Slashdot Mirror
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."
Go! Seriously, though. "Kill The mood"? "Virtual world bliss"? "Confident, bold and streetsmart"? "Dwarf warriors"? This is too easy.
Imagine the surprise the customers of the are in for!
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
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 play Guild Wars. Recently we (the hubby) and I picked up Vent since it is what our Alliance and Guild uses for communication on long/complicated missions. I generally know how old folks are in my guild/team but it was definitly enlightening to hear accents from the UK to the deep South of the US. On some levels it was cool but it does have a different flavor from going at it with text. Somehow you lose some of the ambience. Not sure how else to explain it.
--Cally
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.
We hates the squeakers, Precious, we hates them!
P.P.S. I'm doing Science and I'm still alive.
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.
...realized he was an 11-year-old boy. Thats silly. Everyone knows that anyone claiming to be between the ages of 10 and 14 is an FBI agent.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 am a 27 year old male that plays a female rogue bloodelf. I was first invited into a guild because they must've thought I was a chick only later to find out that I was a dood when I first spoke in vent during a Gruul run. It was soooo funny because I always just thought the gm was just being a nice guy all those times he told me he'd definately save me a spot!
Moral of this story: Watch out for the hostess, she may have a twinkie...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
"I AM THE DESTROYER OF WORLDS!" really doesn't work with a beginning-to-crack-prepubescent-boy voice, does it?
Any game whose developers considered the flood of racial epithets, pathetic enraged profanity, and inane babble that inevitably results from voice chat vital is a game that I don't play. If I can't shut 'em off and still be effective, it's a deal-breaker. I don't want to hear your shit.
...but is it art?
Glad to know im not the only one who finds voice a mood killa. Peoples insipid gossip and just talking for the hell of it. Some people just like to talk and talk about NOTHING. I assume these are the same people who start dialing their phone before they start their car. Who has that much idle chatter stored up in their brain? If its text, its pretty easy to filter, but voice? Forget about it.
The usefull information and orders are intermixed with information about some guys hernia operation or fluffy kitty. Not to mention the pre pubescent people SCREAMING into the mic for attention, girls flirting with everyone, etc. Nothing makes me cringe more than hearing nasily wow players flirting with girls over vent. I especially hated that when I played wow. It completely ruins the fantasy mood but was required for endgame raiding. I dont want to be slaying dragons with the pimple faced kid from the simpsons. Id much rather picture peoples characters than the "character" that their voice reminds me of.
I'll just use my special getting high powers one more time...
Like TFA said, it's a widespread problem in virtual worlds, but it can become even worse when the world itself introduces voice support, without requiring 3rd party software. Then you get a presumption of voice availability, and not wishing to use voice can then get interpreted in various destructive ways.
This came to a head recently in Second Life, when they introduced voice chat functionality (actually still in beta). One of the most cogent discussions about it was made by a well-known SL commentator in her essay The End of Anonymity, Part II, which focussed mainly on the end of immersion in SL. Her conclusion, that it will force non-politically-correct roleplayers into "ghettos" and destroy mainstream immersion, does seem reasonable.
Avatars in SL can be anything you like, no limit, so not surprisingly roleplay is extremely popular. The main grid is expressly for adults only, and so of course there is much interest in gender roleplay, in both directions (the gender spread is almost exactly 50/50). Needless to say, the loss of immersion through voice immediately gave rise to a lot of concern among roleplayers. This still has to be played out on the main grid, but it's certain that the impact will be large.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-715315209 8207965240
w arcraft.html
And:
http://www.break.com/index/mom-tells-kid-no-more-
Where would the internet be without gems such as those?
If you think education is expensive, you should try ignorance -- Derek Bok, president of Harvard
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!
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.
I played Everquest pretty much from the beginning, and, even though I'm male, at some point I created a female Barbarian (Henna Barberra - ah fun with last names). She became my main, and when I would stand at EC and give SoWs for donations, players would always give me much more than normal. Some higher level players would just run up and give me nice items and not even want the SoW. Of course this led to plenty of A/S/L tells. I don't play female characters any longer - the free stuff isn't worth all the "Hey, baby"'s. It's probably somewhat better now that more females actually play, but during EQ's early days, female players were extremely rare.
I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it by not dying. - Woody Allen
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.
I only play UT2004, no other online games, but I can say that voice chat is generally a benefit and does add a lot to the atmosphere of the game even if you don't have a mic. It usually turns out that someone with a mic suggests tactics and alerts which most people generally respond to, so it makes the team more cohesive.
Of course you do get the odd annoying whiney little moron, but its pretty rare. From other reports it sounds like UT generally attracts a better class of player comapred to games like Wow. Maybe because its 3 or 4 years old now and doesn't need a monthly subscription, it keeps the more braindead/annoying/younger players away.
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.
Wrong. All it seems people use them for is just talking crap about each other. I maybe only get to play a couple hours a month anymore and really only want to play co-op missions for fun. It's entertainment. I always run into a few folks there for the same reason, but even more kids that are frankly punks out to diss everyone else and prove to the universe how cool they are.
That and clans. Everyone seems to be talking about this clan or that clan or do you want to join a clan...crap, I want to charge up the hill with people that know a thing or two about fire/movement tactics, and have some fun! I don't care about the inner politics of the gaming community.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
wait.. you had to look up Ender's Game and you are on slashdot?????????
something is not right in the world......
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
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
I knew some people that used Diablo II as a long distance phone system. Free real-time chat to anywhere in the world.
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.
Why wouldn't you just use free pc to pc voice services like skype?
I initially thought of posting something about questing with a sexy female night elf and then finding out through voice chat that she is really a big hairy guy...
But they are all played by guys. The real surprise is when it turns out to be an actual female.
I'm sorry, what was her number again?
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
You sound like an extrovert. Those of us who are introverts freaking HATE "jumping on teamspeak and chatting with people".
One is not better than the other. But extroverts seem to not recognize that introverts exist, or think they're dong them some kind of favor by forcing them into situations they do not want to take part in.
I'm not the commited introvert I used to be, and I don't mind using Vent or Skype these days with people I know. But back in the day, using voice chat would have been an absolute deal breaker for me in online games.
-- Dave
Making fun of dumb people since 2009
All you need is to purchase a big cylinder of helium, play some kind of dwarf and inhale some before speaking. And to creep someone out, you can just giggle, because giggling while on helium would really creep out anyone during gameplay...
Task Mangler
You just can't tell if someone could be a murderer if they publish a file system... Or something like that.
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.
Oh, *many* people, heck I'd say *most* people, roleplay in WOW. You were perhaps hoping they'd be roleplaying in a way that would be in-character for their avatars - this is a very odd expectation for a group that didn't come to MMORPGs from other RPGs.
Nevertheless, people play with very distinct and consistant personalities that are often quite different from their "real life" personality. They're roleplaying an online persona, just not an "in-character" one. And, truthfully, if you just look at a game like WOW without bringing any background to it from other books and games, there's not much there to get in-character about.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
In other words, "very few."
/Former Feathermoon RPer.
If you're looking for roleplay, stay the hell away from WoW.
What, is this 1990 all over again? I can understand being a bit weirded the first time you realize that most of the online gaming community:
/.
1.) Is Better than you.
2.) Has already beaten you to all the unique items and has proceeded to sell them for real money on Ebay.
3.) Is not in your Age group, Tax bracket, Generation Gap, Location or Species.
But I think the thing that the original poster has not realized is that he is the *odd man out*
An "*ageing hipster* who participates in Online RPG" translates into "weird OG" to most of the kids online which, for the uninitiated masses of my generation does not stand for "original gangster" but "*Old Guy*". We aren't in charge anymore. These kids grew using computers, and didn't learn how to role play with those weird dice you had to colour in with the crayons that came in the box with the first books.
The mean age of online gamers is 13. some may even be cats. you can never trust cats. They sneak online when their owners aren't home and download huge videos of tuna fishing. Thats where all the bandwidth they can't understand they have used is coming from.. their cats. Some cats even post to
Then they sit smugly on top of their monitors and laugh at them.
anyway, I digress.
-m
-Magdalene --"there are 10 types of people in the world, those who read binary, and those who don't"
I was having sex with this girl last night and she was always talking "give it to me, oh yeah, big brute, I love it, yeah, harder, bad boy"
So I stopped. Too much talking is like too little.
Oh wait, we're talking internet chat...
Richard Bartle, the father of MUDs (and by extension MMORPGs) tackled this issue four years ago: http://www.gamegirladvance.com/archives/2003/07/28 /not_yet_you_fools.html
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.
While some of the meritocracy associated with text-only gaming disappears when you fire up TeamSpeak or Ventrilo or whatever, in my experience plenty remains. I've played TrueCombat:Elite for a good while now, and I would never want to go back to text-only. Gaming has now become for me a social experience - it's no longer just about relaxing for half an hour fragging some terrorists, it's now about fragging and actually talking to people who can quite honestly call friends. Yet these friends are respected because of who they are (and, to an extent, how well they play) not according to any social stereotype.
Age enters into it somewhat, admittedly. But we happily play alongside a 16 year old friend of ours (although the clans have an 18-years rule) and he is respected because he is friendly. At the same time, I've made friends with a mass of people who I would otherwise never have been able to - not in the way that I have. I now know a Scot from Dundee who's married with two children, I know tens of Germans, several of whom are twice my age or more. In real life, I, as an 18-year-old, would perhaps know and talk with a married 36 year old, I might even be friends with him. But I would never, I would say, have the kind of frank, uninhibited conversation that we all do - it's more like a bunch of blokes at a bar, and if you go to a bar you don't go with people twice your age, usually.
Without voice chat, I would perhaps "know" some of these people - I remember before I used to log on to TeamSpeak I would recognise a few of the regulars on the servers. But one can never hold a conversation of the same type purely through the in-game text chat feature. The conversations we have online range widely in topic - we see little glimpses of each other's home lives, mundane things like the Scot having to leave temporarily because one of his daughters is holding a tin of paint (a new variation on the "it's past the 13-year-old's bedtime) or discussions of Marmite which proceed from my becoming peckish. We discuss television, politics, language, photography, share jokes and behave altogether more like... blokes at a bar than gamers at their PCs.
im in ur