Characterizing multiparty voice communication for multiplayer games

ABSTRACT

Over the last few years, the number of game players using voice communication to talk to each other while playing games has increased dramatically. In fact, many modern games and game consoles have added voice support instead of expecting third-party companies to provide this technology. Unlike traditional voice-over-IP technology, where most conversations are between two people, voice communication in games often has 5 or more people talking together as they play.

We present the first measurement study on the characteristics of multiparty voice communications. Over a 3 month period, we measured over 7,000 sessions on an active multi-party voice communication server to quantify the characteristics of communication generated by game players, including overall server traffic, group sizes, sessions characteristics, and speaking (and silence) durations.

REFERENCES

• 1: Tristan Henderson , Saleem Bhatti, Modelling user behaviour in networked games, Proceedings of the ninth ACM international conference on Multimedia, September 30-October 05, 2001, Ottawa, Canada [doi>10.1145/500141.500175]
• 2: Speex Codec. http://www.speex.org.
• 3: P. Svoboda, W. Karner, and M. Rupp. Traffic analysis and modeling for world of warcraft. 2007. ICC '07. IEEE International Conference on Communications, pages 1612--1617, 24-28 June 2007.
• 4: TeamSpeak. http://www.teamspeak.com.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  I. Computing Methodologies
  I.6 SIMULATION AND MODELING
      I.6.5 Model Development

General Terms:
Design, Measurement

Keywords:
computer games, silence periods, talkspurts, voice communication