Vox Lindeni
Writing by Green Guy on Wednesday, 28 of February , 2007 at 3:49 am
Francis Barraud, His Master’s Voice.
By Prokofy Neva, Dept. of Linden Trees Falling in the Simulated Forest And No One Hearing Them
The Lindens’ announcement that they’re going to add voice to Second Life will likely be met with mixed responses.
In the typical upbeat LL fashion, the Blob tells us that “many” residents wanted to have voice, but in fact this isn’t something we can determine accurately that “most” wanted. Those who truly need voice within SL tend to use Skype, Shoutcast servers, Ventrillo, etc. already. But having it Always On will pose problems for significant numbers.
First, the price tag. We knew when the Lindens said they were “grandfathering the island tiers for a year” that we should count the silverware. We just didn’t think that it would mean they’d add on new features, and then say, oh, you can’t have that new feature unless you pony up the new full freight now. So if you want your island voicified — and the cybering masses may want this or come to feel as if they need this — you’ll have to increase their rent by 50 percent likely, or go out of business, because now you’ll have $295 tier, not $195 tier per month. Mercifully, you may not have to make this radical choice; it seems that IMs between two people can go to voice without having to have the feature on the land where they’re located.
Whenever I think of the voice issue, I think of Richard Bartle’s marvelous essay, “Not Yet, You Fools!” an anti-voice piece about X-box, on gamegirl.advance. It’s perfection. Voice breaks immersion. He’s absolutely right. Here you are all slaying dragons and saving damsels from distress and all of a sudden, thunk, the damsel turns out to be a male trucker, the dragon is your Mom, and you’re bashfully aware that you flat Midwestern accent doesn’t have that Harry Potter plumminess that you imagine your game in, while dashing around a pre-Enlightenment landscape.
The eggheads at Terra Nova talked about this as “Mike Fright”, and while recognizing that voicing breaks the magic circle, they were all for the team-speak of Team Speak because, well, they’re gamerz over there and they got used to X-box.
But you know, we’re not doing NASA flight simulation or organizing raids in WoW as complex as air-traffic controlling a hive of bees through a sieve. We’re just playing Second Life.
We all know who “needs” voice. The Lindens do, first of all. They need it because they want to be like There, WoW, X-Box, and whatever else is out there that either has voice right in the client or uses voice services more routinely than Second Life. They also want to sound like they are really Business-Ready and Business-Savvy and nothing says “Business” like “A Conference Call”. But when Second Life turns out to be nothing more than a conference call, will it be as cool?
And we all know how doesn’t need voice — the deaf, the transgendered, the shy, the insecure, the old, the foreign. That is, all the people who have Second Lives unlike their first lives — and we’re about to find out just how many of us there are like that.
But there will be a lot more conundrums and inconveniences coming along with this voice thing that we haven’t all worked through.
Let’s take the live music. The beauty of a Frogg Marlowe and Jaycatt Nino concert, of course, is that they talk live to you while playing live music. You’re on the keyboard, and Jaycatt’s on the keyboard, but they’re different keyboards.
You can’t interrupt their singing and playing with your own ridiculous voicing inappropriately while they are trying to play. Or…you can, of course, because they may opt to turn ambient world noise off and just play, but then the rest of the venue’s patrons are stuck with you if you voice, just as they are stuck with your clattering keys because you didn’t use the /Harvard Hush backslash, or stuck with your “Ohhh yaaaeah” dumbass noiseclips.
Just like it can be kind of a jarring and unsettling experience flying over the world and listening to 101 god-awful mass-taste horrid radio stations and blasting music of all sorts, so the cacophany of voices may be such a din that you’ll turn it off.
We might see the emergence of type-only sims or communities or events. “She’s a typist,” may come to be a disparagement in some circles, impugning her RL female gender status, or it may become the hallmark of refinement and intelligence — we shall see!
And the big wildcard is performance, lag, visibility or audibility (is that a word?). The Lindens hint at possible trouble by saying you might notice a bit of reduction in speed. That’s their way of admitting that adding voice may be as big a show-stopper for some people’s systems as adding audio and video for movies and music has been. If even they admit there might be trouble — look out! We’ll see. Let’s hope they’ll be truthful about this.
I, for one, am personally unhappy about the move to voice, for obvious reasons. When I came to Second Life, as when I came to the Sims Online, I opted to chose an avatar of the opposite gender because I can. That’s all the reason you need. “The community” as the slathering jackals on various vicious forums describe themselves, have opted to hack and slash at this, first unlawfully outing my RL gender on the official forums, with the Lindens belatedly awarding only mild wrist-slaps, then continually pilloring me and harassing me endlessly for this choice, trying to use it as a lever to prevent my dissent or humiliate me in some way. It’s an astounding double standard, as male-to-female transgendered like Torley get nothing like that sort of harassment. However, it’s a choice I continue to defend, and refuse to yield on, though everything that Second Life has been about for me, whether forums or SLCC or packs of griefing asstards, has tried to erode this. Being forced to use a voice in a virtual world, something not of my choice, against my will — because people in business will all be forced to do this — feels like the ultimate blow. It won’t be — but you do get tired of this crap after awhile.
It’s a sad day when a virtual world, which is supposed to be special, which is supposed to have a magic circle even if it isn’t a game, which is supposed to be about freedom and creativity, makes you do something against your will. There will be many, many others more anonymous than me who will keep typing and therefore endlessly invite suspicion and speculation.
Most of all, what I dislike about this is that it is not truly Vox Populi, the voice of the people. Nobody clamoured for it. It’s a Linden thing. It’s not *necessary*. There are 1000 issues that should be solved before this — like not taking inworld accounts history out of the viewer, like improving FPS and grey squares and being able to teleport. Are they counting on voice to tide them over the worsening performance issues, so that we will be talking to each other because the teleporter won’t be working much of the time?!
Check out the Features Voting Tool and it tells the story about “Voice” in Second Life.
There are five proposals having to do with the word “voice”.
o Prop 2839 has a mere 80 votes from a tiny number of 27 people supporting voice chat in Second Life.
o Prop 2616 calls for voice adjustment meaning the distance at which your typing is “heard” in the existing SL system.
o Prop 2604 talks about people who “have no voice” who are against propositions becuse there is no “no” vote (I have a proposition on this subject, too, as a half dozen others do — one of the deep flaws of the voter system)
o Prop 2186 also has 74 for voice chat from a mere 25 voters because they wish to know “who is an adult and who is a kid”. Hey, watch the grid empty out? And the ageplayers evaporate? That would be nice.
o Prop 2135 is a repeat asking for “hearing back” on a voice proposition, with 15 votes.
o Prop 2111 is a proposal again referring to the lack of voice meaning the lack of a “no” vote, this time with 18 votes from 13 voters.
Telling, eh? And in predictable fashion, the Lindens are defaulting the whole mainland to voice, with an opt-out, just like they defaulted to push, though in fact we may find that the voiced may be a distinct minority. In any event, only 52 people happened to vote for this as far as we know — the rest clearly have other priorities — as the fact that three out of the six “voice” proposals illustrate. They didn’t have to do with RL voice audibility, but having the real voice we need to have in Second Life — a real say in what features are developed and put in the client.
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