TASSY P2P FORUMS

Recently I logged into World of Warcraft and I wound up questing alongside a mage and two dwarf warriors. I was the lowest-level newbie in the group, and the mage was the de-facto leader. He coached me on the details of each new quest, took the point position in dangerous fights and suggested tactics. He seemed like your classic virtual-world group leader: Confident, bold and streetsmart.

But after a few hours he said he was getting tired of using text chat -- and asked me to switch over to Ventrilo, an app that lets gamers chat using microphones and voice. I downloaded Ventrilo, logged in, dialed him up and ...

... realized he was an 11-year-old boy, complete with squeaky, prepubescent vocal chords. When he laughed, his voice shot up abruptly into an octave range that induced headaches and probably killed any dogs within earshot. Oh, and he used "motherfucker" about four times a sentence, except when his mother came into his bedroom to check on him.

I still enjoyed questing with him -- he was a terrific World of Warcraft player. But there's no doubt that hearing each other's voices abruptly changed our social milieu. He seemed equally weirded out by me -- a 38-year-old guy who undoubtedly sounds more like his father than anyone he recognizes as a "gamer." After an hour of this, we all politely logged off and never hooked up again.

I had just experienced the latest culture-shock in online worlds: The advent of voice. Games that were governed by text are now being governed by chat, and it is subtly changing the feel of our virtual universe.

There are good reasons why so many multiplayer online games are launching with voice-chat software. Partly it's to welcome newbies, who often find that old-school text-chat is simply too complicated. Also, voice chat makes pell-mell action easier to handle: If you're running a guild raid with 50 people, it's much easier to bark orders than to type them out (which is why voice chat has long been popular on first-person shooters on Xbox Live).

But many players are now discovering that voice tweaks the social environment -- and sometimes kills off part of what made their favorite world so much fun.

After all, one of the great things about virtual worlds was that they were, well, virtual. You could adopt a brand-new persona, and leave your dull, dreary existence behind. Outside are the suburbs and your shift at Chick-fil-A; online is a land of snowcapped mountains where you sit astride a cat-like mount, while stars rain around you.

This lovely shift in identity was true even if you weren't a hard-core "role player." When I log on to World of Warcraft, I don't try to seriously pretend I'm a medieval person. I happily text-chat with fellow players about 21st century stuff like music, Lost, our jobs. But somehow this social activity never breaks the "magic circle" of the game, the sense that we're in a different place with different rules. Maybe it's because text-chat is inherently abstract; it's something that happens in our heads, in a sort of ludological backchannel of our minds.

But voice has much higher emotional bandwidth. It conveys a lot of identity: Your voice instantly transmits your age, your gender and often your nationality -- even your regional location too. (I can tell a Texan accent from a Minnesotan, and you can probably tell I'm Canadian by my nasal "oots.") With voice, the real world is honking in your ear.

This is particularly a problem for women, because often women thrive in MMOs precisely by downplaying their sexual identity. When Krista-Lee Malone, a student at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee, did a study of the impact of voice chat on online worlds, women all told her they were treated differently once other players -- particularly younger men -- could hear their voices. ("They got hit on a lot," Malone says.)

Meanwhile, shy or geeky players have long thrived in text-based chat, where their social impediments matter less; but they wither when interaction becomes a cocktail party.

"Throw up a (Ventrilo) server, the girls stop talking completely, the shy people shut up mostly and all that is left are the 12- to 18-year-old guys, and it becomes a locker room," as one poster complained on a sprawling, superb debate on the Terra Nova blog.

Yet here's the thing: You can't deny that voice chat can bring a huge amount of positive social good, too. Dmitri Williams, a communications professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, did a study of World of Warcraft players for one month. The results? Those who used text-only chat experienced "drops in trust and happiness" amongst their fellow players; those who used voice chat did not.The fatter emotional signal of voice apparently helps cement online relationships. Indeed, some guilds won't even let you participate anymore unless you use voice chat, because text-only chat seems shifty.

And even I have to admit, voice chat will eventually allow for some awesome tricks. Imagine logging into World of Warcraft, realizing one of your friends isn't there -- and being able to call them on their real-world mobile phone.

Ultimately, this is about intimacy -- how much of ourselves we're willing to give away to strangers. Personally, I enjoy being able to construct identities carefully in text; that's because I grew up with text as my main online mode. It's possible that the impending generation of gamers will simply find voice chat more natural, in the same way that teenagers today happily blog about their personal lives and post pictures and videos of themselves. They regard personal revelation not as an incursion of privacy but a marker of authenticity.

Or maybe this will become a permanent culture clash, a sort of existential civil war in the game-o-verse. Perhaps gamers will demand their favorite online world create separate "text only" or "voice only" shards. This is one issue about which it's hard to shut up