Having had several chances to use Google hangouts for gaming in the past while, I will give my conclusion: it kind of sucks.
There are several reasons for this sucking but first let?s look at what doesn?t suck: hanging out with new people and seeing them laugh and speak and participating in same is wonderful. I adore it. It?s good fun and should be done over and over again.
But gaming ? especially role-playing gaming ? requires reliable pacing and participation to keep the action forefront in everyone?s mind. Engaging each other in the fiction requires constant control of pace. And this is one place where the hangout kind of sucks.
First, the mediator has no effective control over activity. People come and go as they please, speak when they want, and there is no effective way to control all of this as, unexpectedly, most of the body language and related cues we use to do this fail to translate over the video and audio stream. With significant attention and preparation this could be managed by a motivated mediator.
Second, the technology is inconsistent, creating constant distraction. Some video feeds are great, some are awful, and some are absent. Awful video feeds are awful in different ways ? bad lighting, bad resolution, high latency, occasional drop-outs. All of these impact the pace of the game (especially drop outs) and make things less effective. Audio is even worse, in a way, since despite having video we are really there to talk and therefore (one hopes) to listen. So bad mics or mics that are not echo-correcting or mics that are awesome and picking up the dog, the neighbours, and the dishwasher, are all highly distracting.
It is the nature of this place that you cannot control the technology available to the attending parties. If you could, things might be much better ? you get great responsivity thanks to low latency, which makes mediation much easier. You get good visual input from everyone and you get reliable, comprehensible, audio with no feedback echo or shriek. You could finally ignore the technology and get on with the communication.
There?s no good solution for the dice yet. Every option is make-shift requiring window swapping, hidden information, or otherwise blocking the pace but forcing context switches. There really is no substitute for physical dice, on a table where they can be manipulated and seen by everyone at once. I hope we can get close, but so far the solutions are so distant (and of course highlighted by games that need all these axes of information, like Hollowpoint) that the pace of the game is crushed by the defect.
Finally, and this is more personal, I live with my wife. I love her dearly and I interact with her all the time. When there?s a game at our house, she doesn?t play but she does interact and she?s witty and nice and insightful and welcome. When I?m away gaming somewhere else I am, well, somewhere else and so she does not feel ignored even though she is not participating. But when I?m focused on communication for hours through this unstable and sometimes hard to understand medium, I am present with my wife and necessarily ignoring her. This sucks and is not acceptable.
So for now my preference for online gaming must remain text ? IRC or Google Docs ? and I think I will have to impose a minimum technology level on particpants. If we can?t all play at full speed, it?s really not worth playing to me. I?d rather just hang out with you and laugh and have a drink and introduce my girl and like that.
?BMurray
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