So this suggestion comes with much aforethought -- and not just programming expertise, but scholarly research into Group Dynamics. I spent a lot of time trying to answer the question, "How can online play be made as close to face-to-face gaming as possible?" (I wont cite the bibliography here, but if you want, I can certainly e-mail it to you.)
It also addresses some of the concerns in the Virtual Chat thread posted a few days ago.
Oovoo, the best competitor to my suggestion may take a number of years before it can [robustly] support 8-10 video sessions. So I think my suggestion is good for a five year run -- maybe more because it may actually offer some advantages over FtF gaming, which I'll mention at the end.
I propose a chat ap with two visual implementations. The first is the classical chat window (which MapTool already has). The second is a screen of tiled avatar "head shots" that do two things: (1) Display a pop-up, comic-book style speech balloon with chatted text in it (visible for a few seconds). And (2), the head shots can change their expression to one of x (pick a good number) preset emotions. Let me elaborate on how these two things can interact with user input.
(1) The speech balloon can be of a variety of kinds: ordinary balloon, jagged YELLING balloon, cloud-shaped thought balloon, icicle dripping cold balloon, square (no tail) narration balloon (for GM or disembodied chat). The type of balloon is keyed off of a little grammar: chat beginning with a colon is a thought; chat ending with three or more exclamation points is YELLING, etc.
(2) The head shots are actually single images in an array of images (I suggest 9 as an upper bounds), each element position corresponding to a given "emoticon" (pick the 9 most essential) -- that is element 1 is "neutral", element 2 is "LOL", etc. That array, I dub it an "emotrix," should be user maintainable. Players can insert GIF images of themselves with the corresponding emotional expressions on their faces, or drawn images of their character with said emotrix of emotions. A preset syntax in the chat would, like the speech balloon type, change the head shot to the corresponding emotion. Again the default behavior is a momentary shift to the new expression and then, after a delay, a shift back to the prior image (i.e. - a momentary smile, not a permanent grin). That said, a permanent shift should be allowed by typing a given symbol in the text. (Let's say ending your chat statement with a plus sign lets the ChatTool know it should keep the new facial expression, not revert to the prior one).
Of course, these special characters embedded in the chat text should, where appropriate, be stripped from the outputted text in the speech bubbles; as for the text in the regular chat transcript (should the user decide to change the chat VIEW to "classic" mode) you could translate them to the usual little smiley-face emoticons:
The downside of this suggestion is the nine-fold work in creating 9 GIFs to fill out an emotrix. Or, in the case of a GM, who might want to speak as several different characters, creating many emotrices. Perhaps a helpful solution is to offer a certain set of premade emotrices. Certainly, it should be allowed that a player or GM simply add a single GIF to the emotrix, and the ap should then treat that as the default for all the empty elements in the array -- allowing players to opt-out of full emotional expression (and overworked GMs to pop up a character on-the-fly without being forced to have all 9 emotional images created).
The upside of this implementation is that it provides facial, textual, and visual emotional cues with very little effort during play -- and uses hardly any bandwidth. In addition to the disembodied "player" and "GM" , every map token could also be allowed to have its own emotrix. (P.S. - All the sociological data show that the FACIAL cues are key.)
Here I might hazard that this also offers an advantage to Oovoo, no matter how many sessions it can jockey: Players normally don't don a mask every time they speak as a character, and GM's certainly don't keep an arsenal of masks for every NPC and monster they play -- so Oovoo (or Skype) is limited (albeit, it is "limited" in the same way FtF gaming is). So I tentatively suggest that, in this one particular aspect, this kind of chat ap might actually be better that FtF in the immersive dimension.
Thanks for considering,
RyffReturns
Gamer, Programmer, etc. at large
