[MUD-Dev] DGN: Effect of voice chat on game design

[darksuit]

"Brett Bibby wrote on October 12

> With all the posts recently on programs that allow out-of-game
> voice communications (e.g. Roger Wilco, etc.), it has got me
> wondering if this will severly limit the appeal of many games in
> the future.

> For example, if I want to roleplay a female as a RL male, I
> wouldn't be able to join any guilds that require voice if I wanted
> to maintain my roleplaying.  And what about immersion in the
> world? If I'm supposed to be an old battle-hardened Orc, or
> someone with a known accent, and I'm a young female, it would be
> impossible to actually roleplay.

> Once that happens, just simply declining to join a guild with such
> a voice requirement would generally reveal that the person in the
> game is roleplaying in some way.  At some point, with the majority
> of players using such a communication system, the players will
> roleplay less and less.  It is already hard enough to innovate on
> a large scale and make the world compelling, but imagine if
> everyone is using voice chat....

While I was working for There.com which imploys Voice Chat in-world,
I did some research on my own behalf. I was intrested in looking at
the compadibility of Voice Cloaking Software and the voice
configuration in-world and over Instant Messangers.

For this test I downloaded 3 Differnet Voice Cloaking Software
Packages that were free trials. Of the three that I tried, i found
that the most compadible was AV VCS 3.1 http://www.audio4fun.com/
the downside to the trial was that it was just that a trial and
didn't allow for full testing. I paid for the basic package which
has a price tag of $30 or so. This allowed me a variety of different
voice configurations. Which ranged from Female to other worldly

With some help by some one who knew who I was, I was able to
configure the voice for my Female Character. This took roughly about
30 minutes of fine tuning. I was then able to use the voice
convingly in-world, I was also able to repeat this process with
Yahoo's Voice Chat. I have not had a chace to experiment with Roger
Wilco or Team Speak. But with the sucess of There Voice Chat system
which uses a compression that is not that common. I was trying to
remember the specifics and was going over my notes. I may have load
up the latest version of There to get the name.

Point is, is that voice cloaking in game is possible, and could even
be incorperated into ingame chats. Allowing for all sorts of voices
from the common to the truely unique.

-- David
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