Voice Chat and MMORPGs
So Wired published this article today on how voice chat affects the mood and tone in MMO's today. And there are couple of things in it that really bug me, so I wanted to talk about it.
First and foremost.... if you find typing "too complicated" wtf are you doing online? Learn to type, its not hard! People don't like to type because its complicated, people don't like to type because they are too lazy to bother to fully form their words and thoughts. And don't tell me its easier to bark orders than to type, because its not. If you actually bother to learn to type, this shouldn't be a problem! Voice chat is for the lazy and illiterate.
And it does not improve raiding efficiency, if anything it makes it more chaotic. If you need to be barking orders over voice chat, then your raid group doesn't know what its doing. You should go over the strat before you start the encounter, go over what everyone needs to do in particular cases, and everyone SHOULD DO THOSE THINGS without needing to be barked at to do them. You should not need to tell people to heal, or change positions, or what not - they should know to do it when they need to do it, or at least be willing and able to learn to do it without having to have someone hold their hand and bark at them on voice.
This is one of the biggest problems with voice chat outside of the issues of accessibility. Voice brings with it who you are outside your character. It can ruin your RP, ruin the experience of being in the world of the game, and ruin the types of relations you have with your fellow players. As an RPer, this is especially troubling for me. What will people think when they encounter my male characters - especially some of my more interesting ones - when suddenly they hear a female voice coming from the person behind it? Simply put - the RP is always shattered. They will never think of that character as he is any longer, it will always be the knowledge of a woman behind the face of the male character.
Worse, it changes how people react to you and treat you as a character. I don't want people treating me as an American southern woman when I am playing my Male Blood Elf, or my female Draenei - I want them to treat me as the character I am RPing as and as the person I am in game. Voice destroys that - you only hear the persons voice, not their character any longer. It destroys the RP.
Worse, for women, as this article cites, men treat you differently once they know you are a woman. Female raid leaders, especially those with very female voices, have a hard time having people obey them, especially men. Men, especially young men of which the majority of the male MMO population, have a hard time taking instruction from women - especially older women which the majority of the female MMO population is made up of. And lord help you if you are a younger woman, your chances of being listened to drop to zero. All you get are people trying to hit on you, demand topless pictures of, and being lewd and rude to you. "'Throw up a (Ventrilo) server, the girls stop talking completely, the shy people shut up mostly and all that is left are the 12- to 18-year-old guys, and it becomes a locker room," as one poster complained on a sprawling, superb debate on the Terra Nova blog." It sounds cliché but its true!
Why does text seem "shifty" to people? I've never understood this - too many people always read the worst in a line of text. They almost seem to go out of their way to destroy any innocence of meaning in text to find the worst possible, most insulting, most dishonest thing someone might possibly mean by what they say! Why do people do this? Take things at face value! Don't create drama where there is none! I think it has far more to do with our modern age and time than with anything to do with the textual medium verses voice. People are looking for conflict and strife, always feel the victim in everything that goes on, and never take any responsibility for what they bring on themselves.
This comment disgusts me. As someone with a bunch to lose by exposing myself online - a woman - its about much more than this. If I know I will never be taken seriously by the young males in my guild, why should I be forced to expose myself as a woman and thus lose any authority I may have? What about those who are men living as women, or women as men? Is it lying to say you are a woman when you are living as one, but your voice may not sound that like that? People become irrational and angry when confronted with such things, especially if they feel "betrayed" by the person in question.
The point is - voice chat is a violation of the fourth wall of gaming - it destroys the ability to be someone other than you are, someone within the world, rather than just being a person playing a game. It forces you to go back to your daily life, to be treated the way you are within the every day, rather than to be someone else, someone different. Get over it - voice chat is a crutch for raiding, and unneeded for the rest of the gaming.
There are good reasons why so many multiplayer online games are launching with voice-chat software. Partly it's to welcome newbies, who often find that old-school text-chat is simply too complicated. Also, voice chat makes pell-mell action easier to handle: If you're running a guild raid with 50 people, it's much easier to bark orders than to type them out (which is why voice chat has long been popular on first-person shooters on Xbox Live).
First and foremost.... if you find typing "too complicated" wtf are you doing online? Learn to type, its not hard! People don't like to type because its complicated, people don't like to type because they are too lazy to bother to fully form their words and thoughts. And don't tell me its easier to bark orders than to type, because its not. If you actually bother to learn to type, this shouldn't be a problem! Voice chat is for the lazy and illiterate.
And it does not improve raiding efficiency, if anything it makes it more chaotic. If you need to be barking orders over voice chat, then your raid group doesn't know what its doing. You should go over the strat before you start the encounter, go over what everyone needs to do in particular cases, and everyone SHOULD DO THOSE THINGS without needing to be barked at to do them. You should not need to tell people to heal, or change positions, or what not - they should know to do it when they need to do it, or at least be willing and able to learn to do it without having to have someone hold their hand and bark at them on voice.
But voice has much higher emotional bandwidth. It conveys a lot of identity: Your voice instantly transmits your age, your gender and often your nationality -- even your regional location too. (I can tell a Texan accent from a Minnesotan, and you can probably tell I'm Canadian by my nasal "oots.") With voice, the real world is honking in your ear.
This is particularly a problem for women, because often women thrive in MMOs precisely by downplaying their sexual identity. When Krista-Lee Malone, a student at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee, did a study of the impact of voice chat on online worlds, women all told her they were treated differently once other players -- particularly younger men -- could hear their voices. ("They got hit on a lot," Malone says.)
This is one of the biggest problems with voice chat outside of the issues of accessibility. Voice brings with it who you are outside your character. It can ruin your RP, ruin the experience of being in the world of the game, and ruin the types of relations you have with your fellow players. As an RPer, this is especially troubling for me. What will people think when they encounter my male characters - especially some of my more interesting ones - when suddenly they hear a female voice coming from the person behind it? Simply put - the RP is always shattered. They will never think of that character as he is any longer, it will always be the knowledge of a woman behind the face of the male character.
Worse, it changes how people react to you and treat you as a character. I don't want people treating me as an American southern woman when I am playing my Male Blood Elf, or my female Draenei - I want them to treat me as the character I am RPing as and as the person I am in game. Voice destroys that - you only hear the persons voice, not their character any longer. It destroys the RP.
Worse, for women, as this article cites, men treat you differently once they know you are a woman. Female raid leaders, especially those with very female voices, have a hard time having people obey them, especially men. Men, especially young men of which the majority of the male MMO population, have a hard time taking instruction from women - especially older women which the majority of the female MMO population is made up of. And lord help you if you are a younger woman, your chances of being listened to drop to zero. All you get are people trying to hit on you, demand topless pictures of, and being lewd and rude to you. "'Throw up a (Ventrilo) server, the girls stop talking completely, the shy people shut up mostly and all that is left are the 12- to 18-year-old guys, and it becomes a locker room," as one poster complained on a sprawling, superb debate on the Terra Nova blog." It sounds cliché but its true!
Dmitri Williams, a communications professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, did a study of World of Warcraft players for one month. The results? Those who used text-only chat experienced "drops in trust and happiness" amongst their fellow players; those who used voice chat did not.The fatter emotional signal of voice apparently helps cement online relationships. Indeed, some guilds won't even let you participate anymore unless you use voice chat, because text-only chat seems shifty.
Why does text seem "shifty" to people? I've never understood this - too many people always read the worst in a line of text. They almost seem to go out of their way to destroy any innocence of meaning in text to find the worst possible, most insulting, most dishonest thing someone might possibly mean by what they say! Why do people do this? Take things at face value! Don't create drama where there is none! I think it has far more to do with our modern age and time than with anything to do with the textual medium verses voice. People are looking for conflict and strife, always feel the victim in everything that goes on, and never take any responsibility for what they bring on themselves.
Ultimately, this is about intimacy -- how much of ourselves we're willing to give away to strangers. Personally, I enjoy being able to construct identities carefully in text; that's because I grew up with text as my main online mode. It's possible that the impending generation of gamers will simply find voice chat more natural, in the same way that teenagers today happily blog about their personal lives and post pictures and videos of themselves. They regard personal revelation not as an incursion of privacy but a marker of authenticity.
This comment disgusts me. As someone with a bunch to lose by exposing myself online - a woman - its about much more than this. If I know I will never be taken seriously by the young males in my guild, why should I be forced to expose myself as a woman and thus lose any authority I may have? What about those who are men living as women, or women as men? Is it lying to say you are a woman when you are living as one, but your voice may not sound that like that? People become irrational and angry when confronted with such things, especially if they feel "betrayed" by the person in question.
The point is - voice chat is a violation of the fourth wall of gaming - it destroys the ability to be someone other than you are, someone within the world, rather than just being a person playing a game. It forces you to go back to your daily life, to be treated the way you are within the every day, rather than to be someone else, someone different. Get over it - voice chat is a crutch for raiding, and unneeded for the rest of the gaming.
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