Having done some virtual world creation of my own I feel the need to respond.

A nit I picked:
- Since the X-Box is a console system, and consoles don't work well with keyboards, voice communication is probably the best solution for the problem of communication between players.

This is of minimal importance, since we're looking at the overall implications of voice-chat, regardless of the platform.

It sounds to me like Bartle's real problem is with Out-of-character (OOC) things getting in the way of his enjoyment of a virtual world. Whether or not I'm converting from speech-to-text and vice-versa, and whether or not my crystal-perfect sound filter converts my voice into an asthmetic half-elf from the city of Waterdeep, will not prevent me from running around and trash-talking other players, and generally not acting like an asthmetic half-elf from Waterdeep.

And even if you could build a community of players who agreed to always speak in character, could not you also today just ask that people speak in low gravely voices if they choose to play as a marsh troll?

I'm willing to bet that if voice-chat makes a certain kind of game suck, players won't play it, and if players aren't playing it, marketers will stay away in droves.

Nobody's making full-motion-video games, or head-mounted-display games right now either. If this hype curve is on its way up, just give it time, and it'll come back down, with virtual worlds quite intact, and all of us a little wiser for the experience.

An excellent article. While part of me hates the idea of being chained to a keyboard for the rest of my life, I do see the problem of injecting reality into fantasy with voice.

I've been playing EQ for over three years now and it is the first game I felt comfortable roleplaying in. That may get ruined if I ever had to say the cheezy lines that I normally type.

What is a better input than voice? Data-wise, it is far faster to speak than to type.

Mike: "Data-wise, it is far faster to speak than to type."

Depends on how fast you type. :) Hehe

I follow a simple rule of thumb for voice in games: if the game would be better experienced in an arcade then it should have a voice option.

I'll give you a real example. When I was in High School, my friend was staying at my house for two weeks while his parents were away on business. We both set up our computers in the same room so that we could play networked. While playing a FPS there was always tons of commentary, laughter, and plenty of "Ohhhh mahan"'s. Whenever we were playing online RPGs, though, we only spoke to each other in game. There were a few times when we would laugh at why we weren't just talking to each other outloud, but I think it just goes back to what I said before. Some games are better with an arcade experience while others aren't.

Oh and nice article and nice 'stache. :)
I might check out that book.

My comments on your comments...

Justin: I know the X-Box doesn't come with a keyboard as standard. It's the fact that it is "proof of concept" for voice communication that leads me to mention it. The article considers what might happen should this technology be adopted for virtual worlds, people having extrapolated from its success in related multi-player game environments. I hope you're right and it IS a flash in the pan, but I do know of developers seriously considering adding voice as a feature to new games they're designing.

ClockworkGrue: I agree that voice is potentially a great input mechanism. My complaint is that adding it to virtual worlds right now would be premature.

Draigon: The moustache is on hiatus at the moment, but may make a reappearance in winter. My wife and kids hate it, so it depends on how well they treat me in the coming months as to whether I grow it back or not...

I can think of nothing more immersive than pen-and-paper RPGs like D&D. And I used my real voice to play those. Immersion is in the brain, not in the ear.
I, for one, would rather here someone speak than read l337 speech because people can't type fast enough.

"Why do people play the same game for hour after hour, night after night, for week after week, month after month? It's not because they like the game; it's because they like who they are."

speak for yourself - i don't play Mario 64 to be a fat plumber in the Mushroom Kigdom. if you think some videogame character is a better version of yo, then you must lead a very sad life.

i'm most certainly looking forward to voice in games.

you say that Unreal has a lot of trash talking. well, if you don't have to HEAR trash talking, you have to READ IT. and x-box games feature the option to block this or that user's voice, in case they get annoying.

sure, some people may miss the text format, but like old people, it'll certainly linger around for quite a while, hell, i even doubt it ever disappears. what they could do is give both options to the players, therefore pleasing both sides.

And sometimes the Designers aren't even to blame. The sequel that's being planned to the game I'm working on now is having "voice recognition" stamped on it by Those In Charge as a Feature That Will Sell More Units. Allow me to assure you that this feature will never even be used, let alone sell units.

The Designers might not even have the choice to exclude it.

well, it's a matter of degrees...

the most immersive experience would be something like resident evil online .. where you CANNOT break out of character because all your actions and dialog options are provided for you to choose from.

text allows more freedom than this, as it allows the player to choose how much "in character" they want to be moment-to-moment. with text, you are creating a virtual personality no matter what, and you can make it as much like or unlike your real personality as you choose with relative ease.

voice chat makes it impossible to block off large amounts of information being communicated. gender, race, education, and many aspects of your personality are nearly indelibly part of your voice. all of these are being communicated constantly while you speak. you cannot block them off without alot of training and constant monitoring of your voice (which obviously is not what players want to do to enjoy a game).

so text is a great balance between the two extremes i think. and most importantly allows you to go back and forth between those extremes constantly.

sometimes i want to play a game (or watch a movie) alone, completely immersed in the experience... and sometimes i want to play it with a friend next to me cracking jokes about the design or characters in a way that breaks from the immersion. i would say being able to enjoy the game in both ways simultaneously is very important for the fun of a MMORPG.

I have to agree on hoping for a prolonged absence of voice-chat (however unrealistic it may be). I prefer playing males in on-line roleplaying games, for several reasons:

1) Male players respect you more if they think you're male - they're more willing to group with you and hunt, etc and so forth.

2) Male players are not constantly hitting on you if they think you're male. It's much easier to play the game when a bombardment of lonely, horny mid-teen gamers ISN'T constantly following you saying obscene things.

3) The guy characters tend to be more gear to the type of combat I like. I hate how the majority of females are of the "weaker but more agile" archetype.

4) It's just fun being someone else, especially playing around with different genders.

Voice chat would destroy nearly every reason I have for choosing male characters - once male players hear my very high-pitched, very female voice, they will continue to stalk me yet again.

-Misha

i've said it before - GAMES ALLOW YOU TO CHANGE YOUR VOICE. you can sound like the lead singer from Cannibal Corpse, Barry White or Dani Filth if you want.

as for the accent.. well, that's your problem. game developers can't be expected to add new features because young Jaime from Mexico decided to have a little game with his friend Kim-Pak-young-So-Il from South Korea.

Yeah, but when you change your voice in a game, it still SOUNDS fake. Another factor is that people can easily take it, run it through a processor, and bam, they can hear your original voice. I have no doubt "voice hackers" would also appear...

Is it really worth it? I mean, really, it's JUST a game. Games are my ESCAPE from people, not my chance to get closer to them.

-Misha

oh, text isn't fake now, is it?

i play games for FUN. i don't want to escape OR apporach people. i just want to kill people, eat mushrooms, save hyrule and stuff like that. if you want to escape reality watch a horror movie and go to sleep.

Some more comments to your comments:

Wookie: If people who play virtual worlds should be able to use their own voices, then by the same token they should be able to use their same faces and their same clothes and their same names. Now although this may not bother you, it will bother some people. In D&D, what happens is described to the imagination; in (graphical) virtual worlds, it is presented to the senses. The conceit is that the world is shown "as is"; anything that is presented "as isn't" breaks that. Although l33t sp3k3 will do that, it doesn't affect everyone all the time; voice would.

Azrael: No-one plays Mario 64 to be a fat plumber. No-one plays virtual worlds to be an elf. People do, however, play virtual worlds to be (or, more precisely, to become) themselves. What's more, because they design these characters themselves (unlike Mario, who is a given), they can actually achieve something. This may well be sad from your point of view, but then from theirs you're sad for spending all your time playing dumb video games.
You say you play games for fun, which is fair enough as most people do. However, what is it about them that makes them fun for you? Is this the same kind of fun that most players of virtual worlds have when they play those games?

Miles Jacob: I think the definition you're using for "immersive" is different from mine. Railroading someone as you describe in your (hypothetical) Resident Evil Online would not be all that immersive. People would constantly be aware of the artificial barriers to interaction all around them. The utilisation of a virtual personality, as you describe, is a precondition of the kind of immersion I mean (basically, the sense that "you are there" in the virtual world).

Misha: The prospect of communicating with a real, live woman may draw some male players to a virtual world, so your concerns could quite possibly fall on deaf ears (at least until the female players disappear). The same applies to children who play these games, too.

Richard

voice chat can be as immersive or as "fake" as text chat, as you want it to be.

i don't mind creating my own character, but again i create it to get the most fun out of it than to see a hypothetical virtual version of myself.

in games like the Mario series, a given character is best, while in online RPG's it's better to create one.

I went over to a friends house one time. They were playing D&D. They were very into it. They spoke like elves (or they tried) and did about everything else. They did this for years without issue.

If voice is okay for offline fantasty, why isn't it for online?

I mean floating words flying through the sky aren't exactly the part of any fantasty world I know. Typing is no more fantasty then voice. . .

Escape reality? Role-play? Whoever said that online virtual worlds have to do with either? This is a fundamental problem with the current MMOG "scene"--the idea that an online-only game has to be an RPG, and that it has to be fantasy/sci-fi. There are so many different possibilities for MMOG games that have been completely untapped because of these two restrictions. Planetside is one of the few exceptions to the rule. I haven't gotten into any MMOG games precisely because they are all of the "kill monsters, gain level" variety, and I had a total blast with Planetside. And, guess what? It has voice chat.

Richard's article is not only elitist, it's based on several such assumptions which are the main factors that MMOGs have not yet become mass-market. Hopefully those "designers out there that know what they're doing" don't see things the way Richard does.

Chris: I played a lot of D&D in my youth and am cosequently aware that people can role-play face-to-face and get very "into it". The difference is that in D&D people see the player first and only experience the character through the player's actions; in virtual worlds, people see the character first and only experience the player through the character's actions. Some people prefer to play behind a mask, some don't. Those that don't can stick with D&D - virtual worlds are not for everyone - and those that do can play virtual worlds. Except that with voice, they may as well be playing D&D.

Janie: I was talking about virtual worlds, not massively multiplayer online games. I used the distinction precisely because of games like Planetside (and all those real-time strategy games that have tens of thousands of simultaneous players). Lots of games are online and massively multiplayer but aren't virtual worlds.
As for my article being elitist, well what would be the point of my writing one that was popularist? It would only serve to tell people things they already knew. Most of the articles on this web site are elitist in some way! So, I'm guilty as charged there.
I take issue, however, with the assertion you make that my article is based on "assumptions". It is not. It's based on a detailed, testable theoretical model drawn from years of observation. Part of the reason I wrote the article was precisely because too many people make "assumptions" about why others play in virtual worlds; there needs to be an underlying theory that people can appeal to in order to understand why things are the way they are, and the impact that proposed changes will have. Of course, they're going to be reluctant to come up with such theories if the moment they apply them they're accused of being elitist (even if they are elitist!).

Richard

Personally, I see voice as a natural way to communicate. A voice is no more destroying of fantasty then the fact that you have to type english in a black keyboard. . .and look at the monitor. etc.

I would think I could get into it "more" the less I am constrainted by clunky io devices over 20 years old.

All virtual worlds hold some facimile with reality, or one would not know what to do in them. One would not be able to associate this - with that, hunting with killing, wounds with healing, food with eating, and so on. Therefore, "to do reality in a game or not to do reality in a game" is not the question. A good designer knows that one must look beyond presumption, and imagine what other people want to do that they themselves may not want to do. Looking into the future then, we see that it could be a very fun thing when "voice synthesis" is perfected, allowing per say - a fat balding man (in RL) to choose a beautiful female heroine with the voice of Kathleen Turner! :)

Feel free to discuss this on the "Frontier 1859 MMORPG" Online Community:
http://frontier1859.aimoo.com

Robert: Just want to say, I thought your article was quite astute. I found myself cringing a little when you categorized designers quite generically, and emphasized that knowledgeable designers will "recoil in horror", because I hardly feel it is an unsolvable problem. Offhand, how about separating the game into a role-players realm and an action realm, and allow players to move between the realms? This is QUITE obviously fallible, but I would say it's an adequate solution for a non-problem (I feel it's more of a tweaking issue).

But I'm writing to say that the analysis was strong. It is important to get to the core of the games themselves, and make standard topic out of what players want from a virtual world. Clearly, we've witnessed players from two camps in the postings: those focused on the role aspect and those focused on the game aspect.

My opinion is that building on these sorts of foundations is what leads to truly satisfying games.

Chris: Although voice is a natural way to communicate, your voice is only a natural way for you to communicate. When you're pretending to be some virtual character, your virtual character's voice would be the natural way for them to communicate. If your virtual character has your voice, how acceptable that is depends on how close your virtual character is to being you.

Daniel B. McMillan: I agree. When voice translation doesn't sound synthesised and can get rid of accents, I'll be among the first to use it! It's not there yet, though.

Veritas: Partitioning a virtual world is an option, although the more likely solution would be to have separate servers ("voice" and "non-voice"). Newbies would still try voice by default, though, which could colour their view of what a virtual world "should" be like.
As for categorising designers generically, there was actually some reasoning behind the four categories I used (they correspond to the "development tracks" I describe for players in my book), but yes, I didn't have to be quite so rude about it I guess (grin).

Richard

Very interesting article. I'm a veteran of both PC and console RPGs, including MMORPG in both of these flavors. Personally, I find the text interface of PC MMORPGs to be functional, but a bit clunky (as I'm not the fastest typer in the world - you would think after 15 years of playing computer games I'd be better).

I own an Xbox and Xbox Live, and the communication features it offers truly make playing online a blast. While I understand that voice chat does make suspending disbelief a task, the plusses of instant communication with my group would be great in MMORPGs. I would love to be able to tell someone that the group caster is getting hammered without having to type it.

On a side note, the new Xbox MMORPG True Fantasy Online is supposed to have voice support as well as keyboard support. The voice communicator comes bundled with Xbox Live, while the keyboard does not. It will be interesting to see how that world develops, since everyone will have the option to communicate over voice out of the box.

Although I appreciate the fear of vocal communication ruining the immersive experience, am I the only one who fears this "fourth wall" of sorts being broken in text form? Honestly, one of the biggest reasons I've stayed away from MMO-whatevers is because I loathe the prospect of some dark elf casually addressing me as "d00d".

Does anyone who actually plays these games know if this happens?

I wonder if this guy has ever *played* anything with Voice Chat. He doesn't mention it if he has.

First of all, voice chat *doesn't* make people go away when they cease to be newbies. This isn't coming from my brain - it's a fact, from There. The vast majority of There citizens have and use VC, and the ones that leave and never come back are, in my experience, usually the ones without it.

Second, there is no problem reading text while listening. Again, this comes from experience. It's no more complex than reading more than one person in IRC.

The only valid argument is one he didn't make - bandwidth. The voice chat over today's internet connections, sometimes even broadband, causes voice to sputter. A simple "What?" resolves that problem though, and you can still get what you want to say out in less time than it would have taken to type it. And with more emotion.

That's the ultimate goal - getting out what you want to say without going through a keyboard. Voice chat is faster and more accurate than any amount of typing. And it hurts your hands a lot less.

I've been playing in virtual worlds for decades. In their computer incarnations, I play in near silence. My husband games in the next room with audio, but I keep mine off because I find jarring some of the in-game music choices/events. Another reason is that I have to listen for and talk to other household residents.

Maybe I'm spoiled because I'm a touch typist, but I'm for keeping voice chat away from my virtual worlds as long as possible!

I can appreciate the issues associated with suspension of disbelief.

Of more concern to me is the impact of having 8 people screaming while I'm trying to stay alive in a combat situation. You'd need a very discplined team or a rigurous protocol... Perhaps one person in a party, say a caster type removed from the heat of battle giving instuctions/commentary while everone else bites their tounge.

What's this? Whining that because we can't we shouldn't try?

Speech input works great on team FPS and flight simulators. Granted it doesn't necessarily fit RPG-worlds where you're playing a character very different from yourself. But why superstitiously avoid voice input? Why don't just emphasis on speech recognition and synthesis? You could radically alter your voice or even language on-the-fly! Not to say that that would be easy, or even merely hard, but it's possible thus it's more the reason to investigate rather than to avoid.

Come on baby give daddy some loving

Come on baby give daddy some loving

Anyone who thinks that voice communication will ruin the immersion of MMORPGs is suffering from two problems. 1) They haven't played any of the current crop of MMORPGs. 2) They're stuck in an ivory tower of idealism.

The fact of the matter is that there is no immersion now, and there never was immersion in MUDs. How immersive is it to defeat the evil dragon which has been harassing the townsfolk only to have it reappear days later?

How immersive is it to bring an army to slay a god, and once you've slain the god still suffer from his followers being just as zealous, his influence in the world being just as strong? For the god to reappear inexplicably after a timer has finished timing?

The fact of the matter is that the current games are very advanced whack-a-mole machines which facilitate social interactions and throw in a little bit of persistence on how big your mallet is. If you want immersion, many things need to change. Voice communication could be one of them, but there's many more fundamental issues that need to be resolved before targeting voice. Many of these are problems that MMORPGs inherited from their text based predecessors like Diku and LP MUD.

With all due respect to Mr. Bartle, whom I believe
was instrumental in starting a wonderful ball rolling, this article shows a profound ignorance and idealism. Game design requires sacrificing parts of the ideal for broader appeal and accessibility. Voice communication will not destroy things any more than respawns, random drops, and PVP flags do.

What I don't see is how an "adjunct to the real world" fails to be a "place". My house is certainly connected to the real world (sometimes against my wishes), if you show up in my house you'll be able to identify my voice and see my face. You'd probably laugh at me if pretend to be an elf. But my house is most definitely a place.

Likewise, I would see these new voice worlds as very interesting places where I could have conversations with a room full of people from very far away. Playing in a massively multiplayer voice world would be like maintaining a dual-citizenship in a new country with different laws of physics with people from around the world. To me, that sounds infintely cooler than pretending to be an elf while on the treadmill of pointless level building.

So we trade virtual worlds for virtual nations--worlds that are tied down to the real world. Yet by tying them down, paradoxically I expect them to become more creative. The need to roleplay constrains the context of a virtual world to ones universally understood--which is perhaps why the successful MMORPGS are all set in a northern european mythological world, or in the Star Wars universe, or in some other typical sci-fi setting. Something most of the people interested in playing these games can grasp. If we give up the requirement of role playing, we build a tolerance for inconsistency, paving the way for a postmodern explosion of innconceivable places filled with unpredictable characters, each fully aware of their context as a creation of the physical world. I'm talking enclaves of 1920s Prohibition mobsters from Austrailia joining forces with the Californian Samurai guild to resist immigration by the Indonesian Cowboy Society. A beautiful, horrific microcosm of the real world's problems, in this case participated in by both self-aware kitsch junkies and nationalistic bigots alike. A place both more unreal and real than any virtual world yet seen.

And, if my dream turns out to suck, well, after proper text-to-speech/speech-to-text technology is developed, we can all go back to pretending to be female gnomes while playing ProgressQuest. Yay. Just watch for the technology to develop, Mr. Bartle, and you could be the one who gets rich bringing back the Glorius Past of Role Playing to the jaded eyes of future children.

Devil's advocate here. I guess the author never did any real roleplaying around a tabletop? Folks have been doing it for years and the fact that they can hear eachothers' voices, see eachothers' faces and, hell, eat eachothers' pixystix... well, it never seemed to detract from immersion.

My 2C.

Alli

Regrdless of MMORPGs, voice chat is the BEST thing for On-line FPSs. Case in point - Battlefield 1942. The public server I play on actively encourages TeamSpeak use. Why? An FPS player is not trying to be somebody else, and in the heat of battle, stopping to type a message is difficult at best, often deadly. Voice chat allows us to report enemy positions, call for airstrikes, beg for help, and call out team-killers for immediate kick and ban. The server admins monitor and participate in the chat, so any excessive swearing, insulting, etc. can be squashed. They're not anal about it, but they can keep it within limits. We have a few female players who participate. I have never once heard them hit on. I think most of the male gamers are just happy to have some women on the channel, and would like to encourage more women gamers by not being meat-heads.

Regrdless of MMORPGs, voice chat is the BEST thing for On-line FPSs. Case in point - Battlefield 1942. The public server I play on actively encourages TeamSpeak use. Why? An FPS player is not trying to be somebody else, and in the heat of battle, stopping to type a message is difficult at best, often deadly. Voice chat allows us to report enemy positions, call for airstrikes, beg for help, and call out team-killers for immediate kick and ban. The server admins monitor and participate in the chat, so any excessive swearing, insulting, etc. can be squashed. They're not anal about it, but they can keep it within limits. We have a few female players who participate. I have never once heard them hit on. I think most of the male gamers are just happy to have some women on the channel, and would like to encourage more women gamers by not being meat-heads.

There are big (relatively big) money paid for professional voice actors in games. Even if the characters are voiced by amateurs, there is professional sound editing done. That's why games sound good. If you let everyone input their own voice into the system, the quality will definitely degrade. People are not good actors - they don't know how to express emotions, how to modulate their voice, how to play with it.

And remember, the audio version of "OMFG! FUCKING LAG! YOU FAGS!" would be much harder to ignore.

Richard A. Bartle - this must really be your sacred cow ... sacred cows makes the best burgers. Voice in virtual worlds is the next thing ... don't care about the accent.

Well, I really see the point of the author, as virtuallity is the basic fascination of the game. That could even be seen when voice talk was enabled in Counter Strike, a game what really suffered the non-existance of voice support. Sitting duck in a corner and *typing* for help while your teammate is somewhere at the other end of the map doesn't really help you to react at enemy activities, say, knifing you down.

But on the other hand, it was like, terrible. Suddenly all those 13-year old kids that should be sleeping at 2oclock in the morning where whining through the game, and hey, 13yo's are normally not on a S.W.A.T. team, are they? Really bad.

Trash talking was not really a problem, as it was really easy to mute other players.

So reality is a bad thing.

On the other hand, maybe those who don't like voice support in MMORPGs, you might watch a few episodes of .hack//SIGN (or .hack//DUSK). Those series take place *in* a very modern MMORPG (like, not yet available), where player can talk to each other - and it seems proper. Well of course the only abuse in that game are PKs, as in all MMORPGs now. But I think the way those people can use the voice support of "The World" is like the way the author wants; it does not destroy the virtuality. Even if the characters are using their own voice, as it seems. Maybe it's just a matter of time. And a matter of moderation those out who are destroing the fun of games. You won't play chess with someone mocking at your hair all the time, would you?

If you're one of those people who uses the phrase, "It's just a game!" you won't understand where he's coming from. The current games may not be immersive enough to suspend your disbelief, so that makes it okay to make them less immersive?

I wish there were a way to simplify the keyboard input. A way to quickly input meaning, so the computer can parse that meaning into language. I'd like typing to be easier than talking. When you type or talk in either of the ways to do it now, the game itself never knows what you're actually saying, I'd like the game to be able to eavesdrop. The way to communicate would have to be enormously simple, but what is communicated would have to remain as complex as vanilla typing or voice chat.

I felt I had to submit my own experience with voice chat in a not so MMORPG, "Neverwinter Nights"
because it differed so much from what the author seems to be expecting.
Our game ran between 4 and 8 players in a custom created NWN module. We noticed that the voice,
(via MS gamevoice), was so imersive (we were talking in character) that our focus shifted completly away
from the onscreen text. So much so, that the 1 or 2 players who didn't have microphones found it nearly
impossible to get our attention if there was any action on our screens.
Reading text and typing responses works great in a MUD, but when you are manipulating a mouse and
keyboard controlled character in a 2D/3D realtime environment, it is very cumbersome and distracting
to repositiong your left hand(from the direcional keyset you are using) and look away from the monitor,
even for a few seconds, to start typing, as apposed to just speaking into a microphone.

As long as it comes with good method of muting annoying players, I am all for it!

The solution, Andrew, would be to name your character "D'hûd".

Speech to text would be nice for slow typists, when you're too busy to take your hand off your mouse, and / or typing other commands.

swanson said: "Anyone who thinks that voice communication will ruin the immersion of MMORPGs is suffering from two problems. 1) They haven't played any of the current crop of MMORPGs. 2) They're stuck in an ivory tower of idealism."

I'm going to have to partially agree. Any game that currently requires player cooperation is vastly improved by voice chat. Players can still use text chat when they want to role-play. For example, role-playing and combat generally have small overlap.

Sacrificing interface (voice chat allows vastly better organization and coordination of players) to try and make it easier for players to suspend their disbelief is a mistake: the majority of MMORPG gamers are game players first, then role-players.

Suspension of disbelief can be improved after the game is fun and has a great interface, any designer who thinks otherwise should actually play some games. :P

I find it interesting the similarities between Bartle is saying here and a conversation I had recently with Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto (the designer of the programming language Ruby). The conversation took place in a very Japanese restaurant in Portland. The waitresses addressed Matz in very formal Japanese with an extreme degree of rigor in performing the forms of classical Japanese culture (eye-contact, ritual, the whole works).

The conversation (much of it about the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis and other relevant linguistic theory) was conducted in English (mainly due to my limited skills in Japanese). Matz expressed a high degree of frustration with the effort he had to make shifting back and forth between thinking and responding in Japanese and the process he had to go through to talk (which he said involved "thinking in Japanese while translating to English"). He said this was actually harder for him than just talking to people in English.

I find the similarity between this and Bartle's description of the difficulties people will have dealing simulataneously with audio and text "speech" in virtual worlds interesting.

While the comments by the author do have some justification, under certain circumstances, it does not apply in all cases.

While the points may be argued for some games, others simply demand voice communication.

One example has been provided, Battlefield 1942. And while I don't play that game, I do play the similarly themed MMOG/MMORPG World War II Online. My squad/clan numbers in the hundreds, and at times we have more than 60 players on during a given battle. Our ability to communicate by voice is imperative, due to the complexity and nayure of the information we have to impart.

Assume you to to inform a group of people defending the Hoogstraten depot to Breda. You have noted that the are 4 pieces of German armor advancing(2 PIVDs and 1 unidnetified) as well as multiple softskinned vehicles containing upwards of 20 infantry. They are approaching from the ENE. They are being covered by a squadron of Ju87 divebombers at 1500ft, who appear to have escorts flying at around 3200ft.

Now, while that could be typed in some form of short hand, you end up having half the people (who don't have the time or inclination to memorize the hundreds of necessary short hand translations) typing 'Huh?','Pardon?' and 'what the &%$&^ does that mean?'. By which time the enemy has over run your position, killed you all and established a foothold on your city.

It's not that all games should or need to have voice, but some do, and the blanket of negativity the author puts over the entire idea is disheartening.

Pardon me if this has already been covered...

One thing you don't seem to be taking into account is the fact that people have been using Voice to play RPG games ever since they were created. Show me any Pen and Paper game that doesn't require the players to talk with each other... As far as I know, they have done quite well over the years.

The only reason we haven't been using voice on the computer is because it hasn't been technically possible until now. I'll be the first one to point out that we're going to have some growing pains, but I think voice chat will be a good thing in the end...

Im an Avid gameplay, have been since i was 3 years old (says my parents). I have an Xbox and Xbox Live. I used to play a RPG called Phantasy Star Online for dreamcast, we communicated with a keyboard. I got the same game for xbox and we use the headset to talk to each other. At 1st everyone is a little shy, not willing to say the same things they would have typed, after a couple weeks we all got used to each other and became friends, we started to get more into it, started joking and being gamers. At the end of the day Voice chat was better then the KB ever could be, sure its awkward at 1st, why? Because its something new, sooner or later you will get used to it and the immersion factor will go higher then it ever did when you were using a keyboard.

well, i've been mooing for years and have always been myself. i don't like any of the roleplay stuff at all. i don't do muds or the lambda rpg because they don't appeal to me. i'd rather just chat.

similarly, when i am playing NHL2K3 on xbox live, i am just a guy playing a hockey video game. i say things like "have you heard of defense?" and "nice goal, get'em while ya can."

i like this ability, it's a very, very good thing. as a vetarn of online games, your heart might sink, but mine is pounding hard as i fly down the ice, put one in the net, and scream "you've got mail!" into my headset.

I think the most important part of not implementing voice in virtual worlds is that some of us still really don't want to deal with noobs screaming for this and that. For me, I can deal with some level 1 moron coming up and asking me for money/items/PL/whatever, in text. But if I had to listen to them, I would go positively *insane* after about five minutes. I would need an option to turn off voice.

But that would arguably put me at a disadvantage. Without perfect voice-to-text translation, I would never be able to know what all those other people - presumably some of which I need to intercommunicate with - are trying to tell me. Those of us who hate the prospect of listening to noobs whining all day would pretty much be screwed, because as Richard said, once the first game with some level of popularity has voice, they'll all have to cave in, and I'll be left with no choices from the market of virtual world games.

And, as Richard said, it'll be a non-issue once voice-to-text is perfected. I could then clack away happily at my keyboard, otherwise in silence, while Joe Moron is screaming at his computer for me to give him buffs.

Speaking as a server programmer for an in-development MMORPG, there's a good reason that I am trying to eliminate the possibility of voice chat in my game: network bandwidth. As anyone in the business knows, bandwidth = money. Voice chat could easily use up more bandwidth than the game itself, forcing us to either figure out how to use next to zero traffic for game packets (not likely), or raise the subscription price. Mentioning the latter to management usually makes them forget about the whole voice idea in the first place, fortunately. But there are still some strong adherents to the idea, and I'll admit that it does make certain parts of the game easier and more fun to play. It will be interesting to see what the eventual resolution is.

Anyone who has ever had the dubious pleasure of calling a friend who is deeply immersed in an EQ raid will vouch for the inability of most players to speak, read, type and play at the same time.

Even if they put in voice, I bet they will be used pretty much only in a "tavern" setting, where people have the mental nadwidth to form coherent sentences.

There are some good books out there about Computers and Virtual Reality and some of the implications.

Voice in these games right now seems like it's just going to lead to spending most of your time turning off the channels where people are screaming obscenities at you. This is a "feature" to leave turned off.

I believe, on the whole, that voice chat in MMORPG should be optional at best. Only the first MMORPG that has this option will be unique, then it will be back to "ho hum, they're all the same...".

For those of you who complain of "|33t" speak, wait til you have to try and figure out what someone from the Bronx, or the southern US, or a Cockney brit, is trying to say. Sounds like english, but you're not too sure... :P

Seriously though, trying to figure out slang when it's typed at me is bad enough. I can't imagine trying to absorb spoken slang from people around the world.

I turn off the voice chat in Counter Strike, and I'll be turning off the voice chat in UltimaQuest of Camelot....

Biggest issue with Voice in MPOGS i can see is that most people will end up having to play with chat disables or the sound turned off while playing. Who wants to sit there for an hour or too listening to people shouting "You stole my kill" or "Your gay" while playing.. At least when its text based you can mentally block it out easily by just not reading the line of text. If its coming through your speaker system its not only offending you but also anyone else withen hearing distance. Voice is a neat idea but I agree that its time is not now. The players of games in general need to evolve and learn to respect others a lot more before this technology will actually be worth using.

The use of Teamspeak, Roger Wilco, etc. is already quite commonplace in mmorpgs. This in my mind makes for three things. First the demand for it as a feature is actually quite low, since those that care about the feature already have it. Thus the number of additional units sold for adding the feature is miniscule to NEGATIVE, because the persons who like the feature already are using a 3rd party program whose familiar interface will most likely be preferablt to what the developers added while those who hate the concept like Mr Bartle (and myself) might reconsider.

The second observation is that once the function of voice chatis added as a game feature it most likely will need to go through the server. While the techniques of having a game world go over a varily narrow data stream the ability to compress an audio stream with acceptable quality is not so great. Thus one of the largest costs of hosting a mmorpg...bandwidth, will jump by at least one order of magnitude. With the prospect of having to charge $20 per month to for a game with server-based voice chat to get the same profit as charging $15 per month for a game without will REALLY cause the marketing people to reconsider. That is definitly the language the marketing people understand.

The third observation is that with text-based communication is is quite straighforward to put various filters for offensive words and to dump the whole thing to an easily referenced log file to handle complaints about abusive bahavior. Once voice chat becomes an official feature of the game the game company becomes somewhat responsible. Imagine the storage space to log all the voice chat, the technical impossibility of a filter, and the huge potential for public outcry, not to mention lawsuits from what is said in your online environment. Try this for a possibility...convicted sex offender gets an account on your virtual world, uses voice chat to convince a minor to meet them somewhere and... Do you want to be anywhere near the negative publicity and liability that might create?

I've been role-playing in games like D&D for ~20 years. I can see validity to both sides of the argument for using voice in MMORPGs. You say that it destroys our willing suspension of disbelief, and others claim that they've seen it or otherwise experienced it without these problems.

Frankly, I think you're both right. When the audio provided by the player matches the on-screen representation, it will work fine. This will more likely happen when the person is a more serious role-player and is really into the game. When the audio doesn't match (as I fear will be more common), this will tend to destroy the illusion.

However, with in-person role-playing games, you don't have user-interface issues to deal with. All you have to worry about is rolling dice, reading bits of information from the character sheet, moving your lead figure around on a hex map, etc.... With MMORPGs, you have strong limits placed on your ability to interact with other people. You can either type, or move the character and fight, or anything else.

Moreover, most people tend to think and speak much faster than they can read (much less type), so by the time you've thought to say something, taken your fingers away from the keys you need to use to control the actions of your on-screen persona, typed in the words, and hit the RETURN key, you've been killed and so has all the rest of your party.

We need some way to perform these functions at the same time, and the interface that humans have evolved over the millenia is speech -- when you're in a real combat with real bullets flying around (or real swords being swung), you talk or scream or whatever, but you don't type on a keyboard to instruct the guy one foxhole over to peek out to see if there are any enemy troops visible.

Myself, I would very much like to have a voice interface to EverQuest. I can role-play -- I've been doing it for more than half my life. But as fast and good as a typist as I am, this damn keyboard really gets in my way and really hampers my ability to enjoy playing the game.

I am *NOT* looking forward to a speech-to-text/text-to-speech converter. If I'm playing a Wookie in the original Star Wars RPG, I can use my own voice to make the necessary sounds. And I don't want all Trolls in EQ to sound exactly the same, or similar with very minor variations.

I have pondered this subject myself for a while and came to somewhat similar conclusions. I don't agree that the voice transformation needs to be *perfect* before it's acceptable though.

So you may be able to figure out their nationality by their accent. That's usually possible from observing what people write anyway. Simple example, british 'armour' or american 'armor'? Anybody that has played a significant amount of time with people and take a moment to think will agree that you can pick out the British, the Aussies, the French (I guess their french kind of gave them away ;) the Koreans etc quite easily. People already willingly modify their writing to fit their character ("me big strong troll"), it isn't obvious that modifying the pronuncation of certain words would be too much. I wouldn't be surprised either if some americans used british accents for certain characters willingly, due to the tendency of british people being the bad guy in hollywood movies. If anything people would normalize their english by themselves if it turned into a disadvantage. By far worse than accents would be if people weren't forced to pick a voice transformation that fit with the character. Or if they were free to change it at will. I have been led to believe this is not possible to restrict with X-Box Live currently, which is a big mistake. As a rule of thumb I don't think anybody should be allowed to use their own voice either.

While a speech->text->speech system does have additional anonymity I think you will run into a host of problems related to the limitations of text compared to speech. Text doesn't allow expressing emotional states very well, that's why we have smileys in the first place. I have pondered this problem for a while and I think it will be very difficult to construct an interpreter that can reliably intone the words correctly based solely on a simple postfix smiley. A symbolic sound based language would alleviate this, but then you probably get most of the accents too.

Besides that, using simple text as pay load instead of live voice definitely has its beauty from a technical perspective. I don't own an X-box so I don't know how many players they currently support, but when you have 100 players interspered in a room rougly twice the size of average player hearing range you will either have to do do a LOT of mixing for every player or clog the bandwidth with multiple streams. Couple that with significant involuntary noise due to 'clever' activation on sound schemes and I'm somewhat dubious myself if voice chat will work well for MMO's for several years anyway.

"Give it a few years, though, and who knows? This could add a whole new dimension to virtual worlds! Not only do you look like a marsh troll, but you sound like one, too. How groovy is that?"

that's great, but you will never get there if you do not start.

Of course voice will change how the game is played, just like graphics changed MUDs.

Frankly I think a lot of people are confusing a lot of things. Voice is just evolution and most arguments against it is TMO just classical People And Change behaviour. Blah blah newbies screaming in my ear yada yada. It's not the text, it's not the voice. If one is bad, it's as bad as the other, because they come from the same source: humans. Humans are your problem. To get a perfect virtual experience, you'd have to get rid of them.

I understand your point mr. Bartle but I disagree. RPGs and mmorps are an escape but even on the hardcore roleplaying EQ servers, no one fully plays in character and it's still fun. The escape is immersion into the game, not into the world. Mmorps use all kinds of text/slang/sayings that would never be used in a fantasy novel but fit in this "game" world (ie "you got a sow? I'll donate" "He's a good tank, unlike me, a caster"). Knowing those terms and using them ingame add to the immersion.

I've played eq and neverwinter nights with voice chat (roger wilco) and its just as immersive, even more. Is it then less immersive when playing tabletop AD&D in person, where the players are wearing their street clothes instead of armour and drinking a soda vs orc beer, and not talking in character? I think not.

how about using voice manipulating software, so you can make your voice sound like darth vader if u like.

I believe that some constraints need to be made about what is a "virtual world". Clearly, the article cannot address all the different forms. Instead, we could try to address the types we have now.

Fast action, few players - Voice communication is necessary, as fast response is of paramount importance. Also, the "noise" can be kept to a reasonable minimum(there are few players, muting them shouldn't be difficult). Example: Counter-Strike

Fast action, many players(though not MMO) - Voice communication is useful, but the noise is increased. Just muting players is not as useful, as there are many. Even normal communication can be an annoyance. There should be some separation(for example, voice messages are only heard inside a team).

MMORPGS - Voice chat is not essencial, as generally the action is not that intense. Pre-built macros are enough for basic needs in the heat of a battle(a system like Neverwinter Nights comes to mind). Also, standing in a busy town square can quickly become unbearable.

That said, I still tend not to like games that require voice chat. Those 13 year olds really get in my nerves.

Natural Selection is a first-person shooter played over the Internet on a PC. Players are split up into two teams, one of human marines, and one of strange aliens. Players can choose to communicate with text or voice.

The alien role is rather convincing, with the animal-like "Khaara" having unusual abilities such as climbing walls, changing forms, or creating hives. On the other hand, the team of humans play a very familiar role, that of soldiers in battle. In my experience, voice communication is much more prevalent among the team of humans than in the team of aliens. My theory is that the less similar the player is to his character, the less they will use voice communication.

Couple of comments

My experience is primarily with DAoC and EQ, the two games that constitute the bulk of the the MMORPG market.

Just recently I started using teamspeak. WOW. I've played 10 hours using it and those are some of the best 10 hours I have ever played.

Regarding the article and proposition that voice chat is bad:

1. In MMORPGs non-roleplayers outnumber roleplayers at least 10 to 1. The "destruction of immersion" argument is invalid for modern MMORPGamers.

2. When handling complex situations like fighting multiple monsters or other players, voice chat aids immensly in team coordination.

3. I read this article on /. and was ammused to see a few stories down about how pure electronic communications is creating "lonely, depressed, negative, anti-social, brilliant people". Instead of "not yet" you should be saying "get it now" to voice chat in games. There is something "real" and warm about voice chatting. In comparison these characters I am typing on the screen are dead and cold.

The discussion made me realize that the voice that is seriosly lacking is the voice of the NPCs. Why don't NPCs talk in DAoC and EQ? Should be simple to implement....

If the games would actually use voice a little more, maybe it would be easier to "get into it". Most "questing" in EQ/Daoc style games requires tons of reading and zero atmosphere.

Yep, I think he's missed the mark. I can't emphasise the amount that Teamspeak immersed me in MMORPG's of the likes of Endless Ages and Asheron's Call 2. Being able to chat to someone while playing means that your hands do the walking, and not the talking.

what a whiney rant (the original article)... this guy is an industry leader? Sounds more like a "has been" to me. Geez, gimme a break... wake up, this isn't your MUD anymore. The nerds who like to role play female characters may not like voice but the mainstream will.

The most common "refutation" of Bartle's ideas here seems to be this:

"Modern MMORPG players don't roleplay."

I'm one of those mythical "mass-market" players that marketing types are still trying to figure out how to get into online gaming. The idea sounded interesting to me at first, but from the first moment I saw somebody playing Everquest, I knew I would never, EVER play this unbelievably juvenile and stupid little game with these unbelievably stupid and juvenile little people.

People don't roleplay on modern MMORPGs because you, the non-roleplayers, have chased them off and made damn sure they'll never come back. This is why , in a world with over a billion computers, no MMORPG will ever have a subscription base larger than a scant few million.

The fact that people don't roleplay in EQ and AC and all the rest is proof of their failure as roleplaying games. All that remains is for manufacturers to cater to the hard-core assholes who have taken over the genre.

As it happens, said assholes will no doubt enjoy the new avenues for griefing that are opened up by voice communication. Bon appetit. Meanwhile, marketers will continue to scratch their heads and wonder why they can't seem to crack the mainstream. Idiots.

Nonsense. The best fun I ever had in a virtual world was playing Counterstrike daily after hours, months in a row, in a LAN house. All our communication was real voice, screaming one to the other through the room. It was chaos, a dozen guys going HEY, SNAKE IS COMING, HERE IN THE SECOND BASE, HEEEEELP! DAMN, I SHOOT AND I SHOOT AND THIS SPHARION DOESN'T DIE!!! Those were the days...
I don't go to a virtual world to forget about myself. I go to experience an extended reality. To go to places I can't go in the real world. The perfect virtual world for me would be Matrix, apart from the death in the real world concept :).

Two major reservations about voice chat in games are: 1) It becomes a chatroon and there for 2) It becomes a masturbation aid.

I'm going by my experience of Yahoo! (TM) Voice Chat...

However, *in context* voice chat could work. Imagine a Metal Gear Solid type virtual world where you're playing one of a team of soldiers on a mission.

AFAIK the US Army has developed a wearable computer that allows soldiers to talk and share intel etc. using Voice over IP and wireless Ethernet so this already exists in the real world. Richard may say that this no longer constitutes a virtual world, but being a soldier is way out of most peoples 'real world'.

Another context that leaps to mind is a swords and sorcery type game (or something like Zelda) where casting a spell allows you to talk to another character far away.

I think it could work selectively is all I'm saying.

Interesting veiws on this topic !

I see see both sides of the coin here for good and bad potentially , but i would like to point out something that i haven't seen anyone mention yet .

If voice were to be added as a game feature to new products would it not allow a much broader use of the keyboard for useful things such as Macros ? , voice has the potential to free up your entire keyboard for one touch commands and those commands could be numerous by default !
As it stands at the moment i find the MMO's i play tend to have anything but intuitive interfaces , Radial Menu's getting in the way of my eye popping graphics , text based commands that you have to type because you used up all your Macro slots , double clicks to open close containers so on and so forth ...

I see more potential for good than anything else when i take note of how much more can be added in the way of using a Keyboard in its entirety for commands , Moods Socials , Perform Animations / tasks all to match what you are saying are just some i can think of ... Yes they are nothing new and can be Macro'd already but imagine how much more could be included when you think of the WHOLE keyboard being used for nothing more than interacting with the Virtual world around you !!!

Interesting veiws on this topic !

I see see both sides of the coin here for good and bad potentially , but i would like to point out something that i haven't seen anyone mention yet .

If voice were to be added as a game feature to new products would it not allow a much broader use of the keyboard for useful things such as Macros ? , voice has the potential to free up your entire keyboard for one touch commands and those commands could be numerous by default !
As it stands at the moment i find the MMO's i play tend to have anything but intuitive interfaces , Radial Menu's getting in the way of my eye popping graphics , text based commands that you have to type because you used up all your Macro slots , double clicks to open close containers so on and so forth ...

I see more potential for good than anything else when i take note of how much more can be added in the way of using a Keyboard in its entirety for commands , Moods Socials , Perform Animations / tasks all to match what you are saying are just some i can think of ... Yes they are nothing new and can be Macro'd already but imagine how much more could be included when you think of the WHOLE keyboard being used for nothing more than interacting with the Virtual world around you !!!

This is a clear "something lost - something gained" situation. I agree with your thoughts, but your ideal scenario will never occur unless voice is out there. People will realize the limitations and demand improvements. That's what drives progress and innovation.

I have to ask: is your wife unable to watch TV in the next room if you're on the phone?

Where's the imagination, Dr. Bartle? For someone who played D&D, you seem to disregard that most useful of instruments in recreating an imagined scene... the voice. Actors have always used their voice as one of their main tools in creating a character. Why would you frown upon it in virtual worlds? I can be far more creative and convey far more emotions with my voice than a keyboard and far quicker, I might add. Your article seems to be catered to protecting those who lack the self-confidence to be comfortable enough to use their own voice with others in an online game. Do we synthesize our voices when we interact with people at a dance club? Then why would we do such a thing in an online game. Both are social environments and it's bad enough that people are losing social graces due to online gaming habits. Whether they choose to use their voice for more immersion or whether they just use their voice naturally, players should look forward to this. I still don't see why you say, "Not yet". Those uncomfortable with it will never become comfortable with it. Most people resist change unless it is something that they absolutely can no longer resist. It sounds to me like you're a victim of Hem and Haw and somebody moved your cheese. ;)

LMAO. This guy is ridiculus. He is just whining because he helped create the text MUD, and he is afraid of change.
-Constantly reading and writing text is not immersion. It is just accepted, because it is the way it has always been.
-With an imagination, which is needed for roleplaying anyway, it is easy to ignore accents/impediments.
-When players use voice, it eliminates, repetitive abbreviations like lol, etc. which are not helping with immersion, anyway.
-If multiplayer games started with voice communication, could you really imagine players demanding to go text only?
-Roleplaying started out with voice conversation, and only had to use text due to limitations in technology. DND players dont pass around notes, so they can ignore each others accents.
-If you can run around cussing in voice, you can do it in text. Even when the game attempts to filter it, you Fvcking @$$ holes.

I think a bigger problem than immersion is inability to use your voice as effectively.

I think a lot of ppl who spend hours in virtual worlds are shy in real life, and are far better at roleplaying via text than via voice where it is clearly more of a real social setting.

(I'm not saying EVERYONE is shy, so pls don't post to tell us all how much booty you get despite being a gamer)

I like pnp for instance, but feel silly playing live action. no one has fun feeling silly or foolish. I think many ppl would if they had to RP in voice, the equivilant of talking to a bunch of total strangers on the phone.

And to the guy who said "i dont play mario to be a fat plumber" in response to "we play games to be a better us.", I think it was obvious the article was about rpgs, not mario.

Being an EQ bard, I would love to have voice chat. Then I wouldnt have to type in 3-second snippets hehe.

Also, I don't really get all the talk about immersion. I just want to play a game, I don't want to escape reality. If I really want to escape, I will grab a book off the shelf. When you play the game, you are interacting with real people who have real thoughts, feelings and opinions. Maybe it's just me, but I know that the Ogre with the Blade of Carnage isn't really an Ogre and that isn't really a sword. Its just a binary stream represented by pixels on my computer monitor. The point of a game is to have fun, and if voice chatting adds to the fun, what harm is there? In addition there is always the OFF button.

How is that one would want to escape from the world, when it's filled with tons of people who want to escape as well?

As for voice masking in general, couldn't you just fake an accent and had a voice mask on to that to throw off people? For the most part, I wouldn't care about the nitpicking of people, specially when it's my own character.

To add on to this, it's a bit disturbing how some of these posters remind me of Tsukasa from .Hack//SIGN series.

"I think I'll like it here... Yeah..."

It's just one more step closer to blurring the lines between reality and fantasy, only then would you have to be worried about crazy stalkers.

What I am really worried about is the fact that people who spam with text, MAY get the bright idea to spam their voice.
Ever play half-life and there is some jackass who only communicates with crackling midi music or profanities?
Imagine trying to role-play in your favorite online RPG and your speakers are filled with 1000 voices screaming at once.
That, my friends, is the power of X-box.

I'm a 3 year vet of EverQuest (now retired) and I played a good year or so with GameVoice available. We didn't use it all the time, and when we did it was only a few people. Namely the guild leadership. We didn't use it as an in game role playing opportunity. As a matter of fact our organizational needs were so great we turned to voice as a more efficient method of having logistical discussions with 3-8 people. Rather than detracting from game play it gave our tired hands a break, so that we could focus our typing efforts on role playing/in game activities and save the sensitive and guild organizational conversations for voice. That way GuildMember_01's indescretions with GuildMember_02 were dealt with in the "real world" as well as the delicate handling of loot distribution, complex intra-guild relations and some general "relax and chat like we're normal human beings" type chat.. so that we could unwind from the stress of making gameplay fun for our members (often at our own expense) and enjoy other members of the leadership as real friends and not just pixels.

To sum up, voice let us do more efficiently the things that were already outside of the scope of the fantasy world.

~foooo

and to the guy who said

i didn t play the chick in pso to become a hot babe, and cerainly not to become a better person.

sorry went wrong,

again, to the guy who said "it was obvious the article was about rpgs, not mario"

I still didn t plat the chick in pso to become a hot babe, and certainly not to become a better person.

sorry for the second post,blabla

But since MMORPG'ers who aren't newbies will see the fallacy of adding voice chat wouldn't they be drawn to the games that do not include it? This could be a good thing, weeding the serious players from the newbies.

I agree that voice communication will enhance the immersion factor of any game instead of detracting from it. Saying that people will spam and abuse it is a moot point because people do that already with text and they will continue to do it until doomsday.

Besides there are ways you can counter such people: Muting is one obvious solution. Also if you have voice chat in a MMORPG it would be wise to have a radius based voice system, which means you can only hear the voices of characters immediately around you. To talk to someone else far away you'd have to use text, or (like previously stated) cast a spell to voice chat with him/her. Another interesting idea is some kind of mute spell you could cast on other players, preventing them from talking with text or voice for a short period of time. Thus if there's some jerkhead pestering you with annoying request for something or other you can either A: Kill Him, B: Go somewhere else or C: Cast a Mute spell or D: Mute him permanently by a buitin command.

Also stated already is that the human voice conveys far more emotion than text ever will, and is essential to any game, especially RPG's. Having to read text in a RPG dispels any suspension of disbelief the game may have and you are constantly reminded that you're playing a game-NOT in another reality. Indeed using your voice is a far more social activity than typing as well, when using text all you are doing is reading characters of a screen, but you are actually conversing with them using your voice it is a totally different thing-it is almost as social as talking to them face to face.

Voice chat is ideal for team-based PvP games. Was involved with a PA in Shadowbane that used TeamSpeak and it was a great tool for coordinating large groups of people. However, players of team-based PvP games also play these games the way many people would go to their bowling or softball league... a team sport more than a romp through a Tolkein or Asimov novel. Richard is right on with regards to his predictions of the impact of voice chat in mmoRPg's.

Imagine going to see the LoTR and instead of the current cast they had put Chris Rock in the role of Gandalf, Brittney Spears in the role of Legolas, and Louis Anderson (may he RIP) in the role of Boromir. It would be mildly amusing for a while as a farce. However, the novelty of a ghetto version of Gandalf and whiney-voiced Boromir wears off pretty quickly and cognitive dissonance sets in. (it's worth looking up) This causes a decrease in immersion as what we expect an aged wizard or stout warrior to sound like is not what we're receiving.

The nice thing about MMO's is that everybody comes to the game minus the "real world" stereotypes and is judged based on their in-game activities. Thus, the 16 year-old living with their parents has the same opportunity to earn peer respect as the 27 y.o. playing after coming home from their job at IBM. The ruralite with a H.S. diploma living in the hills of West Virginia is perceived the same as the PhD living in the suburbs of Chicago. You bring voice into MMOGs and you bring all the baggage of real world stereotypes in with it.

The thing is we are all pioneering virtual world technology that may lead to who knows what one day, the hollowdeck?

Were going to try and evolve many things and just see where the chips fall. This just may be a natural evolution.

Hard core RP'ers always annoyed me when i used to play EQ. They are always crying about how then want their own servers, a safe haven for fellow RP'ers to talk 'in character.' It is so silly to think that just because thou doth not speaketh like Monty Python's Holly Graile, that you are not roll playing. The bottom line is, in these worlds, you ARE annonymous. Everyone knows that they are annonymous and therefore, nobody acts as they would in real life.
Adding voice chat will be very similar to typed chat that is 'out of character.' Gamers will continue to play because their real lives will still be less satisfying than their virtual ones and the same whining RP'ers will continue whine.

I read the article and most of the comments. To be honest, this whole issue - broadly, the fact that there *is* no way to make people stay in character (most of the time) in an online fantasy world - is the precise reason why I don't play massively multiplayer online games. That's with typing. And yes, it would be ten times worse spoken.

I used to play pen and paper D&D in groups of real people speaking. That's different for two reasons: first, as the author said because the game world is imagined and not 'shown'; but second and perhaps more importantly, because the people you're playing with are guys you know and they will be making at least some vague effort to keep in character. That's something you just can't rely on or even realistically hope for in an MMORPG.

I now play D&D online using IRC, so we type. Same deal: we try to keep in character. (Sure, there is sometimes out-of-character backchat... and text is great for backchat, since it's easier to skip or compartmentalise.)

As for the speech conversion, I happen to have a master's degree in related topics. I also work on a voice conferencing system. So I know something about that kind of deal.

In all likelihood, the process of converting your voice to a different voice and accent would not be done via plain text.

Fundamentally, as noted you'd lose most personality and expression. Text to speech systems *are* good nowadays but they can't, and never will, work magic. It needs a good writer to write sentences that contain the personality or emotion you want to express in the first place. You can't do that in a hurry, and it won't happen from text that was obtained initially from your speech.

On a technical level, accurate voice recognition is a really, REALLY difficult problem if you are going to speak in different tones (e.g. screaming at the microphone), with background noise (e.g. game soundtrack, somebody else comes into the room and asks whether you want dinner), using different accents (e.g. you are French), with a huge vocabulary (e.g. a fantasy world with lots of strange placenames, and character names people are free to create as they see fit), and possibly with poor or abbreviated grammar (because you're in a hurry, or again you are not native English speaker). Even a human given this task will not achieve near 100% accuracy. Computer speech recognition is very far from that.

More likely would be an attempt at phoneme recognition. Phonemes are the basic speech sounds - for example the 'b-' sound at the start of 'book'. Recognising these comes with a high degree of error but, if you are only transmitting speech, it doesn't cause too much of a problem if the phoneme was slightly wrong, as the resulting output is likely still understandable. Transmitting phonemes, with timing and some other information, could provide sufficient data to reconstruct voice using different sounds; you could even have it transform vowels to shift your accent, or adjust timings if trolls speak more slowly. This is also a rather effective data compression scheme... I'm not sure how well it would really work or whether this is already used, but it's the kind of area to look at IMO.

I think changing your voice (female-male, human-troll, young-old, even changing some regional accents) is probably a more realistic task than speech-to-text in an MMORPG situation. Neither solution would solve the problem that many people aren't interested in roleplaying on those systems, which is the fundamental reason for difficulty in creating an immersive fantasy world.

--quen

I do not believe in artificial restrictions on any sort of development, unless it's a matter of ethics. Sure, voice chat will change the design of virtual worlds dramatically, but designers will adapt, as they always have. It's ridiculous to outright dictate how a game should or should now be without even exploring the possibilities the option opens up.

There's no doubt that voice is a better form of communication than text. It communicates mood and expression; how many times have we tried to make sarcastic comments or jokes online, only to have it completely misunderstood?

For sure more of your off-line self will be communicated to others with voice chat. But wouldn't that add complexity and dimension to your otherwise bits-n-bytes character, especially with voice alteration in place to simulate your character's voice register?

Besides, better communication will mean more people will feel responsible for what they say online. This, I feel, is a good thing. Countless times I've seen racist and sexist comments being made while gaming online. Maybe there will be less of that if people actually had to say the words they type.

Well, let's put it like this. Let's say you have a voice-recognition program that takes what you say and interprets it as text. It's output as text to everyone else; what is the difference?

Or, let's take the opposite side and say the game takes everyone's text and outputs it in a pre-approved voice scheme for that archetype (say, model).

Combining these with the linguistic structures that have been discussed above and the *inevitability* that voice will be brought into MMOs, I believe an acceptable situation can be resolved.

Hmmm,personally can't see what the problem is. I think voice chat is ok but on a smaller scale. My guild in star wars galaxies(some of it ne ways) uses voice chat to communicate and i think its brilliant. When ur a crafter as well and ur sat there going through the tedious task of grinding it becomes very boring very quickly. But being able to talk to ur fellow guildies about quests in game etc made it more interesting. But everyone using voice would become a headache, the voice channel just wouldn't be able to handle all the traffic, i think things would become confusing especially with several conversations happening at once. But on a smaller scale with a guild its an interesting and powerful tool imagine the possibilities when pvping on a big scale and instead of having to waste valuable time typing 'heal me' you could just say it! Ive been playing mmogs for a few years now, so in the words of me mate valor:'Voice chat is the future, embrace it'

While I see your point about hearing the "elf babe's" english accent (or more likely her unmistakably masculine voice) ruining immersion, I will jump on my soapbox to again curse what to me kills an EQ conversation faster than anything: BAD MIDDLE ENGLISH.

Seriously, if you don't understand that thy is the possessive form of thou or that thou is the familiar form of the more formal you, then please stop role playing with an English accent. Right now.

Please.

Talk like a pirate, or like a hollywood arab or anything, please just stop saying "I willst go withe thou" to me.

Unfortunately, I've heard no plans for anyone to write realtime Middle English conjugation checking into their MOG. Believe me, it would be a better feature than voice-chat.

Theres no way on earth my wife is going to watch me talking to a monitor :) She'll get me sectioned :P

Loads of pros and cons to this argument, personal choice will win out. I can see the FPS games using this more than MMRPGS simply because of the fact that I wouldn't want a troll talking to me in a US accent. That would kill the whole experience for me.

If you don't start something, you'll never be able to perfect it.

Piled up to the neck in ____.

It seems to me as though the argument is irrelevant. Companies are interested in voice chat are going to employ it. And the majority or gamers support it. Changing your voice to a new pattern that cannot be decoded is actually very simple, as I am an audio engineer I know of what I speak. As the virtual world marches forward towards replacing the mundane social interaction at a more personal level will be sought by the players. The next generation of gamers is for this and corporations see it. It may all be irrelevant in twenty years as the technology is increased to a level that is full immersion. A group of companies that I will leave unnamed at this time is working hard to create machines and software that will react to thought, ergo you think what you want to say to someone and the machine says it for you. It’s not as far off as you would think. But I digress.
My position is that Im for it. In the VR world it is part of the next level of experience enhancement.

My freind and I had a rather intresting solution after reading this article and it goes as follows:
Start including voice recognition software in games with lots of chatting. The messages would still be sent and recieved as text, but the player could input their messages vocally if they chose. It would be much, much faster than typing, and because no one is actually hearing your voice, it doesn't break the immersion or character.
It's not perfect, as I understand it voice recognition technology still has a long way to go before it works really well, but people make many typos when they're trying to type at game speed anyways.
Then, in the future, when computer vocalized text doesn't suck so much, you could pick a voice for your character and have the message read aloud by the computer at the other end in that voice!
And it's also Lo-Bandwidth, because all you're actually sending is text.
Again, I'm sure there are a meriad of possible problems with the system, but I rather like the idea at first glance.

It does depend on how fast you can type. I can type almost as fast as I can talk, so the only time voice chat matters to me is in games like Counter-Strike, where you can have real tactics, but things happen so fast that if I stop to say "He's hiding behind that crate!" then the man (or, excuse me, person) behind that crate will kill me.

I can certainly understand how this _could_ kill immersion. I think the best way to explain this is to refer to cosplay, as done at Otakon 2003.

Roughly half the population at any Otakon is dressed up as anime characters. Those that are stay in character roughly half the time. And yet, rather than destroy the metaphor, it enhances it. I may have been able to press X twice and get Squall to attack in Final Fantasy 8, but dressed as Squall, I can have an actual, honest-to-God swordfight.

It's true that this doesn't make it nearly as easy for me to, say, pretend I'm a girl, or a mountain troll, but I usually am myself anyway. If a 16-year-old slightly overweight white boy with an afro can slice you in half in two seconds flat in-game, it doesn't matter if everyone knows he's not a ninja with a lightsaber.

In fact, what I always go looking for in games is not a way to be someone that I'm not, but a way to be in another world, and do things I would never be able to do in reality. In reality, you don't simply respawn and go get your revenge every time you die.

It may be true that voice would destroy certain games. I'd be curious to see that. For the most part, though, I think that even with no modulation at all, people can still roleplay well enough.

And if you discover that this elf is from England, so what? It's an elf from England. Everything else about it is still the same -- it still has wicked weapons, fast reflexes, and pointy ears.

One more thing: I refuse to address technology issues. 56k still works for some games, but barely. At DSL speeds, voice chat can be very minimal compared to overal bandwidth usage.

I think Mr Bartle has the perfect solution with the Speech -> Text then Text -> Speech conversion, though I have different reasons.

First, some person mentioned use of third party programs such as teamspeak. My Dark Age of Camelot guild uses teamspeak and it's an awesome tool. There are problems with it however.

1. Many people who live geographically close sound similar, it can be hard to tell who is speaking.
2. Bandwidth. Those on dialup are usually not able to use it.

Now, why do I differ on the reasons for Mr Bartle's proposed system? The hearing impaired. I havn't seen any mention of that aspect, yet there are many people playing these games who have partial or full hearing loss. If voice-only communications was introduced, all of these players would be excluded.

The speech->text then text->speech solves that problem as the text version can be displayed, or both the text and the sound can be played.

The other point I differ with Mr Bartle is that the technology is not there so we shouldn't try it. The technology is there, it's basic and doesn't work great, but it could be done.

When you were developing a MUD did you say "Well, in 10 or 15 years we'll be able to put some great graphics in, let's wait until then."? No. We can do speech->text now, and we can do text->speech now ... it won't sound realistic, but so what? Neither did graphics until recently and nobody cared about that at the time.

Some of this could even be done third party. For example in DAoC to chat I hit Enter and type. A third party program could be listening to my mic with a keyboard hook ... when I say something it converts it into text, hits enter and sends it.

Voice should not be in mmog, mmorpg, etc. There are a VERY few select exceptions to this, such as Planetside. It's difficult to recieve and give orders, while playing a complex military tactical 1st person shooter at the same time. Other games, like Diablo for instance, would just be bad for voice. Or everquest, another very famous name. Programs like TS2 make the voice/keyboard issue a problem, and in some cases such as Planetside, solve a problem. I still agree with you though, and this has been a useful article. :)

I think that it could be both good and bad. The above points made are understandable, but while playing Ragnarok Onine with my friends, i often find it irksome to have to stop and start typing stuff that only people on the same screen as me can hear. Although there is a way to speak to entire partys at once wether on screen or not, I find that during battle, it would be far simpler to just say something rather than pause to type it. If centralized to only being able to actualy speak to people in ones partys or certain people who would be able to be set to hot keys then i wouldnt have a problem with it. I only one hand to click on a bad guy, but i need both to type, so if all I have to do is push Q to speak live to my friend Ryan, then Im all or it.

I think one word can be said here: Strangers.

No, two: Strangers, and Stalkers.

With small groups, voice is fine. But playing with random person? You don't know their voice, you don't know which character it belongs to... And you don't know who they are.

I already don't play most online graphical games because the intelligence level is so low. I don't need to play a game with random_joe who seems to get the utmost enjoyment about harassing me for being a girl gamer, or worse, and more common: Spewing obscenities at me.

Random people comming up to you in a game, possibly many of them at once?

No way.

Talk with video games? Maybe. It'd be useful.

Roleplaying? Heck no.

Would I use either? No.

One thing: Voice communications are already being very widely used for MMORPGs and the like; just look at Ventrilo and the like. My own mother uses Ventrilo with her friends while playing DAoC.

Ah, once a visionary...
Now just another snob.

The problem being voiced here isnt with voice but with lack of RP in someone's experience, and the 'break of immersion' rationale is merely that.

This quote amuses me:

"Immersion is enhanced by closeness to reality, but thwarted by isomorphism with it: the act of will required to suspend disbelief is what sustains a player's drive to be, but it disappears when there is no disbelief required.
"

WTF does THAT nonsense mean?

he's saying that a game that feels real won't be immersive (feel real) because you don't have to "remember to forget that this is a game."

In fact, it goes on to clarify that it is "the remberance of the forgetting that drives you to continue playing."

Do any of you REALLY buy that?

That would make this statement true:

"Pretending to fly a 747 feels much more like the real thing than flying an actual plane because when I fly a simulated plane I can remember that it's not a real plane which makes it FEEL more like a real plane."

I mean sure, this guy has written some true and astute things in the past, but this issue is just rationalized whining that boils down to "I don't want to hear human voices in my virtual worlds so no one else should either."

Personally, as a game developer, avid role player of over a decade of games, and proponent of the technological advancement of the species I have found in my extensive experience that voice chat greatly increases the immersion factor of the multiplayer games I have played.
From first person adventure games to space flight simulators, actually speaking with my squadmates (as though via a radio) or clan mates (via whatever sci-fi fictionalization you like) has only helped the experience by providing a connection that felt as though the characters I was interacting with were more than programmable AI's with a canned textual response.
Players on chat curse at you or the environment, Who pauses to type an expletive as it is uttered?
Players on chat share emotion in their voices modified or not, how many textual /tells have you gotten that you could hear the fear or anxiety in?

It comes down to simply this:
/Gag 'em if they won't speak In Character (IC) and force them to type...If that doesn't work (and it won't) /gag them out of your text chat too and you can blissfully ignore anything they have to say.

And surely the fact that you can effectively annul some character's ability to make 'verbal' utterances (voice or text) won't break your verisimilitude right?

Why not simply say "I like to imagine your voices and am sad that soon I will not have that control over our shared experiences unless I want to sacrifice some other functionality. (Such as speed of thought transfer, or ability to communicate effectively with those that exclusively use Voice."
It would be more honest than flaming an otherwise desirable development in the field of multiplayergaming.

James raises an excellent point about the potential exclusion of hearing impaired players if the voice chat is included. If it were voice only, I would be unable to play the games as I am deaf myself.

However, when he proposes speech to text then text to speech he seems to be asumme that all the deaf and hard of hearing can speak clearly. Uh-uh.

Although I can speak well enough, certain words are hard for me to say. I shoud add there are other deaf people out there who can not speak at all. Also due to nerve deafness, words that I can hear are not very clear to me and I can not make them out. For this reason, I prefer the keyboard to using a microphone.

Also, many hearing people have speech problems ranging from stuttering to being unable to to speak at all due to disablities. I have no objection to text> speech and having the speaker's voice turned into text so I can understand what's he's saying.

It is hoped that game developers who want voice will not ignore us or give us assurance someone will listen to us and then do nothing to include us in games that we want to play online.

Also, we need some way of knowing what sort of sounds in game are. I remember Riven very well for one very good reason: I was unable to solve the game because I could not hear the clues in a key puzzle.

Richard...

While for the most part I understand your concern, my problem with your article is that 'voice' is not the holy grail of disbelief. As a player of SWG I see people chatting in their wanna-be popper EQ 'I am the duke of Bestine' tone of type all the time. I see supposedly smart in game characters with spelling and grammar as bad as mine. I see jedi's named 'ImaNotta idej' (no joke). And this is just skimming the top.

The fact is: players destroy the games all the time and designers let them. I challenge you to find one game that does _not_ contain a player named 'Uber Dood' in its database. And, the only game where this might be acceptable is in one like Neocron. Voice won't change anything. It only further levels the playing field for those not savvy enough to download teamspeak or roger wilco.

Game-play is placed WAY over immersion. Neat little ‘see what I can do’ features are built long before time in the script is spent. I am not sure why this is. I speculate that it is because the majority of the design community comes from the programming community. The rest of the software development world understands that seldom is it wise to put a programmer in charge of _designing_ the user interface; not the entertainment industry. This is not to say all designers and all programmers are at fault… Who is it that recognizes and decides on the talent hired and their job function? And who is it that forces them to stick to that roll? – I am getting way down a path that I don’t want to walk…

I will conclude to say this is the same core problem sited in the article written criticizing Max Pane’s dialogue and can be related to the majority of the article criticizing a games design.

Damn it, I want to see the FULL Rez vibrator article, that chick has to be hot, I want to see her shuve that vibrator far up her pussy!

The biggest problem I see with voice communication in MMORPGs is this: player's accent. One has to keep in mind that not everyone speaks the same way, some accents make it difficult to understand what they are saying. It would be a pity that in order to implement actual voice communication, we would have segregate players by country and region. Shouldn't gaming also promote the coming together of people from different countries?

In typing dialogues, there's still the problem of bad spelling and delibrate l33tspeak, but at least we can still understand what is being said most of the time. Voice communication is not going to eliminate childishness or promote better understanding, it is not (currently or at least not for long time) going to improve gaming experience. Personally, I would rather read l33t than to hear a squeeky child play the role of a veteran knight. IMHO, that will really break my bubble of suspended reality.

Surprised the comments haven't touched so much on gender issues. Seems to me the consequences of this technology would be strangest in that area. Just imagine what it would be like to actually become female in a game, to actually sound like a girl.

Am linking an article about male-to-female transexual voice therapy here. Highly recommend reading it.

http://heartcorps.com/journeys/voice.htm

Couldn't something like that happen to a wide range of roleplayers in the near future?

This also reminds of the Japanese "doll" cosplayers -- men who put on masks and schoolgirl costumes. I interviewed one for about a half-hour over AIM once. This guy actually purchased a pink computer to use while "in character," and the strange thing is that he denied being a cross-dresser.

It seems to me that "suiting up" in a virtual world would lead to this weird new fetish, which is not cross-dressing or sexual in any tangible way, but is at the same time. When men start talking like women, and the in-game camera moves like a real head which can look down at a female body...that's going to change the human experience.

It's been my personal experience that the more immersive a game is, the closer I stick to my own identity.

A 3rd person RPG is not immersive at all for me...it's just like telling a story or watching a movie. For those games, I play as a female character because they look better and it's more enjoyable to imagine their stories. To me, it's really strange that guys would want to fantasize about muscle-bound men running around in leather outfits. (Seriously, that's just weird. Then again, those people probably have a different experience than I do. For me, the game is about watching and fantasizing about the character, not becoming her/it (robots are also a favorite avatar of mine).)

FPS, OTOH, feel like I'm really inside the game, and so I always choose a character that looks just like me. It's real disconcerting to walk by a mirror (non-literal here -- Deus Ex is the only game I've experienced this in, and that game has just the one stock character) and see a different person, or worse yet a person of the opposite gender. As experiences like that become commonplace, the cognitive dissonance is going to be hella crazy.

One other thought. Unrelated to last comments.

How would people react to someone who is a really good actor? What would they do if someone started crying, or went into an apparent psychotic episode? What if somebody was playing a "scary" character and they were so good at it that they really scared the crap out of everyone?

I often go to open mic nights and start in on a comedy routine, then pretend to have a nervous breakdown. It's amazing to watch people's faces as they go from "this is comedy" to "this is frighteningly real."

So, I'm looking forward to this. I could entertain myself with "sociological experiments" endlessly. You just can't grip an unsuspecting audience with text the way you can with speech. Text-only lies, no matter how good the writing is, only work when you provoke interaction from the observer. With speech -- the emotional reaction just happens.

Sorry bartle but you are way off.
Voice chat can easily be sectioned into channels.
Just hope the designers allow for catagories of channels to chose from.
Image you log on and can choose from "trash talkers", "In character only", "comabt & tactics", "Player Vs Player" type channels. That would be great. If you're afraid someone will talk OOC than don't log into the voice option.
Personnaly I hate trying to type to my brother "hurry up heal me i am about to..." and then find out i am incapacitated.

mothafuckhaaaa

Another topic I'm surprised hasn't come up with more emphasis is the concept of putting yourself into a much more personal - and thus vulnerable - position with people that you don't know. SpunikSweetheart mentioned it, but has far more confidence in the decency of online gamers. I, personally, despise online games and the concept of voice makes me cringe. A large part of that, I think, is that there's no guarantee a person I'll meet in real life will be someone I want to speak with, but even more so this is true online, where anonymity and competition combine to produce aggressive personalities. It's like how anyone can gain the courage to scream obscenities if they never see the target, but it's an entirely different situation in person. (Take the Feb 1 post by mmethoo for example.)

While I'll be the first to point out that aggressive teenage boys are certainly not the only ones playing video games, it is obvious that the competition and bragging rights associated with competitive online play are conducive to nasty rivalries and a general disrespect and alienation of other gamers. I myself am a 19 year old gay woman. And while it shouldn't have any impact on with whom I want to play games and which games I'll play online, it certainly makes me stay away from online at all. But again, I fault the over-masculinized culture of teenage gamers, to whom common courtesy and respect don't have much to do with meeting other people. And of course, the loudest constituency sets the tone for the games or the servers.

I think the biggest problem with voice chat is that it makes online games that much less appealing, giving inconsiderate gamers an even easier way to offend and intrude. Until there is some widely followed ethical base, or even just an accepted etiquette online gaming, particularly with voice chat, will push me farther and farther away from trying it. I am NOT, however, suggesting censorship, but for the individual gamers to take on their own responsibilities, or to be able to distinguish between friendly servers and servers where decency is not expected.

Perhaps this move towards voice will actually serve to usher in a new group of vocal gamers who choose to respect and "play nice." Or it could just further push away gamers outside of the aggressive teenage mob.

Katy: I don't really agree on you when on the claim that voice chat would (as you put it) give an even easier way to offend and intrude. Why the offending does happen is mostly because the people who offend are doing it mostly because they'll stay anonymous. Writing "yo u muthafuk suk my dik" really doesn't give an idea what kind of a person is saying it, but saying something similar in a voice chat would reveal quite a lot from you(gender, age, where you live, so on).

We also have to face it, though, there WILL be people who will be misusing voice chat. But there are always people who want to break the rules.

Pulling from FFXI as an idea, why not restrict voice-chat to more private channels, such as parties or linkshells? Being able to hear any random person chatting is liable to be impossible to manage, but if you limit yourself to a smaller group of pre-approved people to whom you can listen, how is that much different from teamchat in Counterstrike?

Pulling from FFXI as an idea, why not restrict voice-chat to more private channels, such as parties or linkshells? Being able to hear any random person chatting is liable to be impossible to manage, but if you limit yourself to a smaller group of pre-approved people to whom you can listen, how is that much different from teamchat in Counterstrike?

Pulling from FFXI as an idea, why not restrict voice-chat to more private channels, such as parties or linkshells? Being able to hear any random person chatting is liable to be impossible to manage, but if you limit yourself to a smaller group of pre-approved people to whom you can listen, how is that much different from teamchat in Counterstrike?

Good thought Skyrender!

"As for the speech conversion, I happen to have a master's degree in related topics. I also work on a voice conferencing system. So I know something about that kind of deal."

immersion hasnt been important in mog's in a long long long time, everquest has what, 2 role play servers out of how many? Lets call this what it is, a complaint that you cant really pretend to be a girl when your not.

"immersion hasnt been important in mog's in a long long long time, everquest has what, 2 role play servers out of how many?"

So...because Everquest doesn't do something, that means it's not important? I guess good graphics and gameplay aren't important either. And with those amazing logic skillz, you can tell what someone really meant...despite there being no evidence to support that conclusion, and the post you refer to directly contradicting it? You should go to work for the NSA. You're brilliant.

I fully agree that designers should not mix reality with virtual worlds. Take a look at Second Life. It's a fantastic world but there is one MAJOR problem:

In the game you can buy items which people create for either L$, which are Linden dollars (fake in-game money), or REAL money. I read on their site that they hope to include IN-GAME ATMs!!!

How would you feel if games charged your credit card every time you bought your Half-Giant Warrior a new shield or your Wizard a new staff? Although I hope it does not go that far, it is beginning to happen.

Dard.

I fully agree that designers should not mix reality with virtual worlds. Take a look at Second Life. It's a fantastic world but there is one MAJOR problem:

In the game you can buy items which people create for either L$, which are Linden dollars (fake in-game money), or REAL money. I read on their site that they hope to include IN-GAME ATMs!!!

How would you feel if games charged your credit card every time you bought your Half-Giant Warrior a new shield or your Wizard a new staff? Although I hope it does not go that far, it is beginning to happen.

Dard.

I fully agree that designers should not mix reality with virtual worlds. Take a look at Second Life. It's a fantastic world but there is one MAJOR problem:

In the game you can buy items which people create for either L$, which are Linden dollars (fake in-game money), or REAL money. I read on their site that they hope to include IN-GAME ATMs!!!

How would you feel if games charged your credit card every time you bought your Half-Giant Warrior a new shield or your Wizard a new staff? Although I hope it does not go that far, it is beginning to happen.

Dard.

I spent a winter playing WWII online. Voice comms were essential for coordinating attacks and defense, and socializing. Also only people from our squad got the password, and the password changed whenever spies and double crossing players were discovered in our midst. And at one point a guy came online to tell us his girl friend was taking the computer so he would be offline for a couple of weeks while he found a replacement machine. Squadies online at the time on the voice server expressed sadness, especially when he told the alleged reason of their break up. The height of pathos was that he described her walking over to the machine in the room and that she was mad and pulling the plug on the computer. He never finished the sentence. Real life has entered the games and added a bizarre dimension to the simple escapist immersive experience that MMO's used to be. I found that people wanted to socialize with others who played the game and voice comms added to that dimension in between the times in the game when the voice comms added to the gameplay of coordinating attacks.

Voice is here to stay, and veteran gamers will adapt to the influx of the newbies who won't go away. Don't try to stay static, because that won't work. Voice comms are the next dimension for those who want it.

smiles . . .

It seems that the voice chat appeals to the Socialisers, but killers and achiever dont like it. And exploreres dont mind. Perhaps.

To tell tales out of school.

To tell tales out of school.

I have been following Richard’s work for a while now and I understand what he is trying to drive at; that is the loss of immersion and role-play by introducing speech. The reality is that a significant percentage of players just are not mature enough to understand role-play theory and simply use immature ‘1337’ speech anyway way as a form of communication. It woould be great if everyone got into the role of their character but they just don’t. If you look at the holo-deck in star treck, they might be role playing a 1780 character from a story, yet they are talking in American or what ever they speach they use in the future. I believe that there are potential benefits on introducing speech now to virtual worlds, especially for educational reasons. The story might be set in England or France and this would be perfect for place to be able to learn the language. I have played many mmorpgs and have found lots of people who play the game solely to learn the language and become more fluent in it.

With all due respect, I think it's more the writer himself that is afraid _his_ virtual immersive world will be broken.
I played DAoC for about two years and I think voice would have been a major help in many situations. As I recently entered the world of Xbox Live, I learnt what positive impact voice communication can have on games. And come on, what effect do written words have on photorealistic rendered virtual worlds. True, voice communication would break a text-based MUD game, but as the presentation of a game evolves (graphics, sound) so should also evolve the communication. Writing text just isn't effective enough. Have you ever been able to effectively communicate tactics in a PvP battle while fighting? Can you write down your emotions during a dragon raid without using dozens of nonsense characters?

Cheers,
ErikB

With all due respect, I think it's more the writer himself that is afraid _his_ virtual immersive world will be broken.
I played DAoC for about two years and I think voice would have been a major help in many situations. As I recently entered the world of Xbox Live, I learnt what positive impact voice communication can have on games. And come on, what effect do written words have on photorealistic rendered virtual worlds. True, voice communication would break a text-based MUD game, but as the presentation of a game evolves (graphics, sound) so should also evolve the communication. Writing text just isn't effective enough. Have you ever been able to effectively communicate tactics in a PvP battle while fighting? Can you write down your emotions during a dragon raid without using dozens of nonsense characters?

Cheers,
ErikB

Many of the comments here are off the radar for what this article was aiming at. It wasn't directed so much at MMORPGs and FPSes, as it was pointing out how this will be a problem with virtual worlds.

Virtual worlds are much more immersive and socially-oriented than MMORPGs and FPSes; they include online environments such as Active Worlds, There, and Second Life. These three environments are nothing like the games most of you are defending.

Virtual world environments do not have time-critical goals that require you to keep your hands on the controls instead of chatting, lest you be offed in your unprepared state. Instead, these are alternate realities that are designed for you to explore, create, and socialize.

One of the prime reasons for participating in a virtual world like these is to use it as an escape from reality, so in this case, the original point Bartle made makes sense in the context of these worlds.

BTW: In response to the Second Life comment -- ATMs in Second Life were implemented by a regular resident who runs a third-party currency exchange, gamingopenmarket.com. Unlike There, SL's economy doesn't require you to buy currency, and if you don't want to buy something from someone else there's nothing stopping you from building it yourself for free.

I play an MMO called Eve Online, and until recently was affiliated with the Curse Alliance, and later Supremacy. It's a relatively small MMO, so I don't know how many of you who've heard of it.

We lived on Team Speak. From the moment you logged into the game, to the moment you logged off, and often even when you weren't logged in at all, you were on voice com. Did it break the fiction of the game to have a commander with a Scottish accent you could cut with a chainsaw? Perhapse. Did it break the immersion? It did not. It many ways, clear and complete communication only served to make the game more real, more involving, and more complete. When a Stain fleet tried to capture one of our stations it was *our* station they were trying to take, *ours* and we would die to defend it. And when we tried to take their stations, they were the same. It has an involvement and intensity that is just not there in the EQ clones.

I wonder if, perhapse, when the first graphical MUDs came about, the text players felt the same way about them?

Harry Voyager

Given that in virtual worlds many people design Avatars based on themselves or an ideal of themselves (see the comments on the Second Life forums for example http://forums.secondlife.com/showthread.php?t=43798 ) then I can't see that there is a problem...

From nearly everything I've read, people mainly create themselves.

Even so, with Real Time voice masking women can sound like men (I've seen the Black Eyed Peas use a special mic to do the "female" bits of their songs before they had a female singer) and vice versa, so that eliminates that problem.

Of course, you're always going to get some OOC discussion or noise, but that happens with text as well. The way around this is to report/ban users who talk OOC.

I don't see that voice in multi-player role playing games is such a bad thing as expressed in this story

Wow, this is a lot of justification to rant against the inevitable (your word: unavoidable). Welcome to 21st century technology. To paraphrase Richard Feynman, technology is what nature made it, not what we want it to be. People will adapt and make what they want, and the rest of us will be dragged, kicking and screaming (Remember Windows?)

There are many people who wouldn't think typing one or two word sentences is worth text. Here we have a thought out discussion with text, where we can fully complete a thought and rethink what we really think before posting it. Its not really chat in that way.

Chat is short for chatter. Not really fully thought out facts or ideas, just communication. I use ventrilo. Its nice to not have to type simple statements and questions. Its nice to hear the tone and inflection in peoples voices, less misunderstandings that way.

Text chat has its uses but for inter-group chat, nothing beats voice. These are the people you are directly interacting with at the moment. These are the people who would traditionally type "inc, add, baf, oop, afk,", these are things that are most useful to know as soon as possible. And when things are happening around us, having our eyes glued to a text box isn't a priority. Or perhaps you have a window open, you get cold so decide to close the window, and someone types "inc". 1 minute later you see it, too late to react. If you have voice chat, you hear it when you're not at your computer, and can dart back to react in time if that is your priority.

Even when it comes to roleplaying you still use 1 word acronym sentences to communicate during action. And besides, if you are really into roleplay with your group, im sure you could have way more fun over a voice server, give it a shot you may be surprised. :O

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Well, voice is now coming to Second Life, and it is built-in. The first generation will not have any voice morphing technology in place (although one has been promised to be developed, which should take a year). After such a maturity of Second Life's society and economy, this is one of the most dramatic changes to be introduced there since, well, 2003 I guess. It's obviously different to introduce a technology (or way of life) that changes things for a thousand people, however, or one that will change things for 7.7 million people.

Sadly, nobody read Bartle's very thorough and fundamented article. And yes, they're only after the marketing hype to attract another couple of million newbies that will join, laugh a lot on their mics, and leave after a week or so. But in the mean time, the number of accounts will effectively rise, so, I guess the marketeers will be happy.

It'll be interesting to watch it unfold in Second Life as well. I predict that Bartle's prediction is correct :D