A couple of weeks ago I talked about names. The discussion that ensued was very interesting and brought up a few issues that need looking into about MMORPGs. The one that struck me the most was the chatting interface. It suddenly struck me that although we live in highly graphical environments in our everyday computer lives, and although our games are becoming more and more visually complex, chat interfaces are still somewhat archaic.

Let me call my secretary
I remember configuring my Guild options in DAoC. It was a total nightmare! There were at least 4 or 5 slash commands to input for each of the 9 or 10 guild ranks to set them up and configure them properly. Typing them all one after another took at least a half hour, and that's without considering the number of mistakes I made of course. I'm fortunate enough to be a pretty fast typist, but I pity those poor souls that are cursed with fat fingers. My half hour could sometimes stretch to a long hour for them doing the same tasks!

For some reason we have avatars living in very visual worlds, doing many things that have a visual impact on their surroundings ("emotes" that are actually acted out come to mind). But the way these visual features are accessed, and the way we configure our daily virtual lives is done by an old fashion text-based interface. Why in the world are we still stuck with typing "/wave" to make our avatar wave out to someone?

I guess the origins of the slash commands come from the old MUD's (Multi User Dungeons), and in those games slash commands probably made a lot of sense. The interface was all text-based to begin with, so to enter a slash command to emote something your character would do would have made sense there. But in a graphical game, where all other user interfaces are graphical in nature, does it make any sense to need to type anything else than speech for our avatar?

Why hasn't anyone come up with option-based mini-windows where you could simply click on a button to do these emotes? Why not be bold and try out a graphical chat interface with simple clickable options for replies and sent messages?

The person you are trying to reach cannot reply because they can't type your name correctly, please try again later…
Ever had to reply to someone named "BigFatBuddyWithAHammer"? How many times did you have to type "/r bigfatbuddywithahammer, hi!" before you got it right and without any mistakes? I know I've had plenty of occasions when the game would tell me "bigfastbuddy(…) is not in game or on another server"… Would it be so hard for developers to give us proper, not to say modern tools to conduct simple and enjoyable chat? Slash commands should already be a thing of the past by now, same as DOS commands nowadays, yet every single new MMORPG that comes out still boasts the same kind of engine to drive the only communication tool we have at our disposal.

Look at what players are already doing anyway: In some games where it's possible to play in windowed mode, players use MSN Messenger or ICQ to talk to each other and coordinate large groups in a much more efficient way than most tools available to them in-game! Why? You can bring everyone in on a chat in MSN Messenger and the only thing you need to do to chat is - get this - type what you want to say!! No slash commands here! Even emotes are little icons that you can just click through to select. Compare that to a flawed interface where it's very easy to make mistakes (let those who have never made an embarrassing misstell throw the first stone…) and you're stuck with a very frustrating and very old-fashioned tool.

Power to the chatters!
I think it's time that developers start spending a little more energy on the chat interface. Let's face it: it's the single most used interface in the whole game since an MMORPG is usually built around interactions with other players - interaction that, interestingly enough, can only be made through chatting and emotes.

This sounds like a rant, and maybe it is in a way. But after playing 5 MMORPGs, each one bigger than the one before it, it's a bit disconcerting to always find myself stuck with the same inadequate tools. Let's revolutionize chat, and make it a big revolution too because the tools we currently use have been antiquities for a good while now already…