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MUD Co-Creator Bartle On Voice Chat in MMOGs
Fusty writes "In 1979, Richard Bartle co-created a MUD, the first system for players to share adventures online. Aside from veteran game coding skills, Bartle has strong opinions about game design. He recently examined the idea of voice chat in massively-multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs). His opinion? Not Yet You Fools! - on Game Girl Advance."
Not only would voice destroy the ROLE PLAYING element (as he nicely puts it: "Hey, this elf babe is from England!". Hello reality."), but they present a number of technical problems. Just how would you log these chats for abuse? What about bandwidth and processing power? Even MUD servers never seem to have enough bandwidth, in graphical MMO's lag is always a huge problem, but instead of fixing those problems they go and intruduce a whole new dimension based on the presumption that it's going to "attract newbies". Well guess what? It's going to turn away long.time players.
I think Richard Bartle has lost touch with what role playing's origins. If we apply his logic to pen and paper games we see how flawed his argument really is. Afterall how many of us sat around the table throwing dice passing written notes back and forth explaining what our chacters were doing/saying? I think "voice communication" was as acceptable then as it remains now. I think people are becomming a little TOO immersed in the digital world and forgeting that there are analog analogies to some of these problems. Think people. I doubt that most people in these games are concernied about character development anyway... its all about the amount of "stuff" you can gather. Those geeks that are into playing out their bvirtual cahracters arent going to be disuaded by the fact that voice has been introduced into the game. I wasn't when I role played my Theif in 1988...