Just yesterday Joe Linden announced a new feature of our world. In a month or so, we'll be able to hear our fellow residents talking. Very nice indeed, but before the technical questions about how far we can whisper or shout with our mikes instead of keyboards, another question is to be put: do we really want it and how will our dreamland look when avatars stop doing those silly animations of typing in the empty air. The first thing that comes to mind are the bandwidth and performances issues. To make the voices available, we should have a stable system with no lag, no missing textures and no ghostly avatars who are to be located only by their attachments floating in the air. Second, I cannot imagine the amount of audio spam that we are about to fight. Like all the nonsense chat and doors talking who is in front of them, vendors advertising themselves, copybot protectors barking around and whatnot are not enough spam in the bottom part of the client window. Now we're gonna have it over our music. Third, a disappointing number of residents are such lousy role-players even now. Some people can act with their voices but most of us can't. Some can do many things with live voice using audio processing tools, even transgender it with good pitch shifter. But that is an action that requires a fair amount of knowledge, software and processing power of one's box. For most of the players, live voice will be another way of ruining the game. Fourth, chat logging is out! For the moment I thought that live voice is useful for business and educational purposes, live conferences, meetings and such stuff. But, on second thought, those occasions usually find having your event recorded in one single text file as very handy option. Sure enough, the possibility to choose is always welcome. But, I'm afraid, as many times before new feature will bring more bad than good. As Prokofy Neva said in Herald's article
"She's a typist," may come to be a disparagement in some circles, impugning her RL female gender status, or it may become the hallmark of refinement and intelligence — we shall see!
And we surely will. But, expecting to find new way of artistic elitism in typing seems just too optimistic. Especially when having in mind on of the reasons for voice feature residents stated in features voting mentioned in the same article. "[They] wish to know "who is an adult and who is a kid." Any smart kid older than ten years will find out a way to trick this easier than to trick his or her entrance into mature grid.
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