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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."
The problem I have with the age variations on a video game is that I was raised to address certain social groups differently. It _totally_ kills my gaming mood when I chew out the squad leader in BF2142 for making a bad call and then have some kid (or worse, some young girl) come on voice comms to apologize. I mean, I would never have used that language if I'd realized it was a kid/girl in the first place, and now I'm an asshole. I realize this is a 'self-inflicted' problem, but the converse (you realize that hard-charging drill-sergeant vocabulary is coming from a 6 year old) is just as disquieting.
While I agree that roleplaying may suffer a bit when you have a night elf female voiced by a guy who sounds like he's from the south, I've found that having voice chat can make the games much more fun.
Back in my WoW days I enjoyed jumping on Teamspeak and chatting with people during our raids. Our guild was good enough that when we were clearing trash mobs (unless someone screwed up) we could freely chat and tell jokes and stuff. It also made hours of grinding for items much more fun when you could just chat with people. The range of real people behind the players also made for some interesting times. We had people that ranged from early teens to grandmothers/grandfathers, all across the world in a variety of different occupations. It made the game a lot more fun because you developed a certain bond with the other players that you couldn't do only over text chat.
Plus it was really fun listening to the guys/girls with the Australian accents!
Note to self: Stop putting jokes in my insightful comments so I can get something other than +1 Funny!
Back in the day I used to do larping. I was the leader of my group and for the most part they were just friends of mine. I was one of the natural leaders of the social group anyway so it wasn't that hard to deal with, but one of my friends fathers came to game with us. I was a high school/college student at the time but he was a very intelligent engineer with fantastic reasoning and logic skills and I really looked up to him personally.
His character, however, was that of a basic support healer, not a lot of initiative and very risk adverse. My tendency would have been to go to this guy for advice but instead he would come to me asking if he should use his healing now or save it for later (staying in character). This totally threw me, how could I be in charge of someone like that? how could I be the one making the decisions in the face of someone I would normally deffer to.
So I sucked it up and made the decisions and became a better role player for it.
"In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson
I remember the frustration as well, but what I conveniently forget (which has been painfully illustrated by my own kids) is how often I was wrong. We judge people's insight based on past performance, and kids generally have a poor track record because, among other things, while they may clearly remember a conversation, or an event that occurred, they frequently mis-interpret what actually transpired, or leave out important details. For example, when his teacher asked him to confirm that "xxx-xxxx" was our phone number, my 6 year-old came to the conclusion that his teacher had the same phone number as we did, and vehemently insisted that this was true. For some reason or another, he had completely misinterpreted what had happened. As another example, apparently his school is still teaching that Pluto is a planet (as of last month). I was completely unsuccessful at convincing him otherwise, probably because he doesn't yet completely understand that definitions are not absolute (although I didn't try very hard because I didn't want him to fail his assignments. Yes, I could have pressed the issue with the school, but I think it will be easier, and no less effective in the long run, to just explain it when he's a bit older). Anyway, when someone presents you with misinformation on a fairly constant basis, you have to take everything they say with a grain of salt, and that's true whether the source is a child or an adult. I try to give the benefit of the doubt, but unless you have kids, or deal with them on a regular basis, it's hard to appreciate how often they're just plain wrong. Given that, it's not hard to understand why parents assume their children are wrong if what their children say conflicts with their view of reality. Parents should probably try to be open to the idea that their children are right, but at the same time, learning to present a convincing argument (and when not to bother) is an important part of growing up.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
He has a level 31 Blood Elf hunter and to my amazement he is always getting into instances. He can't really read what is being said in party chat and he can't really communicate with them but he'll go an entire instance. I often wonder what the other people in the party must be thinking about him. I assume they think he doesn't speak English. If they check out hi character they have to be thinking WTF. He's got a cloth piece with spirit and healing and some odd leather pieces that don't belong on a hunter. Although, he is able to determine if something is leather or cloth now. He does lots of runs without a pet and at times without arrows so he has to use his sword, dagger, or whatever random weapon he happens to be using at the time. So, moral of the story is you just never know who you might be playing with online. It could be a 6 year old kid.