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

[Mike Rozak]

Richard Bartle wrote:

> But they take everyone who isn't a poor typist with them, or at
> least split the player base along voice/text lines. It's hard to
> talk to one person while typing to someone else, so if you come
> across someone who doesn't use your preferred method of
> communication then you won't be inclined to communicate with them.

Using text-to-speech for typists would minimize this problem.

However, it introduces a new problem. Since people trying to hide
their identities are more likely to use text, just as people wearing
balaclavas in the summer are more likely to be bank robbers or
terrorists, people will be suspicious of those using text.

A few days ago I thought of a possible solution... a person's speech
is identified by their voice (voice box and head shape), prosody,
and accent (if any). A comedic impersonator works by simulaiting the
prosody and accent of the person they're impersonating. Voice
morphing algorithms work on the voice, and don't affect the prosody
or accent. Voice morphing by itself is not good enough because
prosody and accent then become an identity give-away. I described a
technique for changing all three using speech recognition, but it's
not advisable because speech recognition makes too many mistakes,
resulting in misspoken words.

However, if you use speech recognition to identify where the
phonemes are and then alter the prosody using synthesized prosody,
in combination with voice morphing, the voice should be
unrecognizable (unless the speaker has an accent). The reason speech
recognition works for this is that any errors will be less noticable
when applied to prosody, as opposed to resynthesizing the entire
word from the misrecognized word.

This techniques has some down sides: For one, everyone's prosody
becomes as bad as text-to-speech's prosody... which means its
emotionless and sounds "wrong". Two, it's a fair amount of coding
for a feature that may not get used. I suspect most players will
want to keep their original prosody to convey emotion, despite the
lost anonymity. Therefore, anyone using synthesized prosody might as
well be wearing a balaclava.

Another issue affecting anonymity is the number of players in any
MMORPG, soon to be millions. If a player wants to be anonymous,
he/she moves toa different shard or a different part of the world.

> I don't think being unable to type is all that much of an issue
> anyway (at least if you're physically able to type - obviously it
> IS an issue if you have no hands). Millions of people send text
> messages to one another every day using their mobile phones -
> devices that are quite able to support speech. They could phone
> and leave a voicemail message, but they use SMS instead. Typing
> something on an ABC keyboard using only your thumb isn't exactly
> easy (at least initially), yet that doesn't put them off.

See my reply to Paul Caniff about the demise of silent
movies... While I agree that your points are correct, sometimes
users (players) will rush headlong into a technology regardless of
the consequences. Those entertainment suppliers that try to get in
the way are trampled. Is voice-chat one such technology? I don't
know.

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

> While they're playing together, yes, fair enough. If they're bound
> closely enough, they can consider the group to be the number 1
> object of advancement in the virtual world, rather than their own
> characters, and instant communication between members would assist
> that. The question is, what happens when they come across other
> people with whom they want to communicate?

Two thoughts:

  1) Private regions in MMORPGs ensure a bit more privacy. If they
  take off, they may also encourage voice chat amongst friends.

  2) The VW engine I'm working on can be configured to produce a
  MUD, or a single-player adventure game. It can also be configured
  to create a personal VW, where one player sets their computer up
  as server for the night, and all the player's friends log on to
  play the game. (Just think of playing an adventure game, NwN, or
  Morrowind with your friends. It's kind of like a private region in
  a MUD/MMORPG, but without the monthly fees.) Voice chat feels like
  a must-have feature for my personal VW configuration. (But, I
  don't know how many users would like such a configuration.)

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