Voice Chat in MMORPGs

According to TotalVideoGames, Dungeons & Dragons Online will feature fully integrated voice chat. To spare you following the link, I have the juicy bit here:

Atari has today confirmed that the forthcoming MMORPG Dungeons & Dragons Online: Stormreach will be the first MMO to feature fully integrated voice chat, without the need for players to use their own system resources or bandwidth. The move means that the ability to use voice chat should cut down on the rabid-like typing that players of other MMORPGs, and also enable stronger communication to be kept during mass battles.

Is it a good idea? There are many very obvious hurdles, such as technical limitations, legal ramifications, and customer service issues, but the one that really concerns me is the potential hit to the enjoyment of the game in the form of immersion loss and social segmentation.

I’ll first briefly cover the obvious hurdles. The easiest one to talk about is the technical speed bump. Few, if any, technical limitations cannot be surmounted. Bandwidth costs go down, transfer speeds go up, sound cards become more capable, and technology advances as time marches on. It is entirely possible that we are at the point in which it is both financially feasible and technologically sound to integrate voice chat into massively multiplayer games.

Legal ramifications are hairy, but not insurmountable. The development team or publisher behind a game with integrated voice chat might be held responsible for the content broadcasted through the game, so if someone started spouting something copyrighted, pornographic, or overtly offensive the developer could potentially get in trouble. However, this may be solved simply through the EULA, indicating that it is against the terms of service to transfer any audio content that is not a) legally the property of the person transmitting and b) within the confines of the game’s rating. After all, players are allowed to type to each other and companies don’t get in trouble for it because their user agreements are solid.

There will likely be a host of new customer service issues brought about with voice chat. Harassment will undoubtedly take place in some capacity, and that can get real bad if you have someone under 18 playing the game. When comfortably behind a wall of anonymity, players can lose all sense of tact or responsibility for their actions. It’s sad, but true.

In online games today, it is possible to log every line of text that anyone in the game types. If someone claims they are being harassed, a customer service representative can simply check the logs and verify that it occurred. How, then, do you monitor voice chat? It would be out of the question to permanently log every bit of voice chat that goes on in the game. That’s simply too much data to store to be feasible. If the voice chat passes through a centralized server, it would be possible to snoop voice conversations, but that only solves issues that are happening in the present rather than the past. Enough of the CS stuff, because there are always ways to deal with such issues to a relatively acceptable degree.

My main issues with the integration of voice chat into an online game–especially a fantasy world–revolve around the hit to immersion and potential for social alienation. When you have a 10-foot tall ogre who sounds like a 13-year old boy or a beautiful woman with the deep voice of a man, it could get a little annoying (and worse, it could rip you out of feeling like part of the game world). There are modern techniques for overcoming such limitations in the form of voice masking, but it’s generally quite obvious if someone is using it.

If the voice masking is too apparent and players can see (or hear) through it (which they will, because players are smart), there may be issues with social alienation. If you are playing with that gorgeous wood elf female and hear the undertones of a booming male voice, will you get weirded out? If that massive barbarian male has the vocal undulation of a pubescent teenager, will you be less confident in his ability to take on challenges?

I’d like to think I could answer “no” to those questions, but I believe that, subconsciously, everyone would be affected by it in some way. It is theoretically possible that players will judge the desirability to adventure with others based on their voice (and potentially their voice in relation how the character looks).

Another social/gameplay issue is that of voice chat becoming a necessity. Would someone who doesn’t use voice chat be welcome in most groups? If voice chat becomes the norm in a game, I doubt the voice chat-timid player would be welcome in most groups. Voice chat is useful and if someone doesn’t like using it, they could find themselves unwelcome in groups that desire efficiency.

The whole social alienation issue is a tough one for me to comment on confidently because I don’t claim to be even an armchair sociologist, but it does cause me concern. Perhaps someone with a greater understanding of human behavior will chime in.

The next issue is griefing. As long as the voice chat is kept to group-only thus making your ability to hear others entirely voluntary, I don’t see too many issues with griefing (e.g. a bunch of random people running by groups shouting obscenities, making funny noises, repeating themselves ad infinitum, etc.), though the griefing aspect was one of my main reasons for opposing voice integration into MMOGs in the past.

Voice chat griefing, or VCG (yes, I just tried to coin a new acronym), can be avoided for the most part by giving control over who can be heard to the player (group-only, mute, and other similar functions). If the idea is to integrate voice chat outside of groups, that’s a whole different ordeal that I’d rather not spend time proving a bad idea (if it isn’t obvious why it would be a poor decision to allow everyone to hear all nearby players, you haven’t ever played an online game. Players will do anything within their power to annoy the piss out of other players, and the ability to run around naked making gurgle noises to screw with other people is just too damn tempting for some).

My conclusion? Well, I don’t have one. Just about any pitfall related to integrating voice chat into an online game can be avoided with forethought, technology, and careful implementation. Will it be done right in DDO? I suppose we’ll have to just watch this one play out to see if it can work.