In her (extremely long but very well argued) essay
The Schism Around Voice: Multicasting vs. Broadcasting, the Second Life character known as Gwyneth Lllewelyn strongly supports the introduction of voice chat into Second life, due this June.
I do not oppose voice. I think people, and indeed avatars, should be able to choose freely their communication channels among the widest possible variety. Period.
I only have two objections. The first is this: voice per se has little to do with the progress of the Second Life environment, unless we adopt a low-profile and state that feature=progress, but that would really be a low-profile attitude.
Ms. Llewelyn herself, by the way, concedes that voice chatting is inferior (in terms of sheer performance) to text chatting: voice constrains communication to broadcasting, while text channels allow ample multicasting options.
I submit that multicasting (in the text-chat form which is the only possible, short of telepathy) emerges out of deep cultural needs and not as a low-tech, pro tempore substitute for voice. I doubt that whoever has experienced how effective, time-saving and malleable multicasting can be will gladly abandon it in favor of more traditional voice speech.
Our business and our culture need multicasting just as strongly as they need virtual social environments, possibly even more so.
My second objection is to this remark that Ms. LLewelyn makes:
Second Life, just like real life, will lose the extraordinary breakthrough of creating one of the first true real time multicasting environments.
Well, I do not think so. I do not see why the introduction of an audio channel should force anybody to abandon multicast text chatting. Surely Linden Lab is not going to be so dumb (pun half-intended) as to ban text chats upon the intodution of voice. Second, people will freely choose, and this will happen conversation-wise, whichever channel they deem most suitable for their communiction needs.
Voice could be successful among so-called “newbies”, but the more experienced users will hardly make it their only (or their main, imho) option. Because communication is so key to a virtual presence, the more experienced a user will grow, the more sophisticated his communication will become.
I do not think voice is such a great breakthrough. I even see little reason for it, apart from the usual “everybody else is doing it”. Voice will be another tool, possibly a useful one, in the kit of the Second Life denizen. Good. But Linden Lab would make a terrible mistake to put too much long-term value in voice.
Voice is to virtual realities as colour is to faxes: nice to have, but you won’t lose your sleep over not having it.
Second Life faces much tougher challenges, and ones not easily solved by throwing in a library or two and upgrading the servers. Actually, the toughest challenges do not involve upgrading SL’s servers, but its culture, currently soaked in realism, anthropomorphism and the reproduction of reality. This is a dangerous and costly path leading nowhere. We’ll have voice, then we’ll upgrade the 3d rendering of surfaces, then we’ll see more realistic avatars, then…
The path ends when two perfectly realistic avatars meet in a fully realistic 3d environment with force feedback or, in other words, when you and I meet at a pub and have a pint.
We already have one “perfectly real” reality, and we do not go online to find a second one. What we want is something different, and possibly more. Linden Lab should certainly try to appeal to the most immediate and superficial needs of the next many millions of its citizens, of course. Nonetheless, its long-term survival will not depend on how well it is a “second” life but in how well it is “another” life, altogether more diverse from the “real” one and (this is the crucial point) free from its limitations.
May 1, 2007 at 2:50
Gwyneth Lllewelyn strongly supports the introduction of voice chat into Second life, due this June.
Just a slight clarification … I do not support the introduction of voice chat into Second Life at all. Instead, I take it as granted — a decision has been made by Linden Lab, it is now irreversible, and we have no other choice but to accept it.
Indeed, I’m pretty much sold to the “Bartle argument” — voice in SL should only be introduced when you can shape and change your voice with the same flexibility and creativity that you can do the same as avatars. Alas, Philip “Linden” Rosedale was pretty much set upon that view, and thus the delay in introducing voice in SL. However, market pressure is too great. All MMOGs and similar environments support voice in a way or another. He had no choice but to support “first generation voice” for all the newbies that he plans to attract over the next couple of years.
The second issue is gauging the impact of voice in SL. Well, the issue here is mostly gathering anedoctal evidence and seeing if it makes sense as a whole. From my friends list, around a thousand people, the number of people that will routinely use voice are 2 or 3. Is that significative? Of course not. Just take the Brazilian community as an example. The huge majority of it comes to SL as another dating environment, and they want voice quickly. Now. And these are already half a million users.
Next comes business. In this age of Messengers and emails, people still mistrust the written word to sign agreements. They want face-to-face discussions and meetings, or, failing that, phone calls and conference calls — never mind if they’re inefficient and you don’t get a meeting transcript (there is always a secretary for that). These will all use voice, too.
So if you look upon Second Life, you’ll see that the majority of people will be using it mostly for social or business reasons, and these will be both the areas growing more and more.
Of course the issue here is the timeline. It won’t happen “overnight”. People still user emails and Messengers, although they also use the phone to conduct so-called “serious” business or “intimate conversations”. But it’s a question of averages — on average, people will, over enough time, use voice more and more, and text less and less.
This does not mean that there will not be “minority groups” that will use text for any other reason whatsoever.
The old debate of “Second Life” being a “different” life or a “real” life will never, ever, be closed
May 2, 2007 at 11:32
thanks for the clarification, Gwyneth, I do appreciate. I agree with you that Linden Lab may have had little else to do other than introduce voice. Follow the market and all that.
But, in order to survive, Linden Lab will have to also shape the market as well as follow it.
Masses of users will be on the side of voice, I don’t argue that. I submit that the times are ripe for personal and business environments where net-savviness is a competitive advantage, not only a habit imposed by these stressful times. An environment where I may actually *prefer* a text meeting exactly because its inherent multicast allows me to be more efficient, more alert, and on the whole more productive.
Linden Lab has not made a mistake in adopting voice, of course, the numbers will be on his side. But in so doing neither has Linden Lab led innovation.
And I think innovation, possibly in the form of the more extreme “real virtuality” which I envisage, is what will keep Second Life ahead of the competition, which does not come from gaming MMORPGs, but from the whoever will launch a business-friendly virtual environment.