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Voice Chat Blues
By Cameron Sorden | June 19, 2007
Clive Thompson has a great article up at Wired.com about voice chat in games. He discusses how the use of voice chat can bring real world dynamics into our virtual worlds and change player relationships. It’s tough to take orders from the party leader that you just found out is 11, even if he or she is a great player and leader in-game.
Personally, I’ve never liked voice chat. I don’t mind logging into a Ventrilo server, but I try to stay quiet. My problem is that I’m kind of a loud-mouth. If I start talking, I know I won’t stop and I’ll tend to dominate the conversation. One of the reasons I like text chat is that it’s much more difficult to do that. Everyone has an equally loud voice, and there’s time to write a reasoned response to anything anyone might say– you can even reconsider your words. Tempers don’t flare as easily, drama is lower, and real world issues and prejudices don’t come into play as frequently.
There are a few quotes from the article I wanted to discuss.
After all, one of the great things about virtual worlds was that they were, well, virtual. You could adopt a brand-new persona, and leave your dull, dreary existence behind. Outside are the suburbs and your shift at Chick-fil-A; online is a land of snowcapped mountains where you sit astride a cat-like mount, while stars rain around you.
That’s one of my biggest pet peeves about voice chat in general. I play these games to be in a different world, to have fun questing, to kill fantasy monsters with archaic weapons. I want to think of my fellow players as mysterious spellcasters, wise monks, and rowdy warriors. Every time I hear an accent (from any real-world region), any time discussion starts turning to real-world issues, any time I hear muttered profanity on a bad pull, it breaks that immersion.
Pet peeves aside, there’s a much larger issue with voice chat, and it’s one that I think is much more damaging for communities:
This is particularly a problem for women, because often women thrive in MMOs precisely by downplaying their sexual identity. When Krista-Lee Malone, a student at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee, did a study of the impact of voice chat on online worlds, women all told her they were treated differently once other players — particularly younger men — could hear their voices. (”They got hit on a lot,” Malone says.)
Meanwhile, shy or geeky players have long thrived in text-based chat, where their social impediments matter less; but they wither when interaction becomes a cocktail party.
“Throw up a (Ventrilo) server, the girls stop talking completely, the shy people shut up mostly and all that is left are the 12- to 18-year-old guys, and it becomes a locker room,” as one poster complained on a sprawling, superb debate on the Terra Nova blog.
There’s been a lot of discussion recently about the hostility of online environments for female players. I get annoyed when I think the complaining gets out of hand, as you probably know if you’ve been following my blog, but I can’t deny that it’s tough to be a girl gamer in an MMO. Whatever your personal feelings are about the best way to handle that, the fact remains that women do have to deal with a lot more jerk-offs than guys do in this arena, and it’s a lot more personal.
Often, the best route is simply not to broadcast your gender (and in fact, to conceal it). It’s sad, but true. Evasion is the easiest way to deflect unwanted attention. But how do you do that when voice chat becomes the standard of communication? As the author stated, and as much as I’m loathe to admit it, the Vent channels I’ve been do often have more in common with a high school locker room than a mature gathering of adults that you would expect. It’s easy to verbally intimidate someone when there’s little fear of repercussion and no real world consequences. Virtual sticks and stones don’t do anything (especially without open PvP), but words always have the power to harm.
With voice chat looming as tomorrow’s preferred mode of MMO communication, what does it mean for female gamers that just want to be left alone and have fun? What does it mean for shy gamers that don’t talk a mile per minute and get intimidated by profanity? What about skilled and polite teenagers or children who are given away by their high voices? Is there any way to divorce ourselves from the constraints of our real-world personae and just have fun being dwarves and elves?
I miss the days of MUDs. ::sigh::
June 19th, 2007 at 11:07 am
We’ve been toying around a lot with voice emulators.
Tack a small add on to your Teamspeak or Ventrillo server, and you can sound like a echoing demon, a deep throated troll, or a tinny gnome. Some of our male players use the female emulators to keep up appearances with their characters.
June 19th, 2007 at 11:14 am
See, I think that’s really cool. A voice that matches your character would be awesome for the purposes of immersion. That also helps the gender issue a bit too…
I wonder what that does with player dynamics and RL mentality though? How will players process it when the little female cleric starts talking about his date last night on the chat channel? I mean, we know it’s all pretend. But voice-chat is so much more personal and emotionally in-your-face than text.
I could see that causing its own set of problems and drama quite easily.
June 19th, 2007 at 5:46 pm
I feel that the whole reason behind playing an mmorpg is to get away from all of the things that tie you to real life, just sit back and have fun.
I dont feel like I am emersed in a game at all when I am talking with people like I do at work all day.
June 20th, 2007 at 11:08 am
The main benefit of voicechat that I can see is real-time tactical input and decision-making. I talk my brother by phone during our cooperative RTS sessions in BfME:2, and it makes a hell of a difference during a rough fight.
Voice commands to the software are another strong use.
June 20th, 2007 at 12:50 pm
I don’t like using Vent, though it’s required by my guild. Usually people are talking and if I try to say anything, I get drowned out or I’m stepping on someone else. So though I do respond when asked questions on Vent, if there are people talking I’ll just respond sometimes in raid chat.
I expect the profanity and the constant remarks about ‘gays’ and ‘vaginas’. It was shocking to me at first when I played WoW, but now it’s lost most of its power to offend.
June 20th, 2007 at 12:51 pm
@Aaron: try using Vista’s built-in voice recognition to control your software. Oy vey!
June 21st, 2007 at 9:28 am
Yes yes yes! I was starting to feel like a dinosaur because I hate using chat. It’s really a challenge finding guilds that don’t require it.
A couple of your points really stood out. Regarding being able to reconsider your words when you’re typing…you don’t know how many times I’ve seen my husband backspace over stuff he had typed out (yeah he can be a hot head).
And the whole fantasy thing–viewing your fellow players as wise monks, rowdy warriors, etc. That nailed it for me. That is exactly what I enjoy about mmo’s, like bringing a book to life where you let your own imagination sound out the voices.
July 12th, 2007 at 11:18 pm
Don’t hate the players, hate the game.
…so to speak.
The advantages provided by voice chat make it a requirement in competitive games - the mute team in PvP is playing with a handicap, and at the high-end of competitive play no team is so much better than their competition they can compete with any handicapped and still win.
In non-PvP games, the high end raids are as complex and challenging as the developers can make them - short of being impossible - which often again means the same thing: almost no team is so good that they can play without at least very much missing the advantage voicechat would provide. Would you like to attempt this raid boss fifteen times, or maybe succeed within three attempts?
In RP games, the voicechat might actually be a boon - it’s a better separation of “IC” and “OOC” chat than labeling your text “OOC:”. I can easily imagine a game in which voicechat is always assumed OOC and “RPing” has to be text-chat. Lots of would-be RPers really dislike being gagged as players, but might RP in-character (mostly better via text than voice), if they could also speak as players (and where better for that than out-of-game?).
So, I think maybe the problem is there aren’t any “RP games”… just scattered RPers roaming the realm of fantasy sports.
Voicechat considered as another pro-sport, anti-RP aspect of sports-style surely seems a negative thing to RPers, trying to RP in an environment fairly hostile to it already.
But it really could be a positive thing for RPGs online, too.
I mean. If there were any.