[MUD-Dev] online voice communication

[Peter Harkins]

On Mon, Dec 02, 2002 at 11:00:08AM -0600, Damion Schubert wrote:

> Voice chat is quite excellent for small squad tactics (especially,
> it should be pointed out, player killing).  I'm still waiting for
> someone to make it really work in 'cocktail party' mode.
> Unfortunately, the publishers are more interested in that social
> mode, as the reason many are interested in voice is that they see
> keyboard communication as being a barrier to entry for new users.

I don't see that it can work how you're describing: voice chat
doesn't work in groups over roughly 4-8 in real life. People at
cocktail parties tend to form little clumps of discussion, task
forces for the topic at hand, if you will. It's simply not possible
for everyone to be able to say what they want to say when they want
to say it. Throwing on a distance calculation (you get to hear the
10 nearest people to you) is a decent way of keeping from wasting
bandwidth. It has the loss that one can't easily pick up on another
discussion group and wander over, but them's the breaks: bandwidth
is a limited commodity.

I've a group of friends of around 7-15 I meet up with at a diner on
a fairly regular basis. If we have fewer people we take one long
table and generally have a discussion at either end, with the people
in the middle choosing which one to flip between (making those seats
rather valued). If we have more, we'll take a few tables of 3-5
people and people hop between tables at will.

Even without the physical problem of seating that many people, it's
hard to scale a voice conversation over a half-dozen or so
people. It can only begin to work again when you impose the
structure of a different paradigm, like a designated platoon leader
that gives orders, a business meeting with attendee hierarchy
(management vs. their aides), a lecturer addressing an audience,
etc. I see the "speak only when you're spoken to" rule as a pretty
common requirement.


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