Welcome Voice? The First Sounds New SL Residents Hear

Earlier today, we talked about about the use of Second Life's internal voice software for conferencing and other real world applications-- now here's the flip side. The machinima above is entirely unrecommended for work viewing (unless you have the audio muted, which would defeat the purpose), and I have to say, momentarily entertaining in a juvenile sort of way. It's taken from the Welcome Area in Ahern by jjcc Coronet, culled from 90 minutes of footage. "Ahern is a regular argument hot spot," Coronet tells me, "I go there for fun." Then again, I wonder what new users who teleport into Second Life proper for the first time think of this maelstrom of drama waiting to greet them. For all the banal sniping, the video itself is beautifully realized, with a hypnotic watercolor quality. To achieve that, Coronet set the viewer's environment editor to foggy, and used a WindLight preset, shooting the footage with a Logitect Rumble 2 Joypad. In any case, watch and listen for a view minutes and tell me: Does it change your view on the value of voice in Second Life, or confirm your existing opinion?

Comments

[Truthseeker]

dude Ahern is comedy gold each and every day...
and yeah, I'd say voice improved the general level of discourse in sL, definitely.

*facepalm*

[MK]

This is why I will never do voice. People are idiots. I don't want to hear them speak.

[Ann Otoole]

Linden Lab needs to do something about voice.

All the welcome areas I have been to are always full of the wrong type of people anyway. And mostly they all behave like teenagers using the microphone to amplify bodily noises.

The best solution is to disable voice on PG parcels completely since it cannot be logged.

Alternatively Linden Lab can staff up with police and start enforcing policy.

Yes Linden Lab has work to do if they want to clean up the image. Personally I think voice needs to be restricted to ID validated people so their voice activities can reflect upon their real life identities.

[Ravishal Bentham]

The ongoing hell that are the welcome areas are proof that LL lacks the backbone or power to enforce anything.

[Arabella]

I have just spent an hour at Ahern infohub, it has been the most interesting variety of conversations on voice, very generous people helping newbies, no fights, lots of humour. Maybe it was videoed on a bad day?

[YP]

Lets hope new residents don't activate voice until much later on, eh?

[JJccc Coronet]

Ok i make these videos for fun because it is funny. If you you want to get on your high horse and use the video as a reason for policing second life with an iron fist and fundementally removing peoples right to speak freely, then that is wrong. I want to live in a world were i dont have to watch every word i say and get punished for it, if i say a wrong word and if you dont like it thats tough, you should go and live in a country were your free speech is suppressed. One day soon Linden Labs will police the welcome areas as they already do 24/7, they will remove any undisirable take away any freedoms we once had in second life, that will be a sad day when it happens, the fun will leave second life for me.

[Ann Otoole]

@Arabella - Maybe someone at the lab read this article and dispatched some hunter killer squads to commence the needed clean up operations. Which I would welcome. Ahern is not the only welcome area. I have a store next to a different welcome area and it is usually not a pleasurable experience to go in there for any duration of time. However sometimes it is pretty well behaved. And when things are going right in the welcome areas they are nice places to be so yes it is wrong to paint them all totally bad.

However info hubs are another serious issue. The only place I have encountered griefers and blatant outright white supremacist racism is in info hubs. So the need for LL to have surveillance systems monitoring IMs, chat, and voice in Welcome areas also extends to info hubs. Is it necessary to have "uniformed police presence"? No. Remote surveillance is superior because it allows miscreants to express who and what they are. LL doesn't have to see them to hear them and read what they type. That should be sufficient for permanent account deletion upon confirmation of totally unacceptable behavior. I.e.; preemptive monitoring instead of relying upon the abuse reporting system might start making miscreants reconsider their presence in Second Life. Plenty of other places for them to go.

[Iggy O]

MK wrote: "This is why I will never do voice. People are idiots. I don't want to hear them speak."

MK, do they TYPE better? So much for SL being a creative playground for hip, educated digerati.

Maybe the LL client is too easy to use. I hang at Ahern sometimes to help noobs (in text, since they've not figured out voice) or listen in voice for grins. Extra-credit fun: have you ever heard a Linden at Ahern TRY to deal with this moron-athon?

Some consolation: for the laziest, it means no typing...so the smart people can just IM each other in a crowd and avoid hearing the rabble rouse each other with their food-court drama.

[Ann Otoole]

Ahern is not doing very well this morning but the issue is not voice. Hanja is utterly silent though. Total silence. Not even a gesture endlessly repeating. Not one person talking and barely anyone typing. Well there was one girl with clomp clomp boots that had the clomping sound loop stuck running. That was annoying.

[anna gulaev]

Ahern is like eavesdropping on kids hanging out at the mall. It's not my kind of crowd, but people apparently have found a place to chat, so I say good for them. Not a good place to drop newbies, though.

[Arwyn Quandry]

This is almost exactly, word-for-word, what I hear in the Teen Welcome Area, cursing and all, but with fewer people. The scene is so exactly alike, just the people are slightly better dressed on the MG. Whoever said adults are more mature?

[MK]

@Iggy O
Whatever the filter process between the brain and the keyboard, it does seem to have something over insta brain-to-voice spewage. Yeah, they do type a little better, simply because it takes *slightly* more effort to put things into words and pound out the letters on the keyboard. I find it much easier to walk away from an avatar who is affronting via type, but voice takes things to a more personal level and engages us differently -- the racial slurs, for example, might not have worked their way in had this conversation been out of voice. I'm not anti-voice, but the I do enjoy and prefer the quiet and odd neutrality of text only.
/me shrugs.

[Veeyawn Spoonhammer]

Let's not over react. Hang out where you want. There's a-holes everywhere. Perhaps LL should ban anyone deemed as such to a separate land mass...hmmmm.

[Ananda]

Here's a quick question - is there a good reason to even have voice at locations where newbies are dropped for their "first hour" experience? I have nothing against there being a public place like Ahern or Waterhead for generalized frivolity and random discussions, but the problem seems to be that these are simultaneously the first places people are dumped after the orientation areas.

Secondly the truly awful part of this video, to me at least, is the intolerable volume and mic feedback issues it demonstrates. I'd hate running into that regardless of the content. Maybe I'm oversensitive to it but I've found Voice in SL hard to get right. It seems like one of those things that should only be introduced with more "advanced" stuff like building and scripting classes.

So why even have Voice at welcome areas?

[Aubergine AUdion]

Thanks for the tip on this. I spent a couple of hours at Ahern yesterday to get a sense of the scene. Conversation topics ranged from the ganal to the revolutionary. Signal to noise ratio was about 50/50. Griefers and fuctards were humored, treated politely and then muted.

Overall it was a most interesting experience, I think I'll be conducting some audio experiments in the coming days.

As for spies. Loki Eliot showed up in an airship with a bunch of his young friends. They hid in the bushes and caused mild mischief. Two different Lindens were spotted and departed as soon as their presence was noticed and announced.

I very interesting place indeed.

[Grim Thursday]

"..is entirely unrecommended [sic] for work viewing (unless you have the audio muted, which would defeat the purpose".

Whatever point you are trying to make failed right there. People shouldn't be playing SL while they're at work in the first place. I think most companies have policies in place about that sort of thing already. Though if they are playing what does audio have to do with viewing? And if you do have audio on you should be wearing a headset anyway - being at work 'n all, you don't want to disturb your cubicle buddies. There's also the speaker problem with people that don't have headsets..they echo in-game and are annoying to listen to and likely muted. Which brings up another point, if you don't like what you hear there's the mute option. Problem solved.

If I ignored your reasoning, all I am left with is what sounds like someone complaining about society in a virtual world. Does anyone really care?

[Rodion Resistance]

@Grim

"People shouldn't be playing SL while they're at work in the first place. I think most companies have policies in place about that sort of thing already."

Well, I'm at work right now, and also in SL. :) But yes, SL IS my work (we're a metaverse development company), so I guess it's an exception. I just posted this to inform people that there are individuals like myself who in fact, use SL at the office and NOT violating any company rule :) In fact, in our case, what deems to be the "wrong thing to do" is NOT logged into SL hehe.

@JJccc Coronet

Great vid! I'm with you on what you said!

[melponeme_k]

XD

That was fantastic, hilarious. We need more voice on SL, not less.

When the heroine announced "mute" to everyone she disliked at the end then said she would talk chicken to them, it topped the whole thing.

[Dizzy Banjo]

Isn't this like asking "is there value in using voice in RL ?" Just like in RL, some people have interesting things to say, some people don't. But of course its valuable to talk.

I don't think its really fair to base an opinion of the use of voice in SL on the activities in Ahern. I do think that its not really an ideal place to land new users - however if they moved the welcome landing points, I think there would always be questionable avatars hanging around there. An easy solution to this would be to just turn voice off in welcome areas. I think we will be seeing some changes soon in the gateway into SL.

Issues around voice distortion however ( clearly causing problems here ) need to be addressed urgently in SL Voice's implementation. I'd think it would be quite easy for Vivox to build in a clipping detection mechanism into SL Voice and give the user repeated warnings until they turn down their input level - or include some kind of automatic input vol adjustment system, similar to that in place in Skype. This has been feature requested on the Jira multiple times, currently votable here : http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-709