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

[Mike Rozak]

Richard wrote:

> I wrote an article on this subject last year for Game Girl Advance.

>  http://www.gamegirladvance.com/archives/2003/07/28/not_yet_you_fools.html

It's intrigueing when users apply 3rd party software to their MMORPG play:

  - Teamspeak (this discussion thread)

  - ICQ and other specialized text chat programs (more of a MUD issue)

  - Macroing

  - E-bay to buy and sell items and characters

  - EQ hacks that let players see all monsters in the area

  - Did I miss any?

The question for the designer becomes: Does the design fight the
trend, embrace it, ignore it, or co-opt it? Or, in the case of
macroing and E-bay, solve the problem that the 3rd party add-ons are
attempting to solve... namely boring gameplay.

An ideal solution for voice chat would be a realistically morphed
voice with a realistic accent. However, any attempt to correct
accents using speech recognition will result in characters
occasionally speaking words they didn't intend to say, which
although highly amusiing, is worse than the original accent. Only
voice morphing is feasable, and it is of questionable quality,
although better can be done than http://www.audio4fun.com/.

I agree that a poorly morphed voice with its original speaker's
accent can be immersion breaking.

The arguments against voice chat are:

  - Immersion breaking.

  - Lots of bandwidth. (1 kbyte per sec per user x 20 hours per
  month = 72 megabytes per month per user)

  - Deaf players are out of luck, just like blind players are
  prevented from playing contemporary MMORPGs. (Although speech
  recognition applied to the voice chat can reduce the problem for
  deaf users.)

  - NPCs can no longer "listen in" on players' conversations (not
  that any MMORPG has NPCs intelligent enough to do this anyway).

  - Translation software that allows several languages to play on
  one server barely works for text, and has even less hope of
  working with voice.

  - Any others?

Voice chat might be beneficial in some cases:

  - For the SE Asian market, voice chat is probably the way to go
  since typing is such a drag. Same issue with consoles. (Maybe it's
  the way to go for people who are poor typists?)

  - A group of RL friends playing together in the game. There's no
  point disguising voices, and voice-chat is more convenient than
  typing.

  - In a VW where people aren't trying to be anonymous.

  - The raid communcation system where the speed of voice far
  outweighs any loss to immersion. Besides, having ever-resurrecting
  medieval warriors using virtual walkie-talkies to raid a dragon
  with damage numbers wafting from its body is already close to zero
  immersion.

  - Any others?

Question:

  If a large number of players are using 3rd party voice chat, how
  does a VW design co-opt voice chat in order to mitigate the
  immersion damage and add some gameplay elements into it? Perhaps
  VW voice-chat for guilds can be magically spyed upon or jammed by
  other players. (This only works if the VW can hog the audio record
  channels and prevent other voice-chats from working, since no
  guild would agree to using a potentially compromised in-world
  voice chat. I think I know how to do this.)

Mike Rozak
http://www.mxac.com.au
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