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

[Lost Penguin]

While voice chat is nice, I doubt you'll ever be able to get
completely away from text while keyboards are still the primary user
input mechanism.  Perhaps it's slightly off-topic in some ways, but
I see a lot of game companies working on optimizing and improving
various graphics engines, and none on Text-to-speech or speech
recognition engines.  And there's at least two benefits I can see to
doing so.

It seems to me that a flexible TTS and/or SR engine would do a
number of things from the immersion aspect of the game -- rather
than having a chat window say something like "Big Nasty Troll says:
Aaargh!", you'd actually *hear* that Big Nasty Troll, and if you had
turned off your chat window, would then be forced to think "okay, is
that a troll, an ogre, or something else entirely?"

It would also allow both voice-chat and text-chat players a means of
communicating without forcing players to do one or the other.  I
know that, for quite a while, I loved carrying on conversation via
text in EQ, but as soon as I and my friends got a voice-chat server
set up and running (Roger Wilco, I think it was), I began to despise
having to type messages in-game, preferring to leave my fingers
ready to move, attack, etc.  As a bard, I was usually twisting songs
continuously, and /tells usually tended to be accomplished only when
I was roaming around the world, or on specifically to chat and have
fun.  If I could have hit a voice chat toggle (to toggle the voice
chat off, and the /tell mode on), then just said my message, I'd
have been much, much happier.
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