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Voice Chat Can Really Kill the Mood

Posted by Zonk on Tue Jun 19, 2007 02:21 PM
from the get-your-squeak-out-of-my-brain-please dept.
Entertainment Games
Raver32 writes with Wired article about the strange juxtaposition of real life identities intruding on virtual world bliss. Voice chat is becoming a very common component of online games, from MMOGs to FPS titles. Many even bundle a voice chat service into the game client now. That's useful, tactically, but socially it can be downright frustrating, confusing, or awkward. "Recently I logged into World of Warcraft and I wound up questing alongside a mage and two dwarf warriors. I was the lowest-level newbie in the group, and the mage was the de-facto leader. He coached me on the details of each new quest, took the point position in dangerous fights and suggested tactics. He seemed like your classic virtual-world group leader: Confident, bold and streetsmart. But after a few hours he said he was getting tired of using text chat — and asked me to switch over to Ventrilo, an app that lets gamers chat using microphones and voice. I downloaded Ventrilo, logged in, dialed him up and ... realized he was an 11-year-old boy."
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  • Pedophilia jokes in 3 ... 2 ... 1 ... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Rhodey (702341) on Tuesday June 19 2007, @02:22PM (#19568943)
    Go! Seriously, though. "Kill The mood"? "Virtual world bliss"? "Confident, bold and streetsmart"? "Dwarf warriors"? This is too easy.

    • Re:Pedophilia jokes in 3 ... 2 ... 1 ... (Score:5, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 19 2007, @03:21PM (#19569971)
      "Hi, I'm Chris Hansen with Dateline NBC. Getting ready for a night of level grinding huh?"

      • Re:Kills the mood (Score:5, Insightful)

        by fractoid (1076465) on Tuesday June 19 2007, @09:02PM (#19573883) Homepage

        But they are all played by guys. The real surprise is when it turns out to be an actual female.
        It used to be that way, but these days with the influx of newbies, most players don't seem to realise that most female characters are played by males. It's amazing how many players start hitting on my gf's female blood elf character within 2 minutes of meeting her (she's always helping lowbies find the flight master or set their hearthstones or whatever) - surely her typing can't be that feminine? >.> I've always played male characters as my 'serious' alts but this one time I rolled a female night elf priest (have you seen male night elves? bletch!) and ended up with a male nelf druid following me around 'helping' me. ><

        On the main topic, though - why does it matter if it's an 11-year-old kid, a 42-year-old mother of three, a college drop out, or an IT worker on the other end of that mage? If he or she is courteous, skilled, and knowledgeable then s/he deserves respect regardless of any other factor. That's where online games, and indeed the internet in general, are great - they let you meet the person without prejudice based on appearance, age, gender, or any other factor (except literacy, I guess... :) Why should it matter if that person is currently living in the body of an 11yo boy or a grey-whiskered tabletop RPGer?

        • Re:Kills the mood (Score:5, Insightful)

          by bdjacobson (1094909) on Tuesday June 19 2007, @10:23PM (#19574393)

          But they are all played by guys. The real surprise is when it turns out to be an actual female.
          It used to be that way, but these days with the influx of newbies, most players don't seem to realise that most female characters are played by males. It's amazing how many players start hitting on my gf's female blood elf character within 2 minutes of meeting her (she's always helping lowbies find the flight master or set their hearthstones or whatever) - surely her typing can't be that feminine? >.> I've always played male characters as my 'serious' alts but this one time I rolled a female night elf priest (have you seen male night elves? bletch!) and ended up with a male nelf druid following me around 'helping' me. ><

          On the main topic, though - why does it matter if it's an 11-year-old kid, a 42-year-old mother of three, a college drop out, or an IT worker on the other end of that mage? If he or she is courteous, skilled, and knowledgeable then s/he deserves respect regardless of any other factor. That's where online games, and indeed the internet in general, are great - they let you meet the person without prejudice based on appearance, age, gender, or any other factor (except literacy, I guess... :) Why should it matter if that person is currently living in the body of an 11yo boy or a grey-whiskered tabletop RPGer?
          As you hint at, it struck me immediately that the only problem here is the submitter's pride. He thinks Voice Chat killed the mood; what killed the mood was him realizing he was having his ass handed to him on a golded platter for hours straight over and over by an 11 year old. He didn't like feeling like a noob. Pure pwnage on the 11 year old's part.

          Maybe he just needs to work on his uber micro [purepwnage.com]. ;)

          In contrast to the submitter's perspective, I found voice chat to be a godsend in WoW when I still played it. Without it you lose the human element of the game, and you forget the noob on the other end (this was other people sometimes, but also myself many times over) is still human. This is only a bad thing. Text conversations fall to hissy fits much faster than they do when you're talking with someone.

          • Re:Kills the mood (Score:5, Insightful)

            by hotdiggitydawg (881316) on Wednesday June 20 2007, @07:11AM (#19577385)

            On the main topic, though - why does it matter if it's an 11-year-old kid, a 42-year-old mother of three, a college drop out, or an IT worker on the other end of that mage? If he or she is courteous, skilled, and knowledgeable then s/he deserves respect regardless of any other factor.
            As you hint at, it struck me immediately that the only problem here is the submitter's pride. He thinks Voice Chat killed the mood; what killed the mood was him realizing he was having his ass handed to him on a golded platter for hours straight over and over by an 11 year old. He didn't like feeling like a noob. Pure pwnage on the 11 year old's part.
            Exactly. Voice chat is not responsible for killing the mood, his own prejudice is.

            I was in a similar situation years ago - playing online in a clan for 5+ years before we started using voice comms together. Turns out our clan leader had a really high squeaky voice. Funny for all of about 5 minutes, but then we all got over it and got on with gaming, and he continued to lead the clan for years after. In no way did it diminish his leadership, our collective pwnage or my enjoyment of the game.

            Learn to respect diversity and life gets a whole lot better.

          • Re:Stereotypes, meritocracy (Score:5, Interesting)

            by It'sYerMam (762418) <thefishface.gmail@com> on Wednesday June 20 2007, @05:28AM (#19576649) Homepage
            While some of the meritocracy associated with text-only gaming disappears when you fire up TeamSpeak or Ventrilo or whatever, in my experience plenty remains. I've played TrueCombat:Elite for a good while now, and I would never want to go back to text-only. Gaming has now become for me a social experience - it's no longer just about relaxing for half an hour fragging some terrorists, it's now about fragging and actually talking to people who can quite honestly call friends. Yet these friends are respected because of who they are (and, to an extent, how well they play) not according to any social stereotype.
            Age enters into it somewhat, admittedly. But we happily play alongside a 16 year old friend of ours (although the clans have an 18-years rule) and he is respected because he is friendly. At the same time, I've made friends with a mass of people who I would otherwise never have been able to - not in the way that I have. I now know a Scot from Dundee who's married with two children, I know tens of Germans, several of whom are twice my age or more. In real life, I, as an 18-year-old, would perhaps know and talk with a married 36 year old, I might even be friends with him. But I would never, I would say, have the kind of frank, uninhibited conversation that we all do - it's more like a bunch of blokes at a bar, and if you go to a bar you don't go with people twice your age, usually.
            Without voice chat, I would perhaps "know" some of these people - I remember before I used to log on to TeamSpeak I would recognise a few of the regulars on the servers. But one can never hold a conversation of the same type purely through the in-game text chat feature. The conversations we have online range widely in topic - we see little glimpses of each other's home lives, mundane things like the Scot having to leave temporarily because one of his daughters is holding a tin of paint (a new variation on the "it's past the 13-year-old's bedtime) or discussions of Marmite which proceed from my becoming peckish. We discuss television, politics, language, photography, share jokes and behave altogether more like... blokes at a bar than gamers at their PCs.

  • So? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by AuMatar (183847) on Tuesday June 19 2007, @02:24PM (#19568979)
    If he's competently leading the party, does it matter if he's an 11 year old boy or a 70 year old woman? Either way you're getting things done.

    • Re:So? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Omnifarious (11933) * on Tuesday June 19 2007, @02:28PM (#19569041) Homepage Journal

      If he's competently leading the party, does it matter if he's an 11 year old boy or a 70 year old woman? Either way you're getting things done.

      This is true. But it's really hard to take them seriously anyway. I knew an 11 year old in college who was better at math than I was and knew more of it. It was still really hard to take him seriously. In took a serious act of willpower, even though I knew, intellectually, that he really did know more than I did.

      • Re:So? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by UncleTogie (1004853) * on Tuesday June 19 2007, @02:43PM (#19569311) Homepage Journal

        It was still really hard to take him seriously.

        Silly question here, and I'm not telling you to take all 11-year-olds seriously...

        If someone has important information, why does their age/gender/religion/culture matter?

        • Re:So? (Score:4, Funny)

          by UbuntuDupe (970646) * on Tuesday June 19 2007, @02:47PM (#19569389) Journal
          I agree. Or as some wag put it: "The internet has done wonders to eliminate the barriers to human interaction posed by age, gender, and distance. First question people ask online: a/s/l?"

        • Re:So? (Score:5, Insightful)

          by Altus (1034) on Tuesday June 19 2007, @02:58PM (#19569599) Homepage

          Im with you here. I'm still young enough to remember how much it would piss me off when adults wouldn't listen to me even when I knew something they didn't.

          I used to watch Nova back in early elementary school and my brain would hold onto all sorts of shit from than and from time to time I would spout some of this information back. My parents never took me seriously, they always assumed I was making it up (yea, I'm just making up shit about astrophysics... sure).

          Its important not to disregard someone just because of their age.

          • Re:So? (Score:5, Funny)

            by digitalchinky (650880) <dtchky@gmail.com> on Tuesday June 19 2007, @04:10PM (#19570751) Homepage
            I'm guessing the difference between 'then' and 'than' never took hold, looks like the whole 'not listening' part went both ways.

          • Re:So? (Score:5, Interesting)

            by StikyPad (445176) on Tuesday June 19 2007, @05:51PM (#19572121) Homepage
            I remember the frustration as well, but what I conveniently forget (which has been painfully illustrated by my own kids) is how often I was wrong. We judge people's insight based on past performance, and kids generally have a poor track record because, among other things, while they may clearly remember a conversation, or an event that occurred, they frequently mis-interpret what actually transpired, or leave out important details. For example, when his teacher asked him to confirm that "xxx-xxxx" was our phone number, my 6 year-old came to the conclusion that his teacher had the same phone number as we did, and vehemently insisted that this was true. For some reason or another, he had completely misinterpreted what had happened. As another example, apparently his school is still teaching that Pluto is a planet (as of last month). I was completely unsuccessful at convincing him otherwise, probably because he doesn't yet completely understand that definitions are not absolute (although I didn't try very hard because I didn't want him to fail his assignments. Yes, I could have pressed the issue with the school, but I think it will be easier, and no less effective in the long run, to just explain it when he's a bit older). Anyway, when someone presents you with misinformation on a fairly constant basis, you have to take everything they say with a grain of salt, and that's true whether the source is a child or an adult. I try to give the benefit of the doubt, but unless you have kids, or deal with them on a regular basis, it's hard to appreciate how often they're just plain wrong. Given that, it's not hard to understand why parents assume their children are wrong if what their children say conflicts with their view of reality. Parents should probably try to be open to the idea that their children are right, but at the same time, learning to present a convincing argument (and when not to bother) is an important part of growing up.

        • Re:So? (Score:5, Insightful)

          by Omnifarious (11933) * on Tuesday June 19 2007, @03:08PM (#19569757) Homepage Journal

          Because he was so much an 11 year old in all other respects. He had an 11 year old's social skills, and everything else that came with being 11.

          If a woman walked into my workplace and started acting like an air-headed bimbo I'd have a hard time taking her seriously too, even if turns out that she developed a public key encryption method that isn't defeated by quantum computing. Especially if she was always asking the men around to 'help' her.

          When certain aspects of a personality don't come over, like in text chat, it doesn't matter. But when you hear them a whole bunch of things you didn't notice before suddenly pop out and it's really hard to ignore them and just pay attention to the important thing.

          • Re:So? (Score:5, Informative)

            by PMBjornerud (947233) on Tuesday June 19 2007, @07:24PM (#19573121)
            The social norms of 30- and 11-year-olds are different, obviously.

            Text is a very slow medium, so only the most information is conveyed. Little overhead. If you use text, you don't have time for chatter and socializing. The game is in focus. If someone knows how to play, he can be 5 or 50, it does not matter.

            Speech is much faster, and allows for a great deal of nuances. Subtle jokes, puns and references. A different social context between the person will be extremely obvious. The way you normally talk to your friends doesn't connect with the other person. It doesn't really matter for the game, but your instincs will tell you that you're interacting with people ouside your "group".

            In closing: Have anyone here ever met a group of roleplay'ers that coordinate internally using voice chat? everything you see will match their character, and be wonderfully synchronized. Voice chat improve the mood, too.

        • Re:So? (Score:4, Insightful)

          by servognome (738846) on Tuesday June 19 2007, @03:15PM (#19569863)

          If someone has important information, why does their age/gender/religion/culture matter?
          Why does anything matter, including education, confidence, height, clothes, etc?
          It comes down to trying to determine if you believe somebody has important information. We have to internally decide whether the person is believalbe or not based on whatever cues we given. Typically this is done based on our previous experiences and over time we build up a database and naturally use them to fill in gaps of knowledge and make assumptions.
          This is why social engineering works so well, it plays upon widely accepted expectations of human interaction.

          • Re:So? (Score:5, Interesting)

            by shaitand (626655) on Tuesday June 19 2007, @05:34PM (#19571945) Homepage Journal
            'It comes down to trying to determine if you believe somebody has important information.'

            You have just nailed one of the greatest flaws in typical human reasoning. Humans attempt to judge the source rather than information. Hitler could have written the most profound poetry, work that gives the reader a beneficial life altering insight into their soul. Only a few historians would ever read it and even they may not read it with an open mind.

            A better example is Eugenics. Eugenics has never been seriously considered in the modern day because of the unscientific manner in which the Nazi's used the concept to justify genocide. People can't seem to separate the two. It's actually fairly sad because ranchers and farmers have assumed the validity of Eugenics (probably without even knowing what it was and the stigma attached to it) for decades if not centuries and their successful results make it very difficult to dispute the core concept.

            One should never consider the source when determining the validity and importance of information except as a last resort. Instead, one should consider the information itself and let it stand or fall on its own merit.

        • It's an issue of self preservation (Score:5, Insightful)

          by briancnorton (586947) on Tuesday June 19 2007, @04:52PM (#19571395) Homepage
          If someone has important information, why does their age/gender/religion/culture matter?

          It matters because bias is a psychological mechanism of self-preservation. People like to chalk up biases to "ignorance, anger, and hatred" but we all have them because they are typically correct for the situations in which we formed them. Our mind processes the information different based on the source.

          If a stately man his 60s wearing a suit and an 18 year old with a Green Day shirt start talking about global economic policy, who do you tend to believe? Chances are fairly good that you believe the old fart, irrespective of the fact that he may be a janitor and the teenager could be some kind of economic prodigy. We have those biases because probabilistically, they are usually correct for a familiar situation.

          As such, an 11 year old may be a VERY capable gamer, but we don't mentally endow them with the required wisdom and experience needed to be an effective leader. In "virtual reality" he is portrayed as an old mage with leadership ability. On some level, you anticipate the person to posses the attributes of the character they are playing, and when you perceive that they don't, you feel lied to.

    • Re:So? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by GWLlosa (800011) on Tuesday June 19 2007, @02:43PM (#19569299)
      The problem I have with the age variations on a video game is that I was raised to address certain social groups differently. It _totally_ kills my gaming mood when I chew out the squad leader in BF2142 for making a bad call and then have some kid (or worse, some young girl) come on voice comms to apologize. I mean, I would never have used that language if I'd realized it was a kid/girl in the first place, and now I'm an asshole. I realize this is a 'self-inflicted' problem, but the converse (you realize that hard-charging drill-sergeant vocabulary is coming from a 6 year old) is just as disquieting.

      • Re:So? (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Altus (1034) on Tuesday June 19 2007, @03:05PM (#19569693) Homepage

        Back in the day I used to do larping. I was the leader of my group and for the most part they were just friends of mine. I was one of the natural leaders of the social group anyway so it wasn't that hard to deal with, but one of my friends fathers came to game with us. I was a high school/college student at the time but he was a very intelligent engineer with fantastic reasoning and logic skills and I really looked up to him personally.

        His character, however, was that of a basic support healer, not a lot of initiative and very risk adverse. My tendency would have been to go to this guy for advice but instead he would come to me asking if he should use his healing now or save it for later (staying in character). This totally threw me, how could I be in charge of someone like that? how could I be the one making the decisions in the face of someone I would normally deffer to.

        So I sucked it up and made the decisions and became a better role player for it.

    • Re:So? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by HardCase (14757) on Tuesday June 19 2007, @04:37PM (#19571167)
      I don't care who's running the party, but what is it with the language? The author of the article hits on something that really bugs me. Fuck this, fuck that, motherfuckin' giant kicked my motherfuckin' ass. All this spewing out of the mouth of some kid who isn't even old enough to see a Samuel L. Jackson movie. I'm 45, spent 10 years in the Navy and even I don't use language like that. Hey, I'm not some overly sensitive, touchy feely guy, but, holy crap! Maybe somebody who is a quarter of my age can fill me in...

  • Lucky you (Score:5, Funny)

    by ajenteks (943860) on Tuesday June 19 2007, @02:26PM (#19568999)

    I downloaded Ventrilo, logged in, dialed him up and ... realized he was an 11-year-old boy.
    Hey, at least it wasn't feds or NBC reporters right?

  • Voices not what you expect (Score:4, Interesting)

    by callistra.moonshadow (956717) on Tuesday June 19 2007, @02:26PM (#19569007) Journal
    I play Guild Wars. Recently we (the hubby) and I picked up Vent since it is what our Alliance and Guild uses for communication on long/complicated missions. I generally know how old folks are in my guild/team but it was definitly enlightening to hear accents from the UK to the deep South of the US. On some levels it was cool but it does have a different flavor from going at it with text. Somehow you lose some of the ambience. Not sure how else to explain it.

  • Text chat's easier to follow (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 19 2007, @02:26PM (#19569011)
    I hate voice chat, not because I care if the player on the other end is 11, or the female elf is played by a man, but because I'm not good at distinguishing new voices. It's much easier to see who's talking in the text chat where there name appears next to whatever they say, then try to remember if that voice is the fighter or the cleric.

  • Voice Chat Sucks, Precious (Score:5, Funny)

    by Puff of Logic (895805) on Tuesday June 19 2007, @02:28PM (#19569059)
    We hates the squeakers [ctrlaltdel-online.com], Precious, we hates them!

  • Voice Changing Technology (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Gman14msu (993012) on Tuesday June 19 2007, @02:31PM (#19569113)
    Wouldn't the logical expansion of the role playing game be to implement voice changing technology? That would make the game completely immersive and allow anyone to assume an identity completely different from themselves and project the image that they want to into the game not their own selves, which is probably a big draw of the game in the first place. This would really take MMORPGs to another level where the online self is completely separate from the "real life" person. Honestly (in some sense) it's unfortunate for that 11 year old in the game that he was judged later on based on his voice and not just skills in the game. Nobody said you needed to have certain skills and a baritone voice to be a successful leader.

  • identity (Score:5, Funny)

    by Hemogoblin (982564) on Tuesday June 19 2007, @02:31PM (#19569117)

    ...realized he was an 11-year-old boy.
    Thats silly. Everyone knows that anyone claiming to be between the ages of 10 and 14 is an FBI agent.

  • hotness (Score:5, Funny)

    by WetBeaverSRU (662854) on Tuesday June 19 2007, @02:37PM (#19569213) Homepage
    I am a 27 year old male that plays a female rogue bloodelf. I was first invited into a guild because they must've thought I was a chick only later to find out that I was a dood when I first spoke in vent during a Gruul run. It was soooo funny because I always just thought the gm was just being a nice guy all those times he told me he'd definately save me a spot!

  • Yeah Like... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Greyfox (87712) on Tuesday June 19 2007, @02:38PM (#19569231) Homepage Journal
    My, um... friend was like totally cybering this night elf chick when some other guys said "Dude! That chick is a dude!" Well I... I mean my friend didn't want to believe that so he asked her to get on vent and and what do you know, she was a dude! Total mood killer!

    Moral of this story: Watch out for the hostess, she may have a twinkie...

  • Menacing?? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by revlayle (964221) on Tuesday June 19 2007, @02:39PM (#19569243) Homepage
    "I AM THE DESTROYER OF WORLDS!" really doesn't work with a beginning-to-crack-prepubescent-boy voice, does it?

  • ah yes (Score:5, Interesting)

    by crabpeople (720852) on Tuesday June 19 2007, @02:49PM (#19569439) Journal
    Glad to know im not the only one who finds voice a mood killa. Peoples insipid gossip and just talking for the hell of it. Some people just like to talk and talk about NOTHING. I assume these are the same people who start dialing their phone before they start their car. Who has that much idle chatter stored up in their brain? If its text, its pretty easy to filter, but voice? Forget about it.

    The usefull information and orders are intermixed with information about some guys hernia operation or fluffy kitty. Not to mention the pre pubescent people SCREAMING into the mic for attention, girls flirting with everyone, etc. Nothing makes me cringe more than hearing nasily wow players flirting with girls over vent. I especially hated that when I played wow. It completely ruins the fantasy mood but was required for endgame raiding. I dont want to be slaying dragons with the pimple faced kid from the simpsons. Id much rather picture peoples characters than the "character" that their voice reminds me of.

  • Same problem happening in Second Life (Score:4, Informative)

    by Morgaine (4316) on Tuesday June 19 2007, @02:59PM (#19569613)
    Like TFA said, it's a widespread problem in virtual worlds, but it can become even worse when the world itself introduces voice support, without requiring 3rd party software. Then you get a presumption of voice availability, and not wishing to use voice can then get interpreted in various destructive ways.

    This came to a head recently in Second Life, when they introduced voice chat functionality (actually still in beta). One of the most cogent discussions about it was made by a well-known SL commentator in her essay The End of Anonymity, Part II [gwynethllewelyn.net], which focussed mainly on the end of immersion in SL. Her conclusion, that it will force non-politically-correct roleplayers into "ghettos" and destroy mainstream immersion, does seem reasonable.

    Avatars in SL can be anything you like, no limit, so not surprisingly roleplay is extremely popular. The main grid is expressly for adults only, and so of course there is much interest in gender roleplay, in both directions (the gender spread is almost exactly 50/50). Needless to say, the loss of immersion through voice immediately gave rise to a lot of concern among roleplayers. This still has to be played out on the main grid, but it's certain that the impact will be large.

  • The upsides: Chocolate Milk! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Demon-Xanth (100910) on Tuesday June 19 2007, @02:59PM (#19569625)
    http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-715315209 8207965240 [google.com]

    And:
    http://www.break.com/index/mom-tells-kid-no-more-w arcraft.html [break.com]

    Where would the internet be without gems such as those?
  • While I agree that roleplaying may suffer a bit when you have a night elf female voiced by a guy who sounds like he's from the south, I've found that having voice chat can make the games much more fun.

    Back in my WoW days I enjoyed jumping on Teamspeak and chatting with people during our raids. Our guild was good enough that when we were clearing trash mobs (unless someone screwed up) we could freely chat and tell jokes and stuff. It also made hours of grinding for items much more fun when you could just chat with people. The range of real people behind the players also made for some interesting times. We had people that ranged from early teens to grandmothers/grandfathers, all across the world in a variety of different occupations. It made the game a lot more fun because you developed a certain bond with the other players that you couldn't do only over text chat.

    Plus it was really fun listening to the guys/girls with the Australian accents!

  • Worst case is wrose than Best Case is best (Score:4, Insightful)

    by SuperKendall (25149) on Tuesday June 19 2007, @03:04PM (#19569675)
    I have been in online games, where the people using mikes actually used them to communicate information pertinent to the team.

    But I've also been in other games, where the voice was used to discuss movies, or worse yet by a weird whining 11 year old who kept asking why people were so stupid they had to type instead of just using voice.

    The thing is, the information passed along by voice is often just as well delivered by keyboard, and can be almost as fast to deliver if you set up macros or just type quick. But when people are yakking, it's really distracting and it usually means you are on a losing team.

    So I'd say that voice chat when it's bad can be horrible, but as its best is only marginally more useful - therefore I can leave it more than take it.

  • My Son Plays WOW and He's 6 (Score:5, Interesting)

    by oborseth (636455) on Tuesday June 19 2007, @06:50PM (#19572707)
    He has a level 31 Blood Elf hunter and to my amazement he is always getting into instances. He can't really read what is being said in party chat and he can't really communicate with them but he'll go an entire instance. I often wonder what the other people in the party must be thinking about him. I assume they think he doesn't speak English. If they check out hi character they have to be thinking WTF. He's got a cloth piece with spirit and healing and some odd leather pieces that don't belong on a hunter. Although, he is able to determine if something is leather or cloth now. He does lots of runs without a pet and at times without arrows so he has to use his sword, dagger, or whatever random weapon he happens to be using at the time. So, moral of the story is you just never know who you might be playing with online. It could be a 6 year old kid.

    • I smell a new market (Score:5, Insightful)

      by spun (1352) <loverevolutionary AT yahoo DOT com> on Tuesday June 19 2007, @02:34PM (#19569157) Journal
      We need something for gaming like those voice alteration devices for the phone. You know, the ones that frightened little old ladies use to sound like burly bikers? It could be done in software as a plug-in for voice chat. You could select your character's voice through a menu.

      The thing is, that 11 year old is getting valuable leadership and teaching experience. If he is competent to lead the party, and a simple software tweak would let you suspend disbelief, it's a good thing.
        • Hehe, I'm imagining a content filter, l33tsp34k to faux-olde-english. "n00b, I totally pwned joo!" becomes "Forsooth! Mighty foe, thou art vanquished!"

          Seriously though, I've been thinking about a MMORPG collective for serious gamers. A few thousand true role players could easily afford to go in on an adequate server and you could give people memberships for content contribution. It could work, but it would be a lot of effort and there would be no profit in it, so I don't see it happening. I would join something like that. It's hard coming from a pencil and paper RPG world where everyone really gets into the role playing aspect, to an MMORPG world where paladins have names like hotchixxor69. Ugh.

    • Re:Ogre image vs reality (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Zibblsnrt (125875) on Tuesday June 19 2007, @03:41PM (#19570335)
      Does anyone actually roleplay as opposed to rollplay in WoW anyway?

      Not trying to be too flippant; I'm genuinely curious. Anyone I know who talks about WoW goes on almost exclusively about either gaming the system or inter-player drama, and I'm wondering if there's more than a handful of exceptions in the game.

      • Re:Ogre image vs reality (Score:5, Interesting)

        by lgw (121541) on Tuesday June 19 2007, @06:55PM (#19572765) Journal
        Oh, *many* people, heck I'd say *most* people, roleplay in WOW. You were perhaps hoping they'd be roleplaying in a way that would be in-character for their avatars - this is a very odd expectation for a group that didn't come to MMORPGs from other RPGs.

        Nevertheless, people play with very distinct and consistant personalities that are often quite different from their "real life" personality. They're roleplaying an online persona, just not an "in-character" one. And, truthfully, if you just look at a game like WOW without bringing any background to it from other books and games, there's not much there to get in-character about.

    • Re:Cue Ender's Game comments! (Score:5, Insightful)

      by juuri (7678) on Tuesday June 19 2007, @03:55PM (#19570535) Homepage
      realize they are 10 years younger than you.

      You speak as if this is something new. I'm actually getting uh, older now, but for the first part of my adult life working in and around the 'Net since the early 90s there was very rarely a situation where the other engineers or technicians were not significantly older than me. Many a lunch was spent listening to DEC guys talk about the work they did before I was born. Earning their trust and respect was a pretty hard thing to do.

      In virtual worlds, when you remove the things we base our common 1st opinions on, you tend to take a person at their acts and words more quickly. This lack of information which you would normally use in judgement forces you to focus on what is actually more important. In work situations wherever possible my preference is for text communication because it is easier for *me* to focus on the task at hand by removing the personal element from the people I am working with.

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