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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.
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?
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.
Silly question here, and I'm not telling you to take all 11-year-olds seriously...
If someone has important information, why does their age/gender/religion/culture matter?
Don't tell me to get a life. I'm a gamer; I have LOTS of lives!
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!
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
One of the guys in my guild sounds exactly like Homestar Runner and doesn't know it. We've been trying to trick him into saying 'fishsticks' for weeks now; we can only hope...
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.
I'm guessing the difference between 'then' and 'than' never took hold, looks like the whole 'not listening' part went both ways.
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.
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.
Sometimes, yes, you can.
The social norms of 30- and 11-year-olds are different, obviously.
Text is a very slow medium, so only the most information is conveyed. Little overhead. If you use text, you don't have time for chatter and socializing. The game is in focus. If someone knows how to play, he can be 5 or 50, it does not matter.
Speech is much faster, and allows for a great deal of nuances. Subtle jokes, puns and references. A different social context between the person will be extremely obvious. The way you normally talk to your friends doesn't connect with the other person. It doesn't really matter for the game, but your instincs will tell you that you're interacting with people ouside your "group".
In closing: Have anyone here ever met a group of roleplay'ers that coordinate internally using voice chat? everything you see will match their character, and be wonderfully synchronized. Voice chat improve the mood, too.
I lost my sig.
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 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.