Multiplayer Languages

I enjoy playing online games; specifically I very much enjoy playing co-operative multiplayer games. (Competitive multiplayer implies being beaten to a pulp by 12-year olds over and over, which is very rarely fun).

Unfortunately, I don’t have many friends to play with, and those who do have a PS3 have professional conformist lives (wives, girlfriends, etc) which they need to prioritize. For whatever reasons, it’s a little bit of a project to set up a session of online gaming with the people I know.

Luckily, game developers have recognized that not all gamers can summon their friends for online gaming at any time or that they simply have no friends with the same type of console. So they [the game developers] invented a “matchmaking feature” which allows gamers to choose a type of game they want to play, select “matchmaking” and let the game/server find other people to play with. These matchmakings appear to include features such as making sure you’re playing with people who are in a somewhat similar rank as yourself, to make games more even.

Unfortunately, there are two serious limits to the matchmaking features, at least for me:

1. It is a rare occasion to encounter someone with a headset. (Or they are too shy to use them?).
2. When people with headsets do end up in the same game as I, they are often speaking a language which I do not understand.

I’m the kind of person who likes to discuss tactics, share ideas, scream for help before I go down, make the odd comment about how letting go of a ledge tends to lead to sudden and irreversible death. Obviously, this is quite incompatible with my empirical observations about how gamers don’t generally use a headset, at least not with strangers.

As there was a trivial solution to the problem with users not being able to pull together a group of friends to play with, there’s a trivial solution to the headset and language problem. I would like game developers to add a language filtering option to the matchmaking features. I’d like to be able to select to play with people who have a headset, who use it, and who speak English. It’s not a difficult thing to add. In fact, the PS3 allows you to specify more than one language for an account, and it’s easy to check if a headset is available (and it’s not rocket science to determine if its muted); so all the relevant information is already there.