Des dispositions nationales propices à la différence impériale

In his preface to “The Social Life of Avatars”, Schroeder (2002) wrote:

The study of VEs not only benefits from comparisons with other forms of CMC, but also from comparing different modalities inside VEs. (p. 6)

A number of researchers made such comparisons. Sallnas (2002) conducted experiments to compare the influence of modality in Active Worlds. In one task, pairs of users who were unknown to each other made joint decisions about a fictitious scenario, communicating by text, voice, or a video link. Pairs made faster decisions and reported greater social co-presence when using voice or video instead of text. Video added no advantage over voice and may have detracted from efficiency.

Huxor (2001) conducted participant observation of a virtual office in Active Worlds, communicating by text. He found that after initial pleasantries on meeting, users usually

phoned each other for in-depth discussion, as they found conversing by text to be too cumbersome.

Nilsson et al. (2002) supplemented Active Worlds with a shared-audio system and studied workplace meetings held in the virtual world. They observed problems with turn-taking in the audio channel, concluding that spoken conversation did not work as well as it did in the physical world, especially for deictic reference to objects. The biggest problem encountered by users was malfunctioning audio. The text channel was used as a backup to the voice channel, and to clarify utterances or spell out a word. Some participants felt that text gave a better sense of presence than voice, possibly because it was more reliable, or more associated with computer use.

Slater and Steed (2002) arranged for a group of actors to conduct rehearsals for a play using a voice-equipped ‘desktop’ CVE. They noted that: “it is essential that actors communicate with one another with their full armoury of emotional expression and non-verbal behaviour” (p 157). The experiments were regarded by the users as reasonably successful. Problems arose from the need for the actors to manually control their avatars’ movements and gestures.

However as research into communication media (reviewed in section 2.3) has shown, voice projects information such as a user's gender, ethnicity and age, interfering with the anonymity which many VW users value (Raybourn, 2001) and which is exploited when role-playing.

Bartle (2003b) argued that voice communication is incompatible with role-play and thereby breaks one of the fundamental purposes for being in the VW.

Koivisto (2003) described verbal and non-verbal communication in VWs, the latter including

“character proximity, clothing, house decorating, possible emotes, or actions such as killing”, and indirect communication through changing the state of the virtual world.

Seay et al. (2004) examined tools used by MMOG guilds for team management. These included instant messaging systems, bulletin boards, reputation systems, ways for users to find and join guilds, and text chat within the guild. They identified problems such as ‘battle spam', where a large number of game status messages interfere with personal communication.

Seay et al.’s informants felt that voice would improve their performance, but they did not use third-party tools, because of the administration overhead. Of the respondents, 78% were in guilds with an average size of more than 40. Respondents reported communicating for support and advice (77%), social exchanges (77%), and coordination and scheduling of activities (76%). Overall, 69% of players communicated outside the game via web-based message boards, instant messaging and email.

My colleagues and I studied the use of voice in Xbox Live, a large Internet-based network of game consoles which at the time of the study offered mostly first-person shooters and racing games (Gibbs et al., 2004). This network placed ad-hoc groups of users into a game and provided them with a shared voice channel for the duration of the game. We found that while users expected voice to be straightforwardly advantageous, the channel had usability and sociability problems. Users often couldn’t match voices to avatars or on-screen names. They were concerned that they did not know, and could not control, who could hear their utterances.

They had no indication of whether their utterances could be heard, and often had to ask “is anybody there?” or ”can anyone hear me?”. The voice channel was frequently abused through deliberate transmission of music or noise. However users appreciated the advantages of voice for coordinating fast-paced team games, as well as the sociability that voice added, which made Internet-based games feel more like a LAN party. We found that voice connected local and online social spaces, because microphones transmitted not only the utterances of their user but of other people co-located with the user.

Williams et al. (2007) provided voice to small pre-existing groups in World of Warcraft for one month and measured its effect on participants’ social attitudes and relationships, using a questionnaire. They found that team-mates who communicated by both voice and text during the trial liked and trusted each other more, and became happier and less lonely, than those who communicated only by text. However it was uncertain in this study how the participants used voice in different gameplay contexts, how often they reverted to text, whether they ever experienced problems with voice, how it affected their success in the game, or whether different user types had different media preferences. The authors did not test the efficacy of voice for large groups, nor for users who did not already know each other.

Erickson et al. (2011) studied a large, three-day conference held by IBM in Second Life. Four hundred IBM technologists from around the world logged in from their homes or offices and attended a mix of keynotes, poster sessions and socials, designed to approximate the social atmosphere of a face-to-face conference (and save travel costs in the post-2008 financial downturn). Although most attendees felt the event was successful, they experienced many technical problems with avatars and the spatial voice system. Some complained that Second Life avatars looked younger, fitter and more casually-dressed than a typical executive, thus reducing realism and making it hard to recognize people. Voices carried further than many expected, so that people became part of conversations distant to them. Being unable to manage small-group conversations caused sufficient discomfort that some individuals didn’t use voice.

These authors noted that attendees at the conference were simultaneously seated at computers in their physical-world homes and offices where they could be interrupted. This simultaneous occupation of two social spaces enabled forms of interruption (negative) and multi-tasking (positive) that the face-to-face situation did not afford.

A number of researchers and educators have embraced Second Life’s voice facility for language teaching. For example Jauregi et al. (2011) paired foreign language students with native speaker tutors and had them explore the virtual world and conduct tasks together.

Participants praised the combination of simulated environment, pseudonymity through avatars, and rich interaction through voice.

In this section I have reviewed prior work on the use of voice in virtual worlds. My own approach to studying this phenomenon was informed by the recent move in HCI research towards studying user experience. This field of research is reviewed in section 2.5.