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... read on
Tuesday, June 19, 2007
Busy day on the blog
This article from Wired amused me but is also quite interesting from a research perspective.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
Interesting, yet I suspect this kind of problem will be a short term phenomenon, for exactly the reasons he suggested. The tech for voice anonymisers is out there, in hardware and software forms. Then you will be able to sound like a nasally 40 year old woman or a squeaky 11 year old (though probably only in varieties of american accents, naturally). What would be nice is to tie in the speech to your character's class, so that dwarves sound suitably gruff, evil characters sound british, etc.
I've often toyed with that idea. Of course it then leads to the notion of talking in and out of character. Funnily, people don't bat an eyelid about the notion of graphical avatars but if you consider voice-mods as auditory avatars then suddenly people get a little uncomfortable.
Post a Comment