Why Do I Care About Voice Chat? (Patreon)

I'm currently typing this tucked away in the corner of a Cafe, away from people so that I don't need to talk. I've gone entire weeks without speaking to anybody beyond a common courtesy, and those weeks can be the most appreciated depending on how everything else is going.

So... why do I care about Voice Chat in games?

It's a feature that when available, I've used no more than a handful of times. I'm never the one to start conversation in real life, let alone a Counter Strike lobby.

I play these games like the way I'm in the Cafe.

I'll talk…

When someone comes to me.

...And I don't mind them.

…And I'm not already pre-occupied.

Beyond that, I leave the chats to everyone else, and quite a few times, it's led to me skimming through the player-list on whichever platform, looking for a mute button. Be it screechers over the microphone, or boomers communicating with what must be 1980's brick telephone underwater, or just someone being a dick.

Thing is, while I remember some of those, I also remember the people I sent friend requests, many of whom I've now known for five, ten, sometimes, twenty years. That's not uncommon though. Many Youtube careers have been launched via someone meeting someone else over a game of Search and Destroy on Modern Warfare 2.

What I think doesn't get mentioned as much are the experiences that I still remember after five, ten, twenty years of playing video-games.

All those years, and I still recall during Year 1 of Rainbow Six when purely over body-language, Attackers and Defenders mutually agreed to meet outside, stand in a Civil War Formation Line, and one by one, have everybody knife-duel, coming down to a 1v1 final round showdown.

I remember somebody in Wreckfest getting angry at people for resetting themselves during a destruction derby, even though he was also doing it himself. The man especially hated my friend Sparky; hosting a vote to ban him from the server outright…

To which Sparky proceeded to write Anime Villain speeches in chat, befriending everybody else in the server, angering the man responding to them unironically, and eventually leading to the server banning him ten minutes later.

And those are just examples WITHOUT voice-chat.

That's before remembering Halo 2v2s that I've got on my hard drive after capturing them via my VCR.

Escorting an "enemy" in Hunt: Showdown who spoke a different language but we mutually understood enough of to be sending our farewells as they reached the extraction zone.

Hearing an entire server banzai charger over Battlebit; the angriest and most hilarious Japanese man over a match of Rising Storm 2, hiding from an APC in Squad hunting us down like Jason Voorhees and we were the Teenagers.

Even the recent wave of social games like Content Warning and Lethal Company, while they're not my jam, not something I go back to for more than one or two sessions, I still remember watching my buddy Dan get killed by a lightning strike because he stole a whoopee cushion from the basement.

I can't just go back and experience that again, and that's the beauty of all of this.

DOORSTUCK was real.

YOU HAVE UNO was real.

LEEROY JENKINS was not real.

MOM GET THE CAMERA was though.

Meanwhile…

Games with no voice-chat options at all, like Forza Horizon or Halo Infinite, games I've played for dozens of hours…

I don't remember a single match.

I'm playing against people.
I'm winning and losing against people.
But that's all.

There's no emotion, no humanity, no life.

I might as well have been playing against bots.

In-fact, these games are becoming so sterilized in their player communication and expression, a lot of them are now just inserting bots without telling players.

We've managed to go full-circle of having bots for those who didn't have the hardware to have full-lobbies online, to having no bots at all because everyone can get full-lobbies online, to having bots to fill lobbies online...

Now.

Originally, I doubled the essay's length discussing the rampant toxicity, harassment, and marginalization in games, the motivation of companies shifting from social-play to content-farms as a game's hook, and the design of EA's dropped MOBA Dawngate covered by Pirate Software, which directly addressed the issue of toxicity in one of the most infamously toxic sub-genres of online games.

But this articles' titled "Why Do I Care About Voice Chat?" and those subjects aren't really relevant right now. Perhaps I'll cover each of them separately and in more detail.

For now, it is pretty simple.

I, as an introvert that rarely uses voice-chat, cares about voice-chat because it facilitates so much more than just letting me speak to other people. It has created memories that I'll have till the day I die, and it's even created friends who'll be relevant till the day I die.

I don't want other people to not have that potential experience, and especially, not for the benefit of fucking Microsoft…