Nonverbal communication

I've recently been thinking a bit about how communication works in the real world as opposed to the alternative one that spawned these boards initially, and that so many people play now (or honestly, pick one). Or more precisely, how it does not work and how this hurts us.

I'm pretty horrible at personal nonverbal skills, and if you want to hear about why tough because this is not the place for that. It does however lead to a good deal of thought on the various signals people use all the time, from a half smile to a hand on arm, crossed arms to slumped shoulders. They're quick, they're usually semi-intuitive and they communicate without (and I think this is key) forcing the interaction on someone. Most of the nonverbal signals, as opposed to the verbal (and by this I'm including semi-vocalized things like sighs and chuckles) which are, in varying degrees intrusive. For clarity, allow me to state that for this I find 'intrusive' mildly pejorative, and I was merely meaning that these things will more likely be noticed by a passive observer as opposed to an active one.

Which, by a round-about route, leads to a game like WoW. If you use Ventrilo or god help you the in game equivalent, those who speak can (and I've noticed, seem to actively try to do so, be it subconscious or by choice) communicate more effectively about their emotional state than those who do not. When someone's in a good mood (or faking it well), there are laughs and chuckles or just a nice lilt to the voice. If someone's annoyed, or tired or angry, often times you'll hear it.

Now this isn't to say that you can't get a significant amount of input from text, or that something like Vent is required to raid (no, I'm not going to say it). The information is there in text as well, and a feeling of intuition certainly can develop from something as simple as spacing, typos, capitalization (not in this referring to all caps, but a failure to capitalize a name or the start of a sentence when usually done, or vice versa). In fact, in some respects text can be more instructive to someone's genuine mood, because while many people familiarize themselves merely on a daily basis via simple interaction how to lie with their face and voice, few people consider how to lie in text in an emotional context.

And then we come down to the game itself. There's not a whole lot you can tell about someone's emotional state by the way they play the game this particular time, at least in an intuitive and definitive sense. Eventually you may notice that tank x keyboard turns when they're in a foul mood, or this mage is slow on a blink when tired. Eventually you can discern with some degree of accuracy and without a lot of attention to it the moods various people are in, and notice that player x that you play with is angry or sad.

I'm hardly the first person to come up with this stuff. In fact I happened to start thinking about it because I happened to glance at Snow Crash's cover this morning when unable to sleep. The line that always sticks out in my mind is "Condensing fact from the vapor of nuance." The ability to intuitively collect information by active study and gain non-insignificant insights is present everywhere, but the power of it is questionable in highly structured systems like WoW.

Rapports build over time, but wouldn't it be nice if there was some mechanism to...well, subconsciously isn't the right word, but perhaps semi-consciously communicate? Nothing so crass as /emotes, which are just text messages and voice chat in that they are active notifiers. I'm not even sure how this sort of thing would be possible without some sort of biofeedback mechanism, for that matter, since any mechanism which would require heavy player interaction could be cumbersome.

The only thing that's come to me is some sort of biometric based upon level/commonality of keypresses, though without someone manually entering their mood enough times for a form of neural net adaptation, or a test data on a huge amount of people, and the amount of CPU this sort of thing might actually take would be pretty healthy.

On the other hand, there's always a level to which you just don't want to know people's mood. Cuz some of these people are crazy.


Also, I should really stop using google as my word lookup when I fail miserably at spelling a couple times.