Flying Gogoplata

Here’s one I found linked on Slashdot the other day. Clive Thompson speaks a bit about the advantages and (mostly) disadvantages he finds with the use of voice communication in virtual worlds.

I had always been fond of the idea of voice chat and had wanted it available even during my first forays into online and networked gaming. Text chat was cumbersome for most PC games, particularly those heavy on the left hand keyboard (read: First Person Shooters. I am missing three fingers on my left hand making this a bit more complicated for me). On consoles, it was near impossible unless the game had an on-screen keyboard or predetermined taunts/commands (read: lame). My house’s rough equivalent to voice chat while playing LAN games of Unreal Tournament and Quake III Arena was leaving our room doors open and hollering taunts and challenges from across rooms and floors. Of course, the opportunity for strategy was hindered by this crude communication mechanism. Needless to say, I had quite a good time when I got my first gaming headset with my XBox Live kit. There was something about being schooled in Halo 2 by an apologetic 12-year-old Japanese kid that was really funny to me. It also made team/game setup quite a bit easier. I used it quite frequently until my XBox got stolen from our gaming room.

I had always just assumed this was going to be the way of the world. As the bandwidth became more available, the technology more efficient, and the hardware more accessible, people would gravitate towards voice chat as the superior communication medium in the online world. People would be collaborating, conspiring, taunting, trading, pretty much doing everything in a rich world of language. As the article points out, the tend towards voice chat is starting, but the effects aren’t quite as welcoming:

…voice has much higher emotional bandwidth. It conveys a lot of identity: Your voice instantly transmits your age, your gender and often your nationality — even your regional location too. (I can tell a Texan accent from a Minnesotan, and you can probably tell I’m Canadian by my nasal “oots.”) With voice, the real world is honking in your ear.

This is particularly a problem for women, because often women thrive in MMOs precisely by downplaying their sexual identity. When Krista-Lee Malone, a student at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee, did a study of the impact of voice chat on online worlds, women all told her they were treated differently once other players — particularly younger men — could hear their voices. (”They got hit on a lot,” Malone says.)

Meanwhile, shy or geeky players have long thrived in text-based chat, where their social impediments matter less; but they wither when interaction becomes a cocktail party.

“Throw up a (Ventrilo) server, the girls stop talking completely, the shy people shut up mostly and all that is left are the 12- to 18-year-old guys, and it becomes a locker room,” as one poster complained on a sprawling, superb debate on the Terra Nova blog. –Clive Thompson, Wired

It saddens me to see a technology that is enabling for me to be disabling for so many other people. What’s worse is that it seems to be particularly disabling to women (of which there are far too few of in the gaming world, in my humble opinion) and those at the social periphery (who already have to deal with being in the periphery in REAL life). Being primarily a shooter fan, this possibility went right over my head. Shooters tend to be a bit of a boys club, an environment that has no problem welcoming folk like me. The environment seems to be thoroughly different for role playing games, where one of the options available to you is to construct a completely alternate identity.

I hope, personally, that there is a way to reconcile the communicative power of voice chat with the notion of a constructed identity in online worlds. I see promise in a very simple, almost gimmicky tool in Halo 2: voice distortion. Players have the option to enable voice distortion which thoroughly masks most identifying elements in voice. There is, however, only one voice distortion option, leaving those choosing to enable it sounding like a Covenant Elite (read: like an idiot). But it doesn’t seem to me like a terrible (or terribly difficult) idea to allow a mechanism to construct a vocal identity that matches the alternate identity. Some kind of voice distortion filter construction system that varies pitch and other sound signal properties that map to identity.

This doesn’t solve the problem of accents identifying geographic/social origin. In a pipe dream of a solution, we could have a voice processing system that identifies individual phones in a sound stream and modifies them to map to the phonemes of the language and then converts them to the phones of the intended constructed identity. That is, understandably, a bit much to ask at the moment. This also doesn’t address the problem of the socially disadvantaged. What about those who just don’t interact nearly as well with vocal social interaction? I’m not sure I have the tools to even begin to tackle that one. The only thing I can think of at the moment is to make text chat easier and more integrable with voice chat.

As you may have noticed, I have a habit of breaking promises I make on my blog. The most recent post came about a day late. Nonetheless, I’m going to strive to get three fairly substantial works up per week, roughly corresponding to Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. See you all tomorrow.

A recent post on Regina Lynn’s blog regarding a humorous trademark dispute reminded me of the essay Ashley wrote for the DeCal entitled “Grace of Fuck”. Within it she discusses some interesting semantic implications of the verb form of “fuck” acting upon a direct object.

While it’s true that in some contexts fuck is indeed used to express anger (as is often the case with the exclamatory Fuck!, the verbal command fuck you, or some uses of the present progressive functioning as the adjective fucking, etc.), its different forms hold several other often-fluctuating implications. The verb form of the word itself can mean one of several things; to fuck with someone implies some vague sort of teasing or tormenting, while to fuck someone over denotes some action of betrayal or sabotage, &etc.

The most notably powerful verb form, though, is that which utilizes the personal direct object: to fuck someone,which is generally accepted to mean, in more passive and appropriate phrasing, to have sex with someone. This use is particularly interesting in that it transforms the clause’s personal object from direct to indirect, negating the use of the preposition with and indicating a new sense of acting upon another person rather than engaging in an action with him or her. In this sense, the word draws a remarkable new sort of modernist meaning that may at once be liberating and emotionally devastating, thus creating a new realm of value in a single verb that is doubtless very useful for drawing certain implications in a literary setting. –Ashley Lystne – and then you explode.

I can actually recall at least one instance of the phrase “fuck with” that may be problematic. Eazy-E recorded a song entitled “I’d Rather Fuck You” for the N.W.A. album Efil4zaggin that uses “fuck with” describing intercourse rather than torment (the chorus and lyrics would switch between the phrase “I’d rather fuck you” and “I’d rather fuck with you”). This may, of course, be entirely pragmatic. Eazy-E has a habit of sampling the music of Bootsy Collins, and this song is no exception. Here he samples “I’d Rather Be With You” by Bootsy’s Rubber Band. The “fuck with” can be be seen as the pragmatic necessity of maintaining the meter of Bootsy’s original while continuing with the intent to change the meaning of the phrase to something explicitly more carnal. This is consistent with the nature of the lyrics, which are very explicitly sexual and misogynistic (as was typical of Gangsta Rap at the time). As such, the more intimate meaning of the sexual “fuck with” could have been entirely accidental.

Nonetheless, this choice of phrasing, whether intentional or accidental, creates a far more complex meaning within the song than the standalone “fuck” would have. As described earlier, there’s the irony of the intimate connotation the direct-object-absent “fuck with” contrasted with the sexual misogyny of the verse lyrics. However, there may be another level of (possibly intentional) irony as well which lies in the more common meaning of “fuck with.” When “fuck with” acts upon a direct object it typically means torment, as Ashley described. When taken with this meaning “I’d rather fuck with you” stands in agreement with the misogyny of the verse lyrics rather than in contrast to it. The irony here lies in the assumption that sex is not torment. Unfortunately, this is not always the case, and further may not be the case in this song.

I’ve been completely unsatisfied lately with how little I have been writing. One thing I loved about the Blogging DeCal was that it actually forced me to write something on a fairly regular basis. So in an attempt to get in the regular writing habit again, I’m going to try to put myself on Penny Arcade’s schedule: updates every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Hopefully I’ll find something interesting unrelated to my personal life to write on that frequently.