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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."
Go! Seriously, though. "Kill The mood"? "Virtual world bliss"? "Confident, bold and streetsmart"? "Dwarf warriors"? This is too easy.
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.I think you a key word in that sentence...
Your brain is not a computer.
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?
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...
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!
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.
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.
You can hear hairy?
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.
Sometimes, yes, you can.
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.
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
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.