Voices in Games

Konami's "LifeLine" (a new Playstation game) features prominently a voice-based interface. Unlike with the speech packages many of us use (e.g. TeamSpeak) LifeLine's speech interface is its only player interface.  An other difference between LifeLine and MMOG voice is that LifeLine uses A.I. to interpret the speech codec.  MMOG's have people to do it.

I've never played LifeLine (to be released this month), however, I am led by GameSpy to believe that in this case the speech-person-game interface does not work well (1 star out of 5).

The odd thing about MMOGs is that the language culture is first about truncation, regularization, and simplification. There was a tongue-in-cheek article in GameSpy last year (The Automated Online Role-Player) which was all about a (hypothetical?!) robot that could play MMPOGs and "fit right in" using simple behavioral and language rules, such as:

In LifeLine's case, I wonder if its alleged failure is a case of "an expectation too far". On the other hand, For MMOGs, is the opposite true: have players have already been "caricaturized" to a point where we have become an A.I. so that all we do is embellish the messages with a personal fiction?

Or is it less sinister: text is just so much more expressive... and the meaning in the "voids between the words" is just so much richer. Or maybe, with text, we just type so much (monkies & typewriters...) that additional meaning is encoded in the spaces above the words... ahem.

• If someone says something ending in a question mark, respond by saying "Dude?"
• If someone says something ending in an exclamation point, respond by saying "Dude!"
• If someone says something ending with a period, respond by randomly saying one of three things: "Okie," "Sure," or "Right on."
• EXCEPTION: If someone says something directly to you by mentioning your name, respond by saying "Lag."
  The many succinct expressions of the Autocamp 2000.(And remember to accept all trade requests from other players by giving them a melon.)