Text has always been at the foundation of internet communication. Websites, emails, IMs - they are all written in text. Simple. Functional. Effective.
And though one might consider virtual worlds to be "advanced" in comparison to your average web page, text has been just as much a cornerstone of communication within them. Some virtual worlds provide more bells and whistles than others, but in the end, its still just plain old text on a screen. Again, simple, functional, and effective.
But as with all things internet, the times keep on changing. High speed internet connectivity has become more prevalent. Online games have become faster paced and more reflex intensive. Conferences have started popping up in virtual worlds like Second Life, and Instructors have started harnessing the power of these new environments to teach. Suddenly, good old text which was still simple and functional found itself become less and less effective in the face of complex tasks. Oh, and somewhere in the midst of all that, people realized that typing just sucks. No one reads anything either ;-)
And so necessity and laziness got together as they so often have, to churn out a scrumptious little ball of glory that we like to call "voice".
Of course! Voice! It makes perfect sense! Why write when you can podcast? Why IM when you can Skype? Why try and type to your virtual class, when you can just talk to them? Why network at a virtual event through text, when you can unleash your Rico Sauve voice on potential customers? Why try and type out coordinated actions in a game when you can just scream your little head off like you just drank a case of Vault soda and red bull?
Seems like the perfect solution right? Well... maybe not so much.
Wired recently posted an article by Clive Thompson thats shares some of his experiences using voice communication while playing the popular online game World of Warcraft.
The quick hitting version is that voice chat has a profound effect on the social dynamic of a game like Warcraft (and by extension any virtual world environment). A particularly interesting quote:
But voice has much higher emotional bandwidth. It conveys a lot of identity: Your voice instantly transmits your age, your gender and often your nationality -- even your regional location too... .With voice, the real world is honking in your ear."
Risks too come with voice, because voice is far more prone to follow the norms of society - meaning all the facets Thompson described, as well as things like personality type, tone, or confidence level can all play an unspoken part in the judgement or ideas or conversations.
And so we have returned to the question of transparency that we touched on so long ago. This isnt so important in a game environment like World of Warcraft, but in, for example, an educationally based virtual setting, how much of yourself should you be expected to reveal in the form of your voice?
If text affords the timid, the shy, or the discriminated against an opportunity to express themselves openly, should it not be supported as an acceptable form of communication? Or does such an idea merely allow people to hide behind a wall of pixels instead of confronting their fears or the biases that do exist in the real world? Should participants in virtual worlds be allowed to be who they choose to be? Or should they always be grounded in the sound of their own voice?
I may have just blown my own mind.
Image from Blizzard.com/wow/images
