PC gaming aside, Xbox Live on 360 was my first real online experience. I’d missed out on DreamArena, had no networkable PS2 games and my old Xbox 1 was modded, so going from hastily-typed banter in Quake 3 Arena to vocal chatter on Xbox Live was going to be tricky. Hell, it still is. For all the extra personality that voice gives you, it can sometimes be easier to follow a stream of independent printed messages than it can to make sense of the chaos that can occur in a public Xbox Live game.

You have timid players who would probably even be drowned out by the noise of your 360′s fan, you have loudmouths who don’t realise that there are other people besides them trying to make conversation, you have chatterboxes who can bang on forever about trivial stuff without anyone else getting a word in edgeways… And yet, game developers have already offered up alternatives to text and voice communication; Unreal Tournament’s pre-recorded quips can really help during a busy Capture The Flag game, and I’ve played Left 4 Dead with a broken headset and still managed to get by on AI phrases alone. The problem is that of human nature, of knowing when to calm down, speak up, or stop talking altogether. This is where the “conversation economy” comes in.

The central idea is simple – airtime should be limited if players are too loud or won’t allow opportunities for other people to converse. Talk for too long too loudly and the game will either force the volume of your voice channel down a touch or – worst case scenario – silence you altogether. These “penalties” offer nothing that players can’t already do for themselves, but by making these rules clear for everyone, it would perhaps make louder players and chatterboxes think more carefully about what they’re saying.

Now, re-reading what I’ve written I can imagine your reaction to this – that I’m over-sensitive, that I’m a killjoy, that I should have the courage to be a loudmouth chatterbox myself. However, this idea is inspired by players who are the exception rather than the rule; the more obvious solution is to pick who you play with more carefully. Also, as briefly mentioned before, if I’m hating on the loud folk, I’m hating on the quiet ones too, but at the same time I think that a little more opportunity to get a few words in would make them less quiet. In other words, a natural balance would be accomplished. For another take on things, consider internet culture. If you spend too much time spouting random nonsense in an IRC channel or a chat room, you’ll get warned about things such as “flood control” (trust me, I’ve been on the receiving end of such warnings during the less mature days of my youth.) Bombard someone with email messages and you might be reprimanded for spam, or mail-bombing, or whatever the term is.

Sure, we have the Xbox Live equivalent of blocking in the form of the “mute” option, but that won’t make the offenders any more self-controlled; they will just wait until the next game and continue as before, whether muted or not. I admit that a limit on airtime may not be that useful – there would be nothing stopping someone shouting as much random nonsense as they can get away with, for instance – but for more open-minded online gamers, it may make them think about how players can come together to make a better experience for everybody. The shy players would open up more (and maybe even prove to be useful in-game allies when you finally have the chance to hear their thoughts), the loudmouths would benefit from being able to hear the chatter of quieter players… and the middle-ground? They need never know it’s there; they can just continue as normal.

Hell, it’s got to beat that ridiculous keyboard add-on for the 360 controller.