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Choosing Your Voice For Online Gaming
jayintune writes "An article from an editor at 2old2play.com looks at the diverse 'voices' that people use online for the different genres of games, and how they differ from each other. It is a nice guide of etiquette for people moving from one genre to another. What you might say in WoW often differs from what you would hear in CS: Source." From the article: "Many online racing gamers take things very seriously. You may find your XBL reputation drops like a squirrel shot with a horse tranquilizer if you speak as though you're playing an FPS. Racing gamers do such things as apologize, notify a racer when they're coming up for a pass (and usually give a direction), complement you on your racing prowess when you pull off a slight win over them, and typically end a game with "nice game guys." "
What you might say in WoW often differs from what you would hear in CS: Source
What I hear tends to be the voice of a pre-pubescent teenager, although thats on TS.
The Television Wiki
it entirely depends on what server you play on - we started our own CS servers specifically for this reason and once you start enforcing a style of behavior, it will be contagious.
I found the same thing with battlefield 2 (which is my current addiction of choice) - if I find a server that has semi-polite players, I'll come back regularly and make it one of the few servers that I do play on.
Servers that are full of shit-talking idiots are usually also plagued by hackers and other issues, which destroys the game for everyone involved.
Just because it's CS, doesn't mean that everyone is a half-coherent idiot.
Gekido's Lair
How's that different from slashdot?
I have my friends over for some Burnout, Mario Kart, or F-Zero, believe you me, I am NOT going to be telling them that I'm coming up behind them for a pass. I am going to be doing my absolute best to slam them into oncoming traffic, or at least give them a good knock on my way by. I've lost races over that, sure. But that's half the fun of playing competitively. Trying to screw the other guy over, and getting into a good grudge match is half the fun.
I haven't read TFA, but I would assume that they are talking about really realistic racing games, such as a Formula-1 game. Now, my general gaming tastes are for very competitive multi-player games, and I would imagine that if it was such a case where I brush against another car at 200MPH, and we both die... I might be more inclined to cooperate with the other drivers. But that's exactly why I don't play those games. I would feel more gratified playing single player if you can't actually interact with the other drivers and actively go out of your way to screw them over.
That isn't what "pwned you, n00b" means?
LOL!!! Total pwnage bia4ches! I love killing n00bs. Come back tomorrow and I'll pwnzor your ass again biznatch! You suck!!!
Is that what they mean? Racers don't talk like that? What room are you in, I'll show you how it's done.
I don't think this is particulary new (or interesting). These online games provide you with different environments and different groups of people that play them. The same kinds of people that play World of Warcraft may not particularly play Counter-Strike. This is similar to real life: I don't talk the same way in school and work, and I don't talk the same way with my family as I do with my friends.
I believe a lot of work like this has been done in sociology. This might be useful. These game environments have norms, and people usually end up following these norms, and acting appropriately based on these norms.
Some of the most fun i have had is drunk Halo over xb-live. Nothing like coming home from the bar and taking out that drunk frustration on some punks up past their bed time. I've got to the point where i dont even hold the controler, i just sit back with the mike and a beer and do my best to teach the kids to curse like saliors.
"I'm not high, just stupid" --JY
I prefer to mainly hear the voice chat unless I am one of the key players for planning. But usually, its a bunch of 12 year olds acting all big because they know they will never meet the other person face to face.
Click Click Bloody Click PANCAKES!
Anyone who's played a lot of split-screen or LAN games with friends knows this. With my friends, I used to play a lot of FPS and racers. Something primal about hunting each other down makes everyone tense, and I think maybe the attitude that surfaces as a result is some kind of self-defense. Racing games are much more focused on technique - in an FPS, not being able to fire straight doesn't preclude participation, but poor racing technique makes a race a very lonely ordeal. That, and there's something poetic about a beautiful racing line. Even at +200km/h, it's almost soothing. For the sake of fun competition, the faster driver (usually the owner of the game) used to stop and wait every so often so as "proper racing" could continue. That being said, long before any of us got into FPS, a lot of our races used to eventually degenerate into ramming and spinning matches.
Bizarrely, there was always this divide that during races we used to just talk about the race in hand, whereas in deathmatches, conversation consisted mostly of shouts, moans and orders. It makes sense: an FPS is much more twitchy, and takes up a lot of your brain's system resources. Also, it's an environment we happen to have specific hardcoded instructions for - war.
The real surprise is that the good behaviour survives the transition to internet gaming, where I was given to believing that there was no honour whatsoever.
Otherwise, I don't see a reason why you shouldn't shout "ZOMG U Ar3 t3h Pwn3d!"
I guess it's a difference in what you're expecting from the game. Some people will ask if you're a "hack", because they'll play differently if they know you're gunning for them.
Anyways, TFA is hilarious. "Player 1: BOOM! Man if you had half the mad skills I have then I'd have used a bigger weapon. Pwned like a n00bzors bitch." That makes me laff.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Us FPS players usually end our games with GG's guys (or good game guys if on TS). Also quite a few FPS gamers are pre-pubescent teenagers, but some like me are a bit more seasoned (like 31 years or so). If you look for more seasoned gamers they are out there, and tend to stick together (think gaming clans).
I've never actually used voice chat in an (Internet-play) video game. I mean, I've _heard_ it, but I don't talk. I also don't type. I'm not there to chat. Even in team games, I just type (if I bother with communication at all on the pubs). Practically this entire article was meaningless to me.
I've found that communication doesn't usually matter in public (read: non-clan) multiplayer games. You can be dead quiet in ET, CS, any deathmatch, SWBF2--any FPS, really, and things usually go fine. Talking leads to idiots replying; idiots replying leads to anger; anger leads to elevated blood pressure, which is something I don't need from a video game.
Counter Strike: Vents - If I don't post this, someone else will. :P
Flight-simmers:
... drag right a bit, I can't close. Copy. .... WTG! Whew, good thing he didn't have a wingman... @#$%^@! I'm hit.
Check six, wolf! Breaking left. You're clear. He's on you now! Dragging two seven zero. I'm in
Gray Ninja: the article's talking about serious sim racing, not smash-em-up games.
I sort of do this when I play games in real life on consoles with others. Once I get the Magnum in GoldenEye, I suddenly take on Dirty Harry's voice out of the blue. "Are you feeling lucky? Well do ya... punk?!"
:)
And then of course if I waste a bunch of rounds of an automatic and hit nobody, I gotta go with Hannibal from the A-Team: "I love it when a plan comes together" (even though they can't shoot worth a crap!)
In FPS it creates a serious feeling of oppression in the opponent - they fear conrontation with you and as result are less of a danger and an easier prey.
I remember a longer session of Shadow Warrior with friends over LAN. I killed one a few times in a row, despite being a weaker player, but that was enough that when the next time I showed up with a rocket launcher and he only had some machinegun, he just turned to run. Thing is I had some 4 rockets and that's all, I wasted them all really soon, missing him, and then the game fell back to default weapon, katana. But as I was running after him, he feeling my breath on his back, he kept running, and you see, a guy with the weakest hand-to-hand weapon chasing one with a pretty powerful machinegun, and the other one running his ass off! I finally got to him and sliced him to pieces.
Some gameplay later and a few of his successful frags against me the situation repeated. He had even weaker weapon. But this time when I ran out of ammo and he saw no rockets whizzing by, he turned around and made me into a pulp. We both had a bit of laugh about that.
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
i just sit back with the mike and a beer and do my best to teach the kids to curse like saliors.
I go news for you, you're wasting your time. Kids these days already know how to curse like sailors. Most of them have already moved on to cursing like marines..
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
My gaming clan plays on line in several games. We don't grief the newbies but we do tend to play "in character" a bit too well for some folks liking. We play SWG as Tarkan raiders and we do exactly that. We roam about and raid. That said, we don't get particulary angry if we roll up on something that turns out to be too tough to handle. We play NWN too and tend to play as chaotic evil and the same tactics serve us well there too, much to many people's dismay. A lot of servers have some serious death penalties and we never whinge when we get whacked by them. We've been known to play the Need for Speed series as well as some similar games and I'm notorious for "nerfing". Now the flip side of that is I don't get bent when I'm one grinding the wall. Frankly I don't see why your "voice" or style of game play needs to be changed just because you swap genres of game.
2 cents,
Queen B
HDGary secures my bank
There was one game that I really enjoyed with terrific teamplay. Natural Selection. Its a Half Life 1 mod. Havn't played it much since I got BF2, but I am anxiously awaiting the team to come out with their new offering. If you have HL installed, go to unknownworlds.com/ns and try this sucker. Its a FPS with a little bit of RTS in there. Good stuff
Instead it's really more about voicing in a literary sense - picking what to say based on the social context - and to some extent about textual expression such as '1337-sp33k. That's ok, but for me it didn't seem to go that deep - MMORPGs are catching up with the MUD world in that aspect, or maybe have gone beyond it, and then there's a big fuzzy boundary between MUDs and LiveJournal/ilk.
I don't play the particular games used in the examples, but it's sort of obvious even to a socially inept introvert that there are some games where you should say things like "Eat Hot Flaming Death, Suckah! Bwahhahahah!" while fragging strangers or friends and other games where you don't do that, such as the racing-game example the author gave about apologizing for getting in another racer's way. There _are_ more interesting cases - more cooperative multiplayer games where you and other people are ganging up on the {bad guys / treasure / other groups of players}, and it might make sense for your character to be chatty or quiet or bossy or like Obi-Wan or Jay or Silent Bob. Do you tell the other player things that ought to be obvious, like the fact that the monster's running towards him from his left, distracting him with your blather when he's trying to figure out what to do about it, or do you only tell him when the monster's somewhere he probably can't see, or do you wait until afterwards to tell him he should have known better than to pick up a duck in a dungeon? Is it helpful to tell the other player "You bash the Balrog, and I'll climb the tree" or shout "Run Away! Run Away!" at every appropriate opportunity? (Normally, no it's not, that's why you're choosing a literary voice for your character, who might have other opinions or different wisdom/charisma/intelligence levels than your own.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I don't do the XBL thing, but I've got some friends that do. Once one was bitching about how obnoxious a 13 year old boy can be when he frags the bacon out of you. The other guy said just do what I do. "I can't believe I got beat by a girl." They wig out.
I generally say Good Game whenever I've just finished an online competitive strategy game, I picked it up from an online tcg I used to play. It kinda carried over to other stuff too, I guess. I think I remember doing it after an online game of chess once or twice, too. I think a lot of time people do these things because they pick it up from another place, and the situation seems appropriate.
When i game with friends, we go all out to insult each other, mock them at every move and prank on them (e.g. giving them wrong direction in MMORPG) but at the end of the day, it's all good fun. We all laugh it off and are still cool. I don't really see what's so bad about acting all mean unless you game with people who can't even hold an insult without killing off half a continent. RAWRR.
I'm playing a lot of FarCry at the moment. The overall mood on most european clan servers is great with clan members watching over server rules and general politeness. You hear a lot of 'sry', 'np', 'thx', 'gg' and 'gj' during a good game and a lot of interesting and funny chatting. People come back to these servers. The other side is official UbiSoft servers where more often than not the scum of the net washes up. Experience tells that British and German servers are among the most civilized. French clan servers are often indifferent with almost no admins or distinguished players 'cleaning up'. But Ubi's are the worst by far.
the computer is online
i am not at it
what a waste of ressources
Otherwise, I might as well be playing a bunch of strangers.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
The topic reminds me of the time Gordon Frohman had this accidental insertion happen to him.
J
/Ignore + usually playing team games = more fun for me. My old CS clan used to use voice chat extremely effectively.I don't want to hear voice chat as a taunt, I want to use it to flank cocky Rambo wannabe's in an open field.
Bury me in mashed potatoes.