Can you hear me now? The impact of voice in online games
Tuesday, 2nd May 2006 Dmitri Williams, Assistant Professor, Department of Speech Communication at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign The now-famous New Yorker cartoon which reads "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog" has been a clever way to illustrate issues about anonymity, social networks and interpersonal relationships. But what happens when someone gives the dog a microphone? This talk discusses the results of a controlled field experiment in which voice communication was introduced into an existing online community (guilds within the popular game "World of Warcraft"). Qualitative and quantitative results will be compared to a control group and will focus on social capital, interpersonal relationships and psychological variables. |