Speaking of immersion: voice chat and roleplaying

July 18th, 2007

World of Warcraft will definitely have built-in voice chat soon. Many other MMORPGs already have built-in voice chat. For games that don’t have it yet or won’t have it, most serious players use other voice chat programs. (This is not news.)

I don’t exactly fit a traditional gaming category. (And really, who does?) But I do like the storytelling, immersion, and roleplaying aspects of MMORPGs, for all that they’re virtually non-existent.

No voice chat tool I’ve seen really supports these things, but there’s no point in bemoaning the fact. Voice chat is too darn useful to gamers to leave out. All multiplayer online games will and should have it.

So my question is, how can people who are interested in immersive roleplaying continue to enjoy it while voice chat is inherent to the online games they enjoy? They could:

• Turn it off or ignore it
  Which, of course, means deliberately crippling their game experience.
• Restrict RP to chat channels
  Which means continuing to RP as they have in the past.
• Try to RP via voice
  Which will interfere with people who wish to roleplay characters of of the other sex, will expose bad actors, and will upset the illusion of the gameworld. Of course, tabletop gamers are able to suspend their disbelief for these sorts of things, but one of the reasons RPers use WoW and other MMORPGs (which aren’t really a good vehicle for roleplaying) is because they can simulate some aspects of their character more easily than they could at the gaming table.

In the end, voice chat is another intrusion of reality into the illusion of the game world. Since UO, MMORPGs have become less and less simulations and more and more games. And I’m not really complaining about this. More people want games than want simulations that make you wait eight in-game hours to go shopping.

So perhaps the future of online gaming isn’t in the big MMORPGs with persistent worlds, but in bringing tabletop games online. I know of several products trying to do this (like Gametable), but I haven’t tried them yet.

And if some sequel to Neverwinter Nights makes campaign construction and game-mastering easier, that may be a solution too. I ran a campaign for about ten sessions. The story was good, and the roleplaying was good (and all text based). But preparing for sessions and actually running the game was almost impossible. But if something like that were easier and faster, I would eagerly give it a try.

Has anyone had experiences with non-MMORPG online roleplaying? What was your experience like?

Entry Filed under: Video Games, Roleplaying, Massively Multiplayer