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Voice Chat Can Really Kill the Mood
Raver32 writes with Wired article about the strange juxtaposition of real life identities intruding on virtual world bliss. Voice chat is becoming a very common component of online games, from MMOGs to FPS titles. Many even bundle a voice chat service into the game client now. That's useful, tactically, but socially it can be downright frustrating, confusing, or awkward. "Recently I logged into World of Warcraft and I wound up questing alongside a mage and two dwarf warriors. I was the lowest-level newbie in the group, and the mage was the de-facto leader. He coached me on the details of each new quest, took the point position in dangerous fights and suggested tactics. He seemed like your classic virtual-world group leader: Confident, bold and streetsmart. But after a few hours he said he was getting tired of using text chat — and asked me to switch over to Ventrilo, an app that lets gamers chat using microphones and voice. I downloaded Ventrilo, logged in, dialed him up and ... realized he was an 11-year-old boy."
If he's competently leading the party, does it matter if he's an 11 year old boy or a 70 year old woman? Either way you're getting things done.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
I hate voice chat, not because I care if the player on the other end is 11, or the female elf is played by a man, but because I'm not good at distinguishing new voices. It's much easier to see who's talking in the text chat where there name appears next to whatever they say, then try to remember if that voice is the fighter or the cleric.
If you're reading text its a lot easier to picture the sounds as coming from a dwarf or elf or whatever than when you hear their actual voice.
11 was a racehorse
12 was 12
1111 Race
12112
Wouldn't the logical expansion of the role playing game be to implement voice changing technology? That would make the game completely immersive and allow anyone to assume an identity completely different from themselves and project the image that they want to into the game not their own selves, which is probably a big draw of the game in the first place. This would really take MMORPGs to another level where the online self is completely separate from the "real life" person. Honestly (in some sense) it's unfortunate for that 11 year old in the game that he was judged later on based on his voice and not just skills in the game. Nobody said you needed to have certain skills and a baritone voice to be a successful leader.
We need something for gaming like those voice alteration devices for the phone. You know, the ones that frightened little old ladies use to sound like burly bikers? It could be done in software as a plug-in for voice chat. You could select your character's voice through a menu.
The thing is, that 11 year old is getting valuable leadership and teaching experience. If he is competent to lead the party, and a simple software tweak would let you suspend disbelief, it's a good thing.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
I have been in online games, where the people using mikes actually used them to communicate information pertinent to the team.
But I've also been in other games, where the voice was used to discuss movies, or worse yet by a weird whining 11 year old who kept asking why people were so stupid they had to type instead of just using voice.
The thing is, the information passed along by voice is often just as well delivered by keyboard, and can be almost as fast to deliver if you set up macros or just type quick. But when people are yakking, it's really distracting and it usually means you are on a losing team.
So I'd say that voice chat when it's bad can be horrible, but as its best is only marginally more useful - therefore I can leave it more than take it.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Whats your point? The summary is postulating that voice chat kills the immersion of a game, the "Role Playing Feel"; not that 11yo can't play video games.
We all know that 11yo are the best at video games.
So what's stopping you now? Just because a lot of old D&D players were really "roll" players instead of role-players, did that mean that you couldn't enjoy the game the way you wanted to?
My addiction of choice is City of Heroes, and my characters and I are pretty much totally separate. Just because there are people in the games that don't roleplay does not mean that you can't. In fact, there's quite a large contingent of role-players around in City of Heroes, ranging from casual to "I never speak of game mechanics even if my character ends up dead, dead, dead" players. You just have to get out there and find them.
My advice if you ever do decide to try out any of these games is to get on the official game site's roleplaying forums (they all have them) and ask for guilds/supergroup/whatever where the primary focus is roleplaying. You'll be pleasantly surprised.
Does anyone actually roleplay as opposed to rollplay in WoW anyway?
Not trying to be too flippant; I'm genuinely curious. Anyone I know who talks about WoW goes on almost exclusively about either gaming the system or inter-player drama, and I'm wondering if there's more than a handful of exceptions in the game.
"All that is necessary for evil to succeed is for good men to do nothing." - Edmund Burke
realize they are 10 years younger than you.
You speak as if this is something new. I'm actually getting uh, older now, but for the first part of my adult life working in and around the 'Net since the early 90s there was very rarely a situation where the other engineers or technicians were not significantly older than me. Many a lunch was spent listening to DEC guys talk about the work they did before I was born. Earning their trust and respect was a pretty hard thing to do.
In virtual worlds, when you remove the things we base our common 1st opinions on, you tend to take a person at their acts and words more quickly. This lack of information which you would normally use in judgement forces you to focus on what is actually more important. In work situations wherever possible my preference is for text communication because it is easier for *me* to focus on the task at hand by removing the personal element from the people I am working with.
--- I do not moderate.
Maybe he mistook role playing for role playing
So...was he hoping for someone younger?
You know what matters less? Your opinion about this story. You know what matters even less than that? My opinion about your opinion. So there we are, then. Glad that's settled.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
He just brings up the point you mention.
That people make these assumption. I didn't see where he said the kid wasn't a good leader at all.
really, you come off as an ignorant SOB who just yaps like a little dog just to show the world he can.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Ender's Game. I can't remember if the starship captains were aware they were taking orders from young children.
It matters because bias is a psychological mechanism of self-preservation. People like to chalk up biases to "ignorance, anger, and hatred" but we all have them because they are typically correct for the situations in which we formed them. Our mind processes the information different based on the source.
If a stately man his 60s wearing a suit and an 18 year old with a Green Day shirt start talking about global economic policy, who do you tend to believe? Chances are fairly good that you believe the old fart, irrespective of the fact that he may be a janitor and the teenager could be some kind of economic prodigy. We have those biases because probabilistically, they are usually correct for a familiar situation.
As such, an 11 year old may be a VERY capable gamer, but we don't mentally endow them with the required wisdom and experience needed to be an effective leader. In "virtual reality" he is portrayed as an old mage with leadership ability. On some level, you anticipate the person to posses the attributes of the character they are playing, and when you perceive that they don't, you feel lied to.
People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.
Wait... how does not requiring a monthly subscription keep griefers away? I'm sure you're spot on about the relative age of UT, but if mommy and daddy have to pay for your WoW subscription, that tends to be a barrier for the younger set. Maybe not a huge one, but still more than for UT. Of course, mommy and daddy might want you playing WoW more than UT2004 anyway, so perhaps it's a wash.
I have this theory that almost all the female characters in WoW are men. Most women I know that play usually pick guys so they don't get hit on all the time.
Yeah, the women don't want to be bothered, and the men would rather look at a female avatar's behind for endless hours than a male one.
At least, the normal self-confident men. The ones who get all wrapped up in their character's sexual identity really crack me up. Like the guy you talked about freaking out that a man was playing a female character, obviously has some issues. Probably went to bed in a cold sweat, worrying if trying to cyber with a man-playing-female-character meant he was gay.
The enemies of Democracy are
I'd put my 11YO's judgment up against many 40YOs I work with any day.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
On the main topic, though - why does it matter if it's an 11-year-old kid, a 42-year-old mother of three, a college drop out, or an IT worker on the other end of that mage? If he or she is courteous, skilled, and knowledgeable then s/he deserves respect regardless of any other factor. That's where online games, and indeed the internet in general, are great - they let you meet the person without prejudice based on appearance, age, gender, or any other factor (except literacy, I guess...
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
On the main topic, though - why does it matter if it's an 11-year-old kid, a 42-year-old mother of three, a college drop out, or an IT worker on the other end of that mage? If he or she is courteous, skilled, and knowledgeable then s/he deserves respect regardless of any other factor. That's where online games, and indeed the internet in general, are great - they let you meet the person without prejudice based on appearance, age, gender, or any other factor (except literacy, I guess...
Maybe he just needs to work on his uber micro.
In contrast to the submitter's perspective, I found voice chat to be a godsend in WoW when I still played it. Without it you lose the human element of the game, and you forget the noob on the other end (this was other people sometimes, but also myself many times over) is still human. This is only a bad thing. Text conversations fall to hissy fits much faster than they do when you're talking with someone.
I agree with the point you're trying to make, but eugenics is a bad example, and I'm going to give a little rant about it.
First, there's a difference between Nazi eugenics and selecting and/or breeding superior cultivars. Only one of them hurts people.
Second, eugenics fails to take social influences into consideration. Isn't it obvious that someone raised to believe in their own innate superiority will be, generally speaking, better than the average person. People are not plants. They are not limited by their inherent nature like superior varieties will, due to their genes, produce a superior crop. They can learn, grow, and put fourth effort. Plants just do in encoded in their DNA. Read The Mismeasure of Man sometime.
Third, eugenics is only a short term deal. Keeping with the agricultural reference, think about bananas. The genetics of the banana of commerce are identical because of its breeding, and a single disease could decimate the commercial banana population. Granted, they've got identical genes because of vegative propagation methods, but similar genes, the result a eugenics program would have, are still a liability for a species. Diversity is not beneficial for a species survival; its essential. Eugenics is nothing more than Darwin simplified, and it only works on paper.
Fourth, it doesn't matter what the results are, with eugenics, the ends do not justify the means.
This has nothing to do with respect, but with maintaining the atmosphere. Not all of us are good enough voice actors to play the role.
I was in a similar situation years ago - playing online in a clan for 5+ years before we started using voice comms together. Turns out our clan leader had a really high squeaky voice. Funny for all of about 5 minutes, but then we all got over it and got on with gaming, and he continued to lead the clan for years after. In no way did it diminish his leadership, our collective pwnage or my enjoyment of the game.
Learn to respect diversity and life gets a whole lot better.
Prejudices do come into play, but it's not the only factor. To expand on the article's point, with voice chat you can open up and be yourself and say whatever comes to your mind. So with voice chat you really get a much better impression of what the other person is like. That might result in you deciding that you don't like them. Not because of thier age or the sound of thier voice but because you know more about them and you just dont like them.
BTW, the 11-year old was just as uncomfortable playing with him once he heard the voice of someone who could be his Dad.
Aw crap, ninjas!