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

[ceo]

Richard A. Bartle wrote:

> This raises another issue: sometimes text is actually better than
> voice.

> ...

> Another thing that text has over voice is multi-tasking. I can
> carry on 4 conversations in text simultaneously, but I can't in
> voice.  Voice does have some huge advantages over text, but text
> also has some over voice that can't be discounted.

Indeed. And it's not only that you can multitask conversations, but
that you have the *context* of every conversation available to you
in the same amount of time it takes you to read the latest message.

This is why I don't have an answerphone IRL - forcing people to
email me makes it much much faster for me to prioritize messages
(compared to having to listen to each (slow) voice message one after
the after, I can skim-read and/or read only subject lines, jump
forwards/backwards etc) and also puts *every* message into a DB
(email client), where no voice-mail service would let you store
50,000 messages.

This was an interesting problem when I used to work on CAT
(computer-aided telephony) at IBM. I worked all day with voice-based
menuing systems, and spent a lot of time trying to make them both
faster to navigate and easier (partly because it would save huge
amounts of time in the test process, which was largely manual). I
managed to reduce the main testing process from a whole working day
down to around 20 minutes, but 90% of that remaining 20 minutes was
listening to option after option, slowly. To my knowledge, no-one
came up with anything better than simultaneous voice-and-text
streams, which was the best I could do.

For instance, you'd have a website display the options whilst you
were phoning the helpline. So, you can very very quikcly scan the
website, find the key combination you need, and punch it in to the
automated helpline.

Perhaps a way forward for online games is to adopt a similar
approach - either TTS in parallel with the current text chat, or STT
in parallel with voice-chat? Certainly, as I said, it was the best
*I* could come up with...

Adam M
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