…Continued from “Getting Vocal About Gaming”…

That’s probably why IVR systems caught on so quickly.

Human-run call centers aren’t practical for big companies with millions of customers, and customers aren’t used to dialing a company and having to talk to a person.

An IVR system incorporates the best of both worlds. Like a computer, it’s sure to give the right answer, is always available and reliable. Like a human, it lets you skip the hundreds of phone trees and gets quickly to what you need.

And the best part is that talking to an IVR system gives you a connection to the company. As weird as it may sound, IVR is far more personal than a webpage or an email exchange.

But for gamers, personalization isn’t always priority one.

The fact is, though, that voice-chat has a lot to offer the gaming world.

When you’re interacting with other players, you need a way to communicate. But text-chat is awkward and confusing. As big a change as voice-chatting may be, it’s just easier and can even lead to some interesting relationships.

In an over-sharing and shrinking world, I think the time has come for gamers to embrace getting personal within the community.

As Thompson puts it:

Ultimately, this is about intimacy — how much of ourselves we’re willing to give away to strangers…It’s possible that the impending generation of gamers will simply find voice chat more natural, in the same way that teenagers today happily blog about their personal lives and post pictures and videos of themselves. They regard personal revelation not as an incursion of privacy but a marker of authenticity.

We tweet our every thought, instagram photos of every meal onto our friends’ newsfeeds and obsessively track our movements on Foursquare. Our over-sharing doesn’t show any signs of stopping, so why not embrace it and get to know the members of our guild?

After all, we spend so much time with our fellow gamers, the least we can do is introduce ourselves.