Although VoIP is nice for this kind of grinding in groups, i have found that usage in larger groups can also be problematic.

Of course there are huge benefits, but consider the "noise" when more than one person speaks at a time. If several people are talking in a group, it is easy to hear what all people are saying, as well as know WHO is saying WHAT. If multiple people speak at the same time using VoIP, sometimes you can't hear or even decipher what is being said by all players, let alone know who was actually saying it.

Additionally, there is some lag as well to VoIP. If players do not have their own local sound turned down, you can hear the other player's environment sounds after they occur in your own UI.

...there is, of course, an opposing view on the voice vs text issue. I may be its sole representative ....

I type very fast and I think very fast with my fingers. I also express myself much better in a written format. If I were in a real-life conversation with you and trying to say the same things I'm typing here, they'd probably be less verbose, but they'd also be less understandable.

I also don't like voice programs because I dislike the sound of my own voice ... and there is a social consideration that I am always playing female characters, for reasons of my own ... while I've never made a big secret of it or used it to deceive, I really don't want to go onto TS and have to answer questions or defend why a female character has a male voice; it's just not a fuss I want to get into. (Some players, usually young males, are really bothered by the idea of other male players having female characters. But that too is a digression.)

Anyway, point is, *I* can keep up with text, but I realize that a lot of other people can't. What this means in practice is that the sort of in-game communication that needs to happen for players to group effectively, which was never good in text format to begin with, gets steadily worse for the text-only player. The rule has become "Get voice or get left behind," and I resent it.

In terms of the need to talk while fighting or doing other things, I think that's greatly exaggerated. You don't socialize while fighting anyway. (Actually, in MMORPGs there is barely any social conversation at all, and that's another gripe and a third digression.) I operate on the "initial briefing" plan - actions carefully coordinated before the fight, and mostly silence during the fight. It works pretty well - assuming you find a group that is willing to sit still for the planning beforehand ... and that's the real problem.

I may be overly cynical, especially since I'm anywhere from ten to twenty years older than the average player (depending on the game), but I think the real problem is that to function well in a text medium takes more patience and focus than the average player has - they just want to dash off and start swinging, over and over, and the voice method is more suited to the rash impulse.

---

By the by, the non-cached message units in There had their own problems. I don't like having other people see me forming the thoughts as I type them ... but it bothered me far less than some of my friends there, who felt that it made them look stupid ... that everyone could see how slowly they formed thoughts or how many times they had to go back in mid-sentence and correct themselves.

Eventually, though, a sense of humor developed about it, and one standard joke among my There peers was to begin typing something and then deliberately strike it out and type the "corrected" version, the same way old Unix geeks might write "Our duly elected moron^H^H^H^H^Hmayor" or use strikeout code.

Todd - I too almost always use text chat for the same reasons. But I've found that when tight coordination matters most, the interactional lag created by the standard chat systems can cause coordination troubles. If I played a male character and did raids or PvP most of the time, I think I'd probably switch to voice. Of course, that sort of game play is starting to look a lot like an online first-person shooter where voice is the standard.

(Actually, in MMORPGs there is barely any social conversation at all, and that's another gripe and a third digression.)

you should join my guild then. /gchat is entirely social chat, almost to the point of irritation. There is rarely any kind of quest/raid/pvp discussion there. Plenty of Chuck Norris and other spam, as well as actual (good) social exchange.

Matt - Nice points. The 3rd party VoIP applications certainly have serious limitations, especially since they're not integrated with the game software itself. (I hear that There.com has one of the best voice systems at the moment.)

How to simulate the "cocktail party effect" - one's perceptual ability to focus on a single conversation within a larger cacophony of many voices - in online audio spaces is still a major technological hurdle (although there is actually a PARC technology that tackles just this problem).

Of course, there is no reason that game developers must choose between voice OR text chat. I'd like to see more sophisticated, nimble text chat AND voice systems offered in today's virtual worlds.

By the by, I mentioned some of the comments I made in that post to an old friend and heavy WOW player, and she disagreed with my thought that most of the necessary planning can be done before missions. She runs the sort of hardcore stuff I was never really able to do because of time issues. (I don't know how familiar you are with WOW-speak, but she's in a guild that spends most of their time these days running Molten Core and the other high-end instances that require LARGE groups and a big time investment.)

I agree that in situations like that, you have to pause and regroup/replan every so often along the way, but I still believe that you can balance the typing and the fighting. She disagrees strongly; she doesn't think she could do MC effectively without having a voice program. Since she has far more experience with big groups than I do, I'm not prepared to contradict her. In short, I think my position is valid for the sort of small groups I played, but it may not scale up well.

Hi Bob and everyone,

I ended up here looking at Bob's homepage (I am also a speaker on that panel next month).

Matt makes a good point: with monaural audio, there is no intelligibility of any of the voices during overtalk. In a real cocktail party, you hear with two ears. The brain has the ability to filter by vector of origin, and so you can tune out all the stuff you don't want to hear and focus on the voice of interest.

With stereo, not only is this problem solved but also the very logical one in a 3D game: when someone says something tactical (e.g. "cover me!") you know where to point the gun, vs. having to spin 360 to find where the person is.

At the risk of appearing overtly commercial in an inappropriate forum (appologies in advance if so), I would like to say that DiamondWare has built a 3D VoIP system with APIs designed to be intgrated into a game or VR simulation. If you're interested in a demo, please email me at keith@dw.com.

Bob, I would especially like to trade demos with you, to see this PARC technology you reference as well as show you our stuff and see what kind of collaboration oppportunities there are. The technology also has huge enterprise collaboration and workspace community applications (I noticed this was another PARC research area).

Sort of a stale topic, but what the hey.

I find that voicechat ruins my immersion, and barely overcomes one of the fundamental reasons ingame chat systems suck: they're designed by gamers, not warriors or wargamers.

Immersion-wise voicechat never represents what I imagine avatars to sound like, given what I know of their personality and appearances. Voicechat fidelity is pretty poor, and so isn't good for social situations (scummy roleplayer, I am), and the timing tends not to integrate with textual emotes players may be generating. Worse, it creates a social stratification between the "haves" and the "have nots". This has been seen in There.

Militarily most ingame chats are poorly integrated with the UI, don't provide secure chatlines, are terribly laggy, and don't provide easy ways to create command control hierarchies. I am a neurotic type and teach my guildmates along the lines of German 'auftragstaktik', wherein individual initiative is encouraged at all levels, and C2 (command control) is only generally exercised from the top. Thusly, when things are going well and with the (outline) of a plan, there really is little communication required. Good discipline and training minimize how much needs to be said, so when things are difficult, the comms needs are still minimal. This is how it goes in the real world, even though most modern combatants have personal short-range radios.

If I had securechats, fast chat systems, UI integration such as target designation, group waypoints, and a common operational picture (I see on an overhead map what my guildies see), then I wouldn't need voicechat at all.

Designers really need to read Rick Shelley's "Dirigent Mercenary Corps" books, particularly those guys who do SF games like SWG. Even in the FPSs, the C2 systems suck and are inferior to what you can buy off the shelf today.