Is Voice Chat the end of Role Play in SL?

The addition of voice chat brings up some major issues for players and entrepreneurs in SL. And I'm curious to find out what everyone thinks.

I know that voice chat is a personal issue with people. Club owners are especially concerned about what voice chat will bring to the adult entertainment industry, while other groups are concerned about what this will mean for RP in general. And then there are those who have physical challenges to overcome that find that SL is the great equalizer in their lives. Now they seem to be left out in the cold.

While I realize that parcels can be switched on or off, I'm more curious about what the social effects and implications will be if a person decides not to use voice chat over those that do. And what about those with physical limitations (deaf, mute), speach impediments, stutterers, etc. Won't this be alientating them just as they are in 1st Life? Isn't part of the intrigue of the game the mystery that lies behind each avitar?

And yes, being a club owner myself, I'm curious what this will make of the adult entertainment world (and SL entertainment in general).

With this whole new realm of voice chat, what do you people think will happen?

Pretty much every Roleplayer that I have spoken with agrees that they will ban Voice on their land, and that they will disable it in their own preferences.

I'm a roleplayer, and I do NOT want to hear the real voices of the players who type for the roleplaying characters that I have known for months and months. I don't want to hear that sexy woman sounding like a truck driver from the Bronx, or that big burly Spanish stallion sounding like a pimple-faced teen from California. If they have been able to act well enough to convince me that they are male or female, or to portray a non-human character, then I DON'T want to hear them outed by their RL voice! Nor do I want the characters that I play who are not of my own gender outed by this contraption.

I'm a good actress, but there is no way I can do appropriate voices for all of my logins. I play both genders. Voice chat will ruin the presentation of my characters as unique individuals.

I do NOT want audible confirmation of the actual gender of the people I roleplay with. I figure a large percentage of the "females" in SL are really males. If someone does a good job of presenting themselves as the opposite gender in text, why destroy that by use of a voice feature that shows it clearly to be a lie? It's like telling an actor that they can't use an accent when portraying a character of a nationality other than that of their own birth, only worse...

I'm not a Roleplayer per se, but to an extent we are all Roleplayers here. Unless your avatar is an exact replica of your real self you are playing a role of some sort in my opinion. I won't use voice. Anyone who feels that is some sort of problem, is not someone i want to hang out with anyway. When I meet someone inworld, and we begin to develop a relationship, I conjure up a Mental Imperession of what their Avi's voice sounds like based upon he information I have on hand. I don't want that ruined by hearing their real voice. I'm sure many who meet me would not put my Queens/Jersey accent to my Avi. Voice will be valuable for those that wish to conduct business here or take classes, but I'm not one of them. Some will try to make an issue of it, calling non voice users all sorts of nasty things but they can be avoided , and I think will be less than expected. To those people I say, Stop being so Paranoid. That sexy exotic female avi you are dancing with may be a 50 year old pot bellied florist from Kalamazoo. So what? Suspension of belief. you aren't meeting in real life. If you plan on doing so , then you have a whole nother issue at hand.

It is likely that there will be a culture split between the voice and non voice players.
Have you ever heard of cochlear implants?
They are implantable medical devices that became available about a decade ago and they allowed babies born deaf (inherited from their parents) to gain hearing and thereby to be able to hear and converse rather than to communicate with sign language.
Surprisingly - for a lot of people- a great number in the deaf community were opposed to having these implants put in their children because they saw it as the death of the deaf culture. In the same way - there is a certain culture of the written word and text communication and I will probably be one of the holdouts for text only.

Dont belive me? have a look here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cochlear_implant - scroll down to ethical issues

I've been using the Cetric skype Secondtalk since it came out and TALKING to people made it a lot better than typing. There will always be a place for text though.
Once you get over your stage fright you will be ok.

I suppose voice will have its uses in SL. To say its totally worthless is rubbish. At one point, people were saying Flexi-Prims were going to be useless. Now look at them!!!

Things like RP Groups, and to an extent, the Escort Services probably wont be using voice chat anytime soon. Like everything else, its just another "feature". We all have access to the same building, scripting & texturing tools, but do we all use them?

I see new uses for voice which arent possible now- Choirs, Kareoke, comedy clubs, business meetings for the corporate side, learning to SPEAK a foreign language, and machinima makers. Plus it's a bonus for anyone teaching classes on stuff.

For a while we'll see a flurry of voice related activities, gadgets, etc. Eventually it'll all settle down and it will be just the same ol' Second Life as normal.

I am great full that Serenity Woods is listed as a estate on the older fee system and will not include voice chat. I can imagine just now noisy it will become if it was. While i do approve of voice chat after using it, i do not agree that it should be forced upon SL to use or else... Text should remain dominant so that people don't mis out on a conversation. Some people choose not to use voice chat, while others don't have the proper equipment to use it. and some are even hearing impaired or are mute.

I am not giving up my stance that Class 4 Server owners should not be forced to foot the bill for voice. I would not enable my entire island. Just my office, my school and my Karaoke club. The chatter in the big nightclub would be terrible.

My thoughts on voice chat in SL.. Well I think there are far too many other issues to be dealt with, other then throwing in another wrench to slow things down further.. I am not sure why they are adding this feature anyways.. I mean if you want voice chat in game.. there are already many other options that wont impact SL like this new set up will.. Besides that .. ya going to a club or someplace like Gurl 6 that is always crowded, and the lag is already tremendous.. can u imagine what kind of jumbled up mess that will be... I am a SWG refugee and we used voice chat in our group.. most of us quit using it because there was always a few that would exploit it just like anything else.. I am not saying voice chat is a bad thing, but I don't think it is a priority like maybe.. server stability!!!
I just hate to see features like this.. That aren't a necessity added.. or rather shoved down our throats. The issues that have been issues, and continue to be issues need to be handled.. I think loosing inventory should take precedence, or unbearable packetloss, or broken tp's every other day or the fact that alot of people can't even log in because updates aren't "workin as intended" .. Ok.. sorry I got off track there lol...
*Rant Off*

Voice runs on its own server independant of the sim. The sim can crash and burn and voice will still work.

I'm not gonna use it, if I want to talk to my friends there's Skype or any instant messenger. For rp it's killing, so those sims will indeed have it shut off.

Mandy C

Comedy clubs could use streaming audio, just as live music does now; they're one-to-many audio, not many-to-many. I'm not convinced of the advantages for teaching; the history is so useful!

I'm even dubious about the business meetings for the same reason, though I know that the corporate types THINK they want it. (And there is the little matter that old-school executives don't know how to type and refuse to learn, because they see it as something that secretaries do. But that breed is dying out, replaced by computer-savvy execs who are comfortable at a keyboard.)

I will grant that your other proposed uses have possibilities. I just hope it's worth the social cost of bringing voice here. Yes, I have tried the voice beta; I'm impressed by how well it works technically... and more convinced than ever that it's something I DON'T want in the world except perhaps for specialized uses.

If i would have to use the new voice feature it will break everything down here for me, since 99% of my friends here are native english speaken people (okay, one is from cockney he told me yesterday, so almost 99%).
I'm from germany and always do my very best with my web-dictionary and super fast copy & paste operations to hang on a thread, even when 5 or 6 ppl "speaking" at the same time. My friends really excercise patience with me - but I can't imagine stay in touch with this cockney one or the girl from texas or the other one from japan if we have to speak to each other. Written english enabled us to come in touch from all over the world here in SL and this should be preserved.

On the other hand, if there would be a language school for SPOKEN english, I would thinking over to buy a headset.

So I totally agree with Tod69 and asking myself now why do I post this here

See you in-world
S.

I will happily be using text only when this happens. Even if I wind up texting only myself.

The first time I tried voice I had a female AV (real life male). I was shyly listening in to a group babbling away. After awhile, I finally realized that all but one of the "females" in the voice beta had rather deep gravelly voices. Joke on me. So, I spoke up, and not a single person pointed out that I didn't talk like I look Nobody seemed to care.

I predict a different split evolving...

Some people are very upset when they find out the real person behind the AV doesn't match the AV. For them, Voice will make role play hard. There are real life guys who aren't going to pick up a girl who sounds like a 58 year old male.

On the other hand, there seem to be a lot of people who don't care what the real person is. They are still comfortable with the overall illusion, or maybe they even *like* a cute girl who sounds like a 58 yo male.

I switch AV genders fairly often (not using an alt, I just switch). I find that some people **hate** this, while others think it is cool. Actually, I find a lot of women who seem to think it is very attractive

And a lot (probably you by this point) don't care.

I've also found it exceedingly difficult to figure out WHO is talking. The only indication is the (()) symbol over the person's head, which can get occluded by, well, everything.

He he.. well u can text chat with me then lol.. thats cute hehe

We might need voice chat now that the text is illegible.

Maybe that was part of the plan.

We already know what brand of griefing this will cause. Anyone who's used voice chat in any game would know. SL will definitely become more like CS and half life. We already have the griefers, and the guns, all we need is the voice chat and it will be a all out flame war.

Could someone give a quick primer on what all the game Acronyms stand for. Or am I the only one who has never played any of them?

I don't know about you all, but I've been using voice chat for years with SL (ventrilo, teamspeak, skype, etc), and it hasn't changed anyones opinion about me or my opinion about anyone else. and I'm a regular RP'er, yiffer, what have you.

And it hasn't been all that earth-shattering, "chicken-little-the-sky-is-falling" for me, If you want to close off your mind from reality, fine thats your prerogative, but don't force others to not use something thats there for them optionally if they want to. Especially something thats always been available to them OUTSIDE of SL even before it was natively included in the client. You do have the option of muting voice chat either on your end or by muting the talker, you're not being forced to use it, don't force other people to not use it.

The sky is still very much in tact my chicken littles, calm the hell down.

But think about it, with voice chat, you'll be able to complain so much faster than you already do with your fingers!

Seriously, having the OPTION of voice chat isn't going to result in some massive user armageddon. People who would prefer voice chat are the ones that already have microphones or plan on getting them. People who are all "Voice chat is going to absolutely ruin SL and it isolates deaf people and whine whine whine" probably don't have microphones and certainly won't go out of their way to buy any. Cuz, y'know, it's an OPTION. That means it's OPTIONAL, as in, you don't have to do it. Even if you do decide to have some vocal fun, you don't have to use it all the time.

This isn't some massive culture-shift. So much bitching is going on that I can't believe for a second that voice chatters will become majority. If anything, yeah a handful of people will use it, but it'll likely be a quickly-forgotten feature that will somehow break a hundred times before anyone gets any real use out of it. This really isn't something we need to be going cutthroat over; it's a feature, not a damnation.

I don't like to have my speakers up loud at night/in morning because people are still sleeping around my house. That means I won't be able to hear any voice chatters unless I plug in headphones, but I don't like headphones, so that's out. Am I going to go on a Linden-bashing warpath because some overblinged heavy-chested wannabe supermodel with a fake smile and diagonal walk has their voice signal lit up and I can't hear them? No, I go "no sound, type plz" or something to that effect. And then chances are their typing skills aren't any more coherent than the silence coming out of my speakers, and I still don't find myself cursing the Lindens for affixing such a horrible, disastrous burden like voice chat to the game.

Here's the remedy: add a simple "no sound" icon toggle that indicates you can't hear voice chat. That's all LL needs to do to complete the feature. Then people can clearly see that you can't hear them, and so they type for you. There, that sure did fix every single problem people are cutting themselves over. I understand the natural reaction to something that has a minor flaw is to cry foul and call for heads, but we really can fix the squeaky wheel with some oil rather than calling the entire carriage and its passengers broken.

Yes, I realize that not everyone who is against this feature is being an outspoken prick about it, so kudos to you for at least voicing your opinion in an intelligent fashion. As for everyone else (especially Yiffy, who I've never actually heard say "Hey, that's a good idea" about anything), can't you find something more important to riot about? Voice chat is meant to be a "that's nice" kind of thing, not an "eat our you-know-what and like it" poke in the eye.

Now that's the best idea I've seen so far!! Good thinking, Fox!

Mandy C

Is Voice Chat the End of Role Play in SL?

No -

Bad Text Acting will be replaced by Even Worse Voice Acting.