Voice not such a hit in WOW - how will it do in SL?

Posted Jun 19th 2007 3:11PM by Eloise Pasteur
Filed under: Stories

According to an article in Wired, voice in WoW causes a lot of issues:

That confident high level character showing you around turns out to be 11
Women stay quiet because they find out the hard way that they suddenly get hit on even more.
The shy, the quiet, the geeky (and of course the mute and the hard of hearing/deaf) stay quiet

Of course those who are convinced voice in SL is the best thing since sliced bread will ignore it, and, in fairness the article does point out that when co-ordinating guild raids, voice is great - so cool. Voice will help the griefer teams organise better.

It probably won't suddenly reveal lots of 11 year olds in SL. Women, do you need to be hit on more? Being hard of hearing, I'm going to be excluded by those that move to 100% voice anyway. That's fine - my land won't be voice activated if the promised "turn it off" option is provided. If you don't like that, you're welcome to stay away, but it does make me wonder just how much voice will be used once the initial wow factor has gone.

Thanks to Sharon for the tip about the article.

Tags: Second Life voice WOW, SecondLifeVoiceWow

Reader Comments

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1. it's like drinking and driving.

One person does it and ends up getting killed, but the next says "bah, I'm better than they are, I can do it just fine"

Posted at 4:18PM on Jun 19th 2007 by Neural

2. I think, outside of educational uses, Linden are going to be shocked just how not-popular voice will be.

I don't mean unpopular - just not popular.

I'm in no rush to waste bandwidth hearing people around me coughing and breathing into their mic's because they haven't the sense to toggle. It'll take some time for the voice etiquette to be established, till then (and possibly after) I'm staying mute. :)

Posted at 4:42PM on Jun 19th 2007 by Eris

3. I won't use it, and I hope there's an option to mute it so I don't have to hear anyone else using it.

Posted at 5:16PM on Jun 19th 2007 by Kahni Poitier

4. "Yet here's the thing: You can't deny that voice chat can bring a huge amount of positive social good, too. Dmitri Williams, a communications professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, did a study of World of Warcraft players for one month. The results? Those who used text-only chat experienced "drops in trust and happiness" amongst their fellow players; those who used voice chat did not.The fatter emotional signal of voice apparently helps cement online relationships. Indeed, some guilds won't even let you participate anymore unless you use voice chat, because text-only chat seems shifty."

Yet here's the thing - that is utter rubbish and a complete misinterpretation. What that says is that the introduction of voice chat (in this instance) made text chatters seem less trustworthy. Not that voice chatters were _more_ trustworthy, just that a bias against text chatters appears. The statement "The fatter emotional signal of voice apparently helps cement online relationships" is completely unjustified. I'm hardly convinced that the appearance of prejudice against text chatters constitutes "positive social good".

Posted at 5:37PM on Jun 19th 2007 by Ordinal Malaprop

5. Thanks for the post. And I agree with Ordinal.

Question for everyone: Do you need speakers for SL at all? If I'm at a club, I'll get the feed IP and plug it into iTunes (I use AirTunes). Then I can mute my laptop's speakers.

Posted at 5:53PM on Jun 19th 2007 by Nightbird Glineux

6. I won't be using it - at all, and I rarely travel with sound on now.

My reason is simple and has nothing to do with 'maintaining the illusion' or concerns about how my voice sounds. It has to do with pure RL practicality.

I don't live alone, and would find it terribly rude to those who share my space with me to be jabbering or flooding the room with sound that makes no sense to nonparticipants. The only way around that would be to remove my computer to some private corner of my home, which would drastically cut the time I spent in SL at all, because I'm not wired to hole up alone with the computer.

Currently, I can be online *and* engaged with my family members at the same time. At present that means that sometimes I dance to music I can't hear, and I'm willing to live with that. And if everone wants to go voice, I guess I'll make a little prim sign to hold announcing that Morgana is deaf - but I won't be joining them in the voice chatter.

I have a very hard time believing I'm the only person in SL with RL etiquette concerns regarding voice, and I don't think this has been well thought out at all. (Not to mention those many many people in SL who will find their SL activities sharply curbed if they have to whisper into a headset to avoid being overheard by RL spouses and SOs. You know who you are.)

Posted at 6:24PM on Jun 19th 2007 by Morgana Fillion

7. you forgot to mention people's tv/stereo/winamp/whatever sounding in the background , I've had a few of those with skype (I myself try to mute the tv, music, game or whatever before answering a call, and have often used the "mute the mic" option in longer periods of inactivity so I could watch tv while the person on the other side of the connection did whatever they were doing that made me wait)

Posted at 1:35AM on Jun 20th 2007 by TigroSpottystripes Katsu

8. I don't think voice will be a popular feature. Most people seem to prefer meeting new people online over talking to strangers on the phone, and this would be a lot like a phone chat line. I've never been on a phone-chat hotline and I have never met anyone who has, so I don't see something so similar catching on.

Posted at 7:35PM on Jun 19th 2007 by Crystal

9. Agree with Ordinal. And I will beat the dead horse again - it will deepen linguistic divides.

Text chat can be automatically translated, and while automatic translation sucks it does encourage people to at least *try* to communicate. But in voice, native speakers will aggregate and people will typically disregard people who do not speak their language.

Posted at 7:58PM on Jun 19th 2007 by Nobody Fugazi

10. Voice is and has always been an option. I was using voice before voice integration begun. Many people do. Voice is not going to help WoW, WoW is a game where fantasy is primordial, most serious team players for games such as Counter Strike, Halo etc.. use third party applications for voice support and am not sure if they have integrated voice now (not my scene, did not follow things in that domain). SL we all agree is the next web platform and should encompass all communication media. Now let's deconstruct a few views through metaphors that basically illustrate the 'me me me' nature of all humans.

I am visually impaired. I want all road signs to be magnified so that I can see it. I don't care about how much space those signs are going to take, or what visual sores they will.

Man: I am an immersionist and want to feel like a woman through text. I want do not want voice, except if I have a male voice to female voice filter (huh... especially one that would make me very sexy and sultry etc...)

I live in a dorm or I dont want my hubby/partner/wife/children to know what I am doing talking out loud...I want privacy, I am an immersionist.

Basically, I want to restrict the freedom of everybody else so that my lifestyle is not impacted. But this strategy does work, how many of us did buy into the idea of 'protecting' our life style/way of life by adverturing in nation building at all costs, regardless of anything including the destruction of life. Nothing as extreme here, in this debate, but the similar mindset shines through.
Btw I begged LL to make voice explicity optional and let people who need it to pay for it but they believe in 'democracy' and everybody is going to have it. There you go. Now LL is a position, where whatever they do, there will always be people criticizing them etc... etc... it appears that such dialogues does not help anybody of course,other than giving meaning to our lives.

Posted at 8:34PM on Jun 19th 2007 by Moriz Gupte

11. I'm not really following, Moritz. Saying I won't be using voice when/if it is an option is equated with nation building at all costs? I'm not even suggesting that voice shouldn't be there - I'm simply saying that I won't be using it. If you have to equate that to some bigger RL issue, I'm the vegetarian person who is going to select the veggie platter at the deli in spite of all those meat options being there for everyone else.

The only freedom I'm restricting for anyone other than me is the opportunity to hear my voice or to pester me with theirs, and I'll be handling that by not having a headset and continuing to keep my sound off in SL. Live and let live - just don't require me to join in the noisy fray.

I'd be worried that this might shunt me off into the sidelines of the next-gen SL, except I'm pretty well settled in a few select groups in SL, and so far not a one of those I know that I've spoken to on this are eager to go voice.

I think voice integration has tremendous application for people using SL for specific real-world supplementation - businesses using SL for meetings, and educators using it for long distance learning. I gather those are not the majority users of SL at this time, but I do get that they are the demographic LL is trying to court.

But for me, personally, it will add nothing to my SL experience as I currently use the platform, and I have no problem with explaining why - what you call criticism that helps no one is information LL can either use or discard as they see fit. Me, I'd want to know how a new expensive feature will be received before financially commiting to it, but I'm well aware that LL doesn't do that sort of risk assessment prior to adding features. That said, i'm not surprised that WoW didn't have a massive orgasm over the addition of voice, and I don't expect SL will either. I am a terribly average user and I think my issues with it will be fairly average, too.

Posted at 12:20AM on Jun 20th 2007 by Morgana Fillion