Mike fright

Nate has been talking and talking about VATSIM, the Air Traffic Control simulator environment. One of my guildies in WoW is a pilot and was explaining why he hasn't got into the VATSIM environment:

One interesting thought that popped into my head -I have the vatsim software for my flight sim, I presume it would work and as I mentioned its a very good thing. I wonder why I havent tried it. My thought is that I dont want to look like an idiot in front of real (all be it virtually real) people. People get mic fright in real life, the unwillingness to talk on the radio. I wonder if thats the same in a virtual sense? In WoW and similar there isn't the requirement for real time voice communication and action, you can chat via text if you feel so inclined but you respond at your leisure. I wonder how it would be if you could only chat using your real voice and the normal rules of sound were enforced so you could be out of earshot of things if you were too far away...

This led me to wonder about the nature of voice, the problem of mike fright, and the great big hairy furball of the magic circle.

Richard has an extended meditation on the introduction of voice into VWs, where he argues against it on the basis that it kills the magic circle and ruins the play characteristics (and lots more, of course, but I'm paraphrasing). I think that this is right if your job, as Richard's is, is to think about this from the perspective of the designer of immersive MMOGs where suspension of disbelief is key. But this can't be the complete answer from the Terra Nova perspective. First off, we have the empirical observation that the punters love it and are rushing to use voice. There could be lots of reasons for this, but my guess is that it may have something to do with that problem we keep bumping up against: the love of the magic circle, which I will define (badly) as the intuitive sense that these worlds are separate places where the self may be expressed without the limitations of the real and should therefore be protected against the osmotic pressure of real world considerations like money (and voice and external regulatory activity). Now, I don't buy the magic circle in the way that people like Richard and Ted do. I think the concept and experience of VWs as wholly distinct place is useful and I often find myself immersed in the environment; but my acceptance of the concept is highly contingent. Like most people I'm not a role player, even in games where that is rewarded. So I don't have any obvious play-based objections to the introduction of voice (pace Richard) or RMT (pace Ted). And in performance-critical environments such as MMO raids it's hard to imagine doing without Teamspeak or Vent; otherwise how else can the raidleader scream that "the next hunter to grab aggro will get booted"? (Although I do recall the amusing moment when of the class leaders in one old raiding guild I was involved in finally got a mike and we all discovered that he was a 12 year old. There was an extended period of total and utter silence. You could hear the crickets).

Leaving aside the magic circle problem (yes, please, let's leave it), the effect of voice doesn't play out consistently in all worlds, and the reception of it must be different depending on the social conventions and milieu. The truly social worlds (SL, There, etc) don't have any sense of a magic circle as far as I can tell. If the standard greeting in There is "ASL?" then it's not a big step for its residents to expect to hear reallife voice as well.[fn1] The social conventions of There assume identity-revealing behavior, and voice is an important part of that.[fn2] It's a neat trick, and totally in keeping with the social expectations of the world, for There to introduce a space-sensitive voice system where your voice fades as you walk away from me. It's hardly a surprise that it would be done in There and not, say, WoW. (Where I have never been asked for ASL info; unlike say CoH where I got it all the time).

Which leads me back to the thing that motivated my interest in this to start with: the psychology of voice use by players when it is available. Krista-Lee Malone, one of Thomas Malaby's students is looking at the way that women play MMOs within raiding guilds. One of her neat observations is that some women just refuse to talk at all, and will initially claim all manner of hardware-related excuses to do this. Or in the end they just abandon the pretense and it becomes clear in time that they don't want to talk and won't. Although I'm not female, I've had some experiences with mike fright. Of the two raiding guilds I've been involved in in WoW, I basically never said anything at all in one guild because I didn't have any sense of possessing any social capital within that guild and also because I felt that my voice would signal me as a Kristevian Other (Like the rest of me, my accent is Australian; and the rest of that group was distinctively North American). Even in the other raiding guild, where I feel much more at home, it took a while to feel comfortable saying much.

I don't have any strong sense about voice, except that it's pretty clear it is a significant issue to study. Richard's essay on this was called "Not yet, you fools". I wonder if today's response is "Yet. And yes, we were fools."
----
fn1: "Age, Sex, Location."

fn2: Let's leave for another day the interesting paradox that a world that has been adopted by teenagers has (internally generated) social conventions of identity disclosure that are problematic for exactly that class of individuals. I find it hard to conceive of a better lesson for "Save the Kiddies" regulators of privacy and identity than the emergence of these conventions in There and Myspace. But I digress. More on this when I get a moment.

Comments

[Raph]

1.

I think even this observation:

First off, we have the empirical observation that the punters love it and are rushing to use voice.

isn't fully accurate. I'd say, rather that certain types of players are rushing to use voice. Among the ones I have observed:

- highly instrumental players who demand high levels of coordination
- some sorts of socializer types -- what I'd call "chatters" rather than "conversationalists"

This is far from encompassing all types...

[Douglas Thomas]

2.

I actually asked the women in my guild why they never talk in Vent. The answer was very straight-forward. They get hit on. A lot. And usually by 16 year old boys.

Doug, 40/M/Los Angeles. Now will you please stop asking, Dan?

[Thomas Malaby]

3.

Great thoughts, Dan. I think it's interesting to consider the paradox that voice (in any arena for interaction) creates. On one hand, to have at one's disposal the range of expressive possibilities that voice (through language, and not) entails seems like a boon; one can, it would seem, do more socially. At the same time, the introduction of voice (assuming no effective voice alteration software) closes down a whole range of other performative possibilities, because voice socially "locates" people so powerfully (like those darned Australians). So it's no wonder that players are ambivalent toward it (when considered as a whole). The instrumental uses of it are undeniable, however, so afficianados of roleplay may have to look wistfully toward the day when you can choose your toon's "voice" as easily as its appearance.

[Dan Hunter]

4.

Thomas> afficianados of roleplay may have to look wistfully toward the day when you can choose your toon's "voice" as easily as its appearance.

I happened to come across this when looking this afternoon at some EvE-related stuff. It's from a discussion about the provision of voice inside EvE, delivered by a company called Vivox and to be rolled out soonish:

"Monty's final point was the inclusion of 'voice fonts'. "What does a Caldari sound like?" Fonts would allow any character to place an overlay of sorts over their own voice, to make them sound different than their normal tone. Pimply-faced adolescents everywhere, rejoice!"

So maybe RPers don't have to look wistfully for too much longer. Although of course this raises all sorts of other issues, for example empirical questions about the uptake of voice fonts, the issues of "Y, presenting X" that we've seen in gender issues in MMOGs, and so forth. Interesting times.

Doug> Doug, 40/M/Los Angeles. Now will you please stop asking, Dan?

Thanks for the ASL. Are you currently seriously involved? How seriously, exactly?

[Mike Rozak]

5.

Random comments:

- As I recall, "Voice fonts" was TM-ed by a text-to-speech company. I don't remember which. Thus, voice-font in terms of voice disguise is a misnomer. Voice-font in terms of text-to-speech is a trademark violation.

- (Fe)male to non-human is easy.

- Female to male, male to female - This works, but isn't perfect. In other words, it's detectable so people will guess that the female character is a male player, or vice versa.

If you look on http://www.mxac.com.au/m3d/tts.htm, at the bottom of the page under "Modified voice", and click on "Female (change formants and pitch)", you'll hear text-to-speech based on my voice (available elsewhere in the page) that's made to sound as female as I could make it.

- Getting rid of dialects - Text-to-speech will do this, but then whoever wishes to hide their dialect will need to type, not speak. The typed text will be converted to speech by text-to-speech. If speech recognition is used to avoid typing then there will be too many speech recognition errors.

[Richard Bartle]

6.

Dan Hunter>Richard's essay on this was called "Not yet, you fools". I wonder if today's response is "Yet. And yes, we were fools."

People were saying that when I wrote the essay, so no change there.

By the way, something I didn't mention in the article was that there were at the time at least two patent applications I was aware of to cover using teamspeak/ventrilo type technology for games. I don't suppose they were granted, but it wouldn't surprise me if the first large-scale virtual world to integrate real-time speech with gameplay found itself the victim of some other patent we haven't heard of yet.

Richard

[Andrew Crystall]

7.

Shrug - in the Eve corp I'm a part of, you need to be able to listen to participate in fleet opps. Taking is only an absolute requirement for the fleet leader and scout(s).

Richard,

As of this week's patch, Eve is (partly) integrating Vivox's voice chat into the client. (As a premium service and causing issues with other voice services even if not activated, but let's NOT go there...)

[Dmitri Williams]

8.

Proviso: This post is not about RP (but see #3 below).

Having recently finished an experimental study of voice vs. text in WoW, I can offer some empirical findings. If/when the thing gets published, I'll post and link a draft for it, complete with graphs, squiggly lines and significance tests. Major findings:

1) The evolutionary psych crowd seems to have it right. The functions of voice occur for humans in this order: Are they really human? What is thier gender? Are they intelligent? and Do I like them? In other words, ASL isn't too far off, and appears to be driven by biology first, then moderated by medium.

2) Female players do indeed have more "broken microphones" than their male counterparts to avoid sexist behaviors in largely male space.

3) Players who use voice come to like each other more and become closer. Compared to a text-only control group, they develop higher levels of trust, liking and happiness, and lower levels of loneliness. So, with all due respect to the magic circle, it's clearly worth breaking.

4) Players playing without voice suffer *losses* in trust, happiness and liking as a normal outcome of long-term WoW play (Wow-nnui?). In other words, the default game social tools or game mechanics might actually break down community quality and psychological health in the long term. That's a tentative finding, but looks legit. Please don't flame me!

The theories that support these findings come from the CMC research and sociology. The former (mainly Walther) suggest that people use whatever communications media they have access to in order to make social and task-based progress, i.e. humans are social and adapt. The latter (mainly Goffman and Meyrowitz) suggest that people take pains to moderate how much of their private, "backstage" behavior others can see. Thus "broken" mics, voice fonts, etc.

[erm]

9.

erm wat is dis .. mind explainin it 4 us illeter8 gaming peeps n those hu dnt get wht ur on about