Let’s Talk About Fargo Talking About Talking
Several weeks ago Terra Nova posted an interesting opinion piece on The Inevitability of Voice. The piece focuses on an interesting phenomenon in-game voice had introduced: suddenly who you are in "real life" can have in impact on your role in a virtual world. (Tip via Fargo's FileBlog at FilePlanet.)
Suddenly a player who you assumed was a grizzled warrior turns out to be merely a child. Women are harassed by adolescent boys instead of being allowed to simply play the game.
This shouldn't stop you from building voice into your games. While initially found only in a select few games or something only the hardest of the hardcore did using external applications, voice is now seen as a standard feature. There's no perfect way to solve this problem there are a few approaches you can take.
First off, make it easy to mute the voice of both individual players as well as disable voice all together. Most of the games that have used our Voice SDK have taken this approach. See Lord of the Rings: Online or SWAT 4 for a good example of this.
Or take it one step further and make voice an invite-only feature. This approach was taken with great success by DICE in both Battlefield 2 and Battlefield 2142. Voice communication is only enabled for those within your squad. The player must consciously choose to join a squad and participate in voice chat.
Give your players the features they expect but do so by apply some thought and care to how they may be treated once it is discovered that a 13-year old girl is whooping up on them.
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