MMORPGs Need Voice Chat

I’m in a party of five players sprinting through the caverns of some noxious dungeon. Each of us is completely immersed in staying alive and knocking down health pools. In fact, we’re so absorbed there’s no time to type. No time to say “Hey, what’s up man?” in the chat-box on the bottom left of my screen. How could I? I’m busy rotating twelve buttons to deal enough damage per second to stay number one on the charts. If only there was some other way I could communicate so we can feel like there’s humans sitting behind our porcelain doll characters.

Oh yeah. First person shooters figured this out years ago. It’s called VOIP: voice-over internet protocol; you push a button and hear each other’s titillating vocal chords. Why don’t MMORPGs have built-in voice chat?

Hearing a voice reminds you that there’s blood coursing behind the avatar speaking’s veins. You’re not playing with a bot but an individual; a person with an accent and perspective and a computer. VOIP makes MMORPGs feel like a world teeming with life.

Why isn’t VOIP in modern MMORPGs?

After undertaking some journalistic internet perusing I’ve discovered a number of forum commentators who dismiss in-game voice clients as superfluous. And I can’t help but posit that the passionate few have helped shape a perception; Beware the tyranny of the minority. It’s a perception that says, “This is an MMORPG. This is no place to hear people talk with their mouths.”

They raise points which ought to be addressed.

It’s true that most MMORPG activities don’t require flapping your rib-sauce stained lips. Typically, group content is designed so that minimal interaction between players is needed so long as each person understands their role. VOIP is extraneous to the core gameplay of most MMORPGs. I concede the point.

My answer to that dismissal is “So, what?” Voice chat shouldn’t exist for coordination. It ought to exist to provide a temporary hub where people playing a game from disparate parts of the world can talk. Don’t you miss the social aspect of games? The novelty of meeting someone new? Of realizing you’re not the only person who likes killing porings 12 hours a day every day?

But then there’s a more powerful refutation of voice chat: Voice chat breaks immersion.

This one cracks me up, because I’m not sure what passionate typists mean by immersion breaking. If they mean to say that the guy in their party talking to someone off-stage while a teacup chihuahua barks is ruining their sense of embodiment beyond any other gameplay factor, well then I’m just confused. Because voice chat is by no means the king of immersion breaking.

If you’re so concerned about immersion shouldn’t a universe of text based tête-à-têtes and text based group chat be the number one offender that breaks logic? After-all, speech precedes text. When a text bubble pops above my head I’ve already lost the ability to recognize the world in as holding any semblance of reality.

How about the endless river of gold spam that drowns any new MMORPG: “4GOLD=$2CashMoneyz Only at MMOs.com/gold4cheaps4u.” What about mobs that pop into existence spontaneously; and whose corpses then fade into nonexistence in the fastest display of entropy run amok? What about NPCs with endless wells of cash; a world full of people who never excrete; killing lobsters that are red at level one and then lobsters that are blue at level 99? I don’t understand the line between what fosters immersion and what breaks it.

If the gruff voice choking on a vape emanating from the mouth of an underaged-barely-clothed wizard—”don’t worry guys, she’s really 999 years old ;)”—breaks your immersion but the idea that eating pork chops heals your broken bones doesn’t, then the immersion rebuttal is nothing more than an arbitrary line. It hurts your immersion but not necessarily everyone else's.

Some people don’t like VOIP. I completely understand. There are many nights—typically inebriated ones—where I don’t want to talk nonsense with rando’s across my fiber optics connection. It’s reasonable to imagine there are many players who don’t want to talk at all. Okay. That’s cool. Play how you want to play. The notion doesn’t disqualify VOIP. Make it an optional addition. At the start of a dungeon you’re given a prompt asking if you want to join the VOIP channel, and whoever wants to does, similar to Overwatch.

But we have Discord and Ventrilo and Teamspeak and Mumble. Yes, that’s true. There are plenty of third-party voice chat options, software I use to interact with a community: friends, an in-game guild, a website. The key word is “community.” Pick-up groups are not communities. They’re temporary connections that dissipate once a purpose is fulfilled, e.g. killing the boss. That doesn’t mean they don’t have value. If the means exist for a potential meeting of people to discover a relationship they would otherwise not have, why miss that opportunity?

Adding a voice to an an avatar’s username automatically triggers our ability to empathize and recognize that we’re playing a game with people. Not automatons running through the motions. No ghost in the machine. But people. I want to play games in a world inhabited by stinking, breathing people with their own personalities: sometimes they harmonize, sometimes they clash. I love it all the same. So please MMORPGs, give us in-game voice chat.