Is voice chat really always necessary?

A headset, hanging on a wall. Photo by flickr user Watchcaddy used under CC license

“There’s no good reason for anyone not to use voice chat.”

That, or something like that, was something that a guild-mate once said to me when I was playing Warhammer Online and which really set my teeth on edge. With hindsight, this moment probably marked the beginning of the end of my time in that guild and in that game. It just stopped being fun at that point.

I am very very wary of using voice chat with people I don’t know very well and I have my reason. I think it’s a good one too. I’m male to female transsexual, and while I pass in most circumstances, my voice is still fairly masculine. This means that in the absence of any visual cues, most people will read me as male based on my voice alone. Add this to the already prevalent notion that there are no women in games, and the fact where I’ve had people react negatively to me before because they thought I was a man pretending to be a woman, and I suspect you can understand my reluctance.

Whenever I see a game advertising that it has built in voice chat capabilities, that instantly dissuades me from buying the game. No matter how good the game comes across as otherwise, I simply do not have the time or the energy to deal with anybody I run into in game thinking that they have the right to talk to me via audio.

Mine isn’t the only reason, of course. I was recently shown a post in the WoW_Ladies LiveJournal community by a woman whose guild wouldn’t let her tank because she’s deaf. It doesn’t take a whole lot of imagination to think up other reasons. Maybe someone isn’t a native English speaker and while they’re comfortable reading and writing English, they’re not comfortable with spoken English. Or maybe they have young children and need to listen to a baby monitor, just in case there’s an emergency.

When people say “there’s no good reason” what they actually mean is “I can’t be bothered trying to imagine any good reason”. In their minds, they can use voice chat, and if they can then everyone else should be able to as well.

Even worse is that when people are confronted, head on, by a reason, they choose to completely ignore it. In the case of the deaf woman who wasn’t allowed to tank, I’d be extremely surprised if the people involved expected her to be able to participate in voice chat. Instead of making provisions to let her play, they put their own convenience first.

Don’t get me wrong, I know that there are times when voice chat in a game is all but essential. However, these times are few and far between, and are generally restricted to high-end competitive PvP. In that sort of environment, the margins between defeat and victory can be very fine, and you need to have some way to instantly communicate complicated ideas. I understand this.

I’m not a WoW player myself, so I’m not certain about the difficulty level of the raid she talked about, but I have played several different MMOs and I can say that I have never encountered any PvE content in any of them where the margin for success was anywhere near that fine. You just don’t need the same degree of instant communication when you’re fighting against an AI with predictable patterns of behaviour. If you know what the enemy is going to do, then you can prepare for it beforehand, and use simpler communications while you fight.

In these circumstances, voice chat is a convenience, and nothing more. Anyone who requires voice chat and won’t even consider making exceptions is effectively saying “my convenience is more important to me than letting you play in my group”. In my head, this always translates to “don’t worry, you probably wouldn’t want to play with me anyway”.

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