L’élite criolla et son grand projet : la Conquête du Désert

Conversation within MMOGs presents a fascinating case with potential to extend the scope of research into mediated communication. The combination of role play and team coordination in a persistent simulation of fictional space provides a unique context in which to develop theory on media preferences and the influence of medium, context and user characteristics on communication.

The aim of this study was to answer the research question:

RQ1: How does voice influence the user experience of massively multiplayer online games?

Rather than survey a large number of MMOG users, I chose instead to undertake intensive research into the experience of a relatively small number of people. This approach traded off richness and depth of data against the generalizability of the results.

The richness of the data is apparent in the complex scenarios these participants related when discussing how using voice influenced their experiences. The risk is that with only 15 informants, the findings might not represent the population of people who use voice in MMOGs, or who use it in MMOGs other than the ones examined here, or who might adopt

voice but have not yet, or might use an MMOG but have not yet. I mitigated this risk by assigning different participants to different conditions, attempting within the time and resources available to cover the diversity of conditions relevant to voice in MMOGs. Some participants played an MMOG with integrated voice, while others used popular third-party voice products in different MMOGs. Of the former cohort, some played with people they knew, while others did not. The participants varied in their prior experience with MMOGs and with voice communication systems for games.

Diversity is a key theme in the results of this study. That is, the diversity that exists among users and their goals and contexts drives diversity in the utility of voice. Since diversity was detected even in this small sample, it seems likely that it prevails in the population as a whole.

4.4.1 The variation in use-cases

I found that MMOGs are socially complex virtual environments that present diverse communication contexts that must be negotiated by users. Participants described activities as diverse as exploration, trade, negotiation, team management, combat and role-play.

Supporting the taxonomic work of Bartle (2003a) and Yee (2006), I found that different people are using the virtual world for different reasons. For example, some like to role-play fictitious characters, others enjoy team-work and socializing, while others focus on succeeding in the game. Some are collaborating with people they know offline, others with people known to them only within the game, still others with strangers they are meeting for the first time. These conditions impact people’s choice and use of modality.

MMOG use takes place in a variety of physical-world settings, and these too influence people’s choice and use of communication medium, confirming prior research on the importance of context in technology use. Supporting the thesis of McCarthy and Wright (2004), I found that the MMOG is used very much within the context of home and family life.

And confirming the findings of Yee (2006) I found that MMOG players are not all teenagers playing in their bedrooms - though some are – but include old and young, singles and couples and parents of small children, whose context of play involves family members, house-mates, work-mates and so on.. Whereas communicating by text is mostly unaffected by the user’s physical context, the utility of voice depends heavily on where the user is and who is around.

Voices cross from the game world to the physical setting and vice-versa. In fact voice channels connect the physical contexts of the users on the channel, so that MMOG voice users

effectively become part of a large media space. As was found regarding mobile phone users (Madell and Muncer, 2007), MMOG users are aware of the possibility of being overheard, and tailor their choice and use of media to suit this contingency.

The results of this study indicate that there is a paradigm communication scenario in virtual worlds to which voice is ideally suited. This occurs when small groups of people, who know each other and are comfortable speaking with each other, are engaged in fast-paced activity which needs to be coordinated synchronously. The people in this paradigm situation are not physically co-located and may be somewhat dispersed also in virtual space. They are also not located in physical settings where the overhearing of conversation by co-located others is a concern. This is the situation most MMOG players encounter while raiding (Golub, 2010). In this paradigm scenario we see the benefits of voice predicted by classic media richness theory come to the fore, as this modality affords dramatically improved coordination over text.

This is also the scenario faced by most users of networked first person shooter games (Reeves et al., 2009). Players of these games have enthusiastically adopted voice communication. They encounter situations which are analogous to those faced in the physical-world by groups of emergency workers, convoy drivers, soldiers and so on.

Offline groups engaged in analogous activities choose radio for its ability to deliver spoken utterances instantly to any point in space. Two-way radio has been the medium of choice for such groups for many decades and it would seem that it is ideally suited to the dynamic coordination of a small group moving through space. But the users of both physical and virtual radio systems face similar problems of channel congestion, eavesdropping, and misidentification of voices. Physical-world radio users have devised voice protocols that ease these problems; however these do not seem to have been widely adopted by videogame players.

Groups whose members know each other and play together primarily to raid successfully, rather than to role-play or explore a virtual world populated by strangers, enjoy the voice channel’s support for rapid communication and resolution of ambiguity. A third or more of MMOG users are in-world to maintain real-world friendship groups (Williams et al., 2006).

This was true of one of the groups in this study. For such users it appears that the greater social presence of voice communication relative to text enhances their experience, and it allows them to enjoy the easy sociability enjoyed by the co-located players of LAN games (Taylor and Witkowski, 2010) and multi-player consoles (Aarsand and Aronsson, 2009).

However, people whose team-mates are not known to them offline may prefer the social distance of a text channel. And insofar as other aspects of MMOG game-play do not resemble this scenario, the utility of voice diminishes.

4.4.2 Comparing text with voice

Figure 9 summarizes differences between voice and text in the MMOG context that were discovered in this study.

My use of multiple dimensions is based on the approach of Media Synchronicity Theory (Dennis et al., 2008) which analyses communication media according to the dimensions of transmission velocity, symbol sets, parallelism, rehearsability and reprocessability. To these concepts I added new criteria that arose out of the study such as the fact that voice transmits more information about the user, is prone to eavesdropping, is more prone to technical problems, and is felt to be more suitable for groups whose members know each other.

Figure 9: Text vs voice in MMOGs

Transmission velocity and symbol sets are wrapped up in the dimension of ‘supports group coordination’.

MMOG players appreciated the ability to store and search text messages (reprocessability) and discussed whether this could be supported by a voice channel. They also appreciated the ability to conduct multiple parallel conversations.

Voice’s lack of rehearsability was mentioned by players when discussing the flaming that could erupt when people spoke before they thought.

4.4.3 Comparing different voice configurations

My study design allowed for a comparison between the voice system integrated into DDO and the non-integrated third-party systems which at the time of the study were the only option for WoW and Everquest users. Integration of voice with the virtual world of DDO enabled two features:

• when a user spoke their name lit up on screen, and

• membership of a radio channel was automatically provided to users who had nominated themselves as a group.

Non-integrated voice provided a different experience. First, there was no indication within the game visuals of who was speaking. Since this and previous studies indicated that gamers have trouble identifying voices, one could conclude that DDO’s visual cue is valuable. However a number of DDO users said that the details of its implementation reduced its usefulness: in particular, if a user was not looking at the right place on the screen at the moment someone spoke, they would miss the cue and wonder who had spoken. To solve this users asked for the cue to slowly fade, or for speech bubbles to display above avatars.

The second difference was that third-party voice users had to do their own channel management. Although this obviously requires extra work, none of our WoW and EQ participants complained about it. The reason might lie in the way groups themselves were arranged. DDO did not specifically support long-term guilds. Users simply logged in, grouped for the current session with whomever they could find, and proceeded to conduct a quest, and DDO’s voice system supported this in a clear and direct way. However some DDO users commented that they would like to speak with others before grouping with them. The process

of forming groups itself requires negotiation and judgement of the worthiness of potential comrades, during which voice would be useful.

In WoW and Everquest, on the other hand, the most important social structure for most users is the guild (Williams et al., 2006). Guilds are long-term groupings. A raiding party will usually be chosen from one’s guild, and it is through the guild that the administration of voice channels is conducted. Most WoW guilds are apparently quite efficient at self-management, and can obtain value from the opportunity to fine-tune channel configuration. DDO’s automatic voice channel management did not provide a large advantage over the third-party products used in other MMOGs.

Third-party products were actually advantageous in one respect: the channel operated independently of who was logged into the game, and even of whether the game was working.

Some MMOG players reported using third-party VoIP to arrange strategy prior to logging into the MMOG, and during the down-time caused by game server crashes.

Most of the problems discussed by participants, such as channel congestion and exposure of identity, applied to both types of voice systems, and the features that users suggested be implemented were relevant to both. Many users expressed a desire to speak with passers-by in the virtual world: i.e. people outside their defined groups. They wanted to be able to set up one-to-one voice conversations, analogous to telephone calls. They were concerned that the lack of a voice log or transcript made it more likely they would miss messages, and they were concerned about broadcasting utterances to unintended recipients in their virtual or physical environment.

4.4.4 Voice and identity play

In contradiction of the assertion that role-play is a widespread, fundamental activity in MMOGs, most of the participants in this study denied being role-players - in the sense of voice-acting one’s on-screen character – and felt that this behaviour was rare. However there was considerable debate among the participants as to what exactly ‘role play’ was. Many felt that the sense of ‘voice-acting’ just referred to was too narrow a definition, and that instead role-playing meant playing a role in a team, or becoming immersed in the fictional setting of the game. By this broader definition of role-play, voice would not be the obstruction that many apparently have felt it was.

Although most denied engaging in role-play, many participants had encountered and/or engaged in gender-play – using an avatar of the opposite gender - and many reported that voice could make this an uncomfortable experience for everyone concerned. In fact this was one of the most-aired criticisms of voice in this study.

But it was interesting that the degree of discomfort people experienced with gender mismatch seemed to depend, as so much else did, on whether the people concerned knew each other.

Furthermore, participants who had played pen-and-paper role-playing games reported no discomfort adopting arbitrary personal characteristics in those offline situations. This suggests that the mismatch that causes so much discomfort relates to visuals, and surprise. When role-playing around a table, no-one changes appearance and everyone present knows who is playing what character. But when people encounter strangers in a virtual world, they have only avatar appearance to judge them by – until they speak.

Many participants in this study felt that the solution to this mismatch was voice-changing technology. However it should be noted that few of them had actually tried this. Prior research into the Xbox Live channel, which supported voice-alteration (Gibbs et al., 2004), indicated that in that system at least, players didn’t like altering their own voices and didn’t like it when others did it. I conclude that no clear solution to the problem of gender and voice surfaced in this study.

4.4.5 Could an MMOG offer only voice communication?

The release of the voice-only Xbox Live network in 2003 raised the possibility that vendors might want to release voice–only MMOGs. A question worth asking then is: can an MMOG be operated using only voice communication? One could infer from this study that the answer is:

“not without difficulty”. This is compatible with the finding of Williams et al. (2007) that voice plus text (not voice alone) was the optimal communication arrangement for groups of WoW players.

Some of the preconditions for a voice-only MMOG would include that the voice channel must be more reliable than existing systems, and that user setup and operation must be foolproof. It appears that MMOG players use text channels to debug voice channels.

Second, a way would have to be found to run multiple simultaneous voice channels. While some high-level WoW guilds used multiple channels, it is not clear whether the degree of discipline and organization required to do this would be found in novice or ad-hoc groups.

Third, users would have to accept the loss of social distance that text provides, with possible implications for role-play, gender-play, interacting with strangers and so on. Study 1 indicates that MMOG players would have mixed feelings about this. Transmission of personal information about players and their settings was broadly accepted only within groups who knew each other.

Finally, users would have to accept the possibility of collaborators in the virtual world and friends and family co-located in their physical context overhearing each other during their (typically long) MMOG sessions. Again, only among close groups of friends was this considered desirable by participants in this study.

4.4.6 Recent developments

Blizzard has recently implemented an integrated voice channel in WoW. Anecdotal evidence suggests that it is inferior to third-party products and has been rejected by most users. In a recent interview, a Blizzard developer admitted:

the Voice Chat we included is not a good feature. We tried, we made some mistakes, and we accept that it isn't something used by a lot of players. It is on the wishlist of things we would eventually like to improve. A big thing it is missing now that we would like to fix is the ability to communicate with people before you get into the game, having to be logged in to use it makes it less useful than something like Ventrilo or Mumble.¹⁰

This supports the conclusion of section 4.4.3 that an integrated voice channel such as that provided in DDO provides only limited benefit, especially for experienced players in long-lived guilds who have evolved sophisticated voice channel management.

4.4.7 Reflections on and limitations of research methods

At the start of this discussion section I commented on the likelihood that results from 15 participants in Australia would be generalizable to the broader MMOG-playing population.

Though my sample was small, I would argue that the variety of experiences reported was itself a finding which will naturally generalize to a larger population. Furthermore, the nature of online cultures is such that my participants were likely to have been sufficiently in touch with

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global MMOG culture (leaving aside the question of multiple cultures) to have had broadly representative experiences.

With a small study like this, the trade-off against generalizability is richness of data about the everyday experience of users (McCarthy and Wright, 2004). The data presented in this chapter reflect the kind of richness that ethnographic methods can produce.