Female vs. Male Announcer Voices

1) I think it's a style thing. Games like Unreal Tournament and Quake have a bulky, gritty aesthetic, and so their announcers are gruff males. Team Fortress 2 has a playful, cartoony style, and its cranky middle-aged lady announcer fits it well.

I'm not sure if players respond differently. UT2k4 had an option to turn on a heavily sexualized female announcer voice, and I'm sure players responded differently to that. But in general, I don't think players responded differently in any way significant to their gameplay decisions, but probably just towards how they perceived the style of the game.

2) I definitely listen to my teammates more. Computer announcements get tuned out pretty easily. In Counter-Strike Source, I'd more likely respond to someone who says on the mic, "I need help in the garage" versus someone who uses the radio command to play the "Enemy Spotted" voice command. It's just more personalized, and often contains much more relevant information. Although on the other hand, often the voice chat gets cluttered with useless chatter and annoying people, so sometimes I just turn that off completely.

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Second, why do companies choose to to have a voice to discuss alerts and announcements in the game, versus just using a text based, or picture based announcement system?

People have the wonderful ability to listen to audio while doing other things. This makes voice announcements infinitely more useful than pictures or text because someone can be in the middle of a heated firefight and still perceive and comprehend important information without it hindering their ability to play. In a game like Team Fortress 2 or Unreal Tournament -- fast twitchy games where every second counts and blinking can cause you to miss a target -- this is an extremely important advantage!

Additionally, people almost always ignore text. Most people hate reading with a passion and will do everything in their power to avoid doing it (you would be absolutely amazed at some stories I can tell about this from play-testing games. Trust me, people will go to any length to avoid reading). Pictures are more acceptable but they still take up space and require time to look at an interpret.

• Voice is immediate.
  
• Voice doesn't prevent you from looking elsewhere at the same time.
  
• Voice suggests human presence and people naturally pay more attention to other humans than a computer HUD
  
• Voice doesn't clutter up the HUD.
  
• Voice breaks immersion less than a HUD.
  
• Voice can add to the atmosphere.
  
• Voice can easily and effectively emphasize moods like urgency, relaxation, or celebration just by shifting the tone a bit.
  

As for Male/Female it's mainly just about what seems more appropriate for the mood of that particular game. Females are generally better at sounding relaxing, males are generally better at sounding really macho and in your face, etc.

Interestingly enough, the default in UT2004 is a female voice for announcing things like objectives ("destroy the barricade"), time limits ("one minute remains"), win/loss ("you have won the match"), etc, and a male voice for one-off reward feedback ("double kill", "killing spree", "first blood", etc).

There are four voices (male, female, UT2k3 (a more animated-sounding male) and "Sexy") and any can be selected in each of those two categories.


It's probably worth mentioning GLaDOS from Portal as part-announcer part-character.

I wonder why games often use British-sounding females, too [smile]

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Original post by Andrew Russell I wonder why games often use British-sounding females, too [smile]

Genetic memory of the Days Of The Empire when British-sounding voices were telling the rest of you lot what to do [razz]

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Original post by LockePick Females are generally better at sounding relaxing

And also quite insanely manic; iirc it was the last level of a payload map, we nearly had the bomb at the location and the female announcer, in this voice on the edge of cracking practically cackled 'the bomb is nearly at the target' and then went off into this mad cackling which somewhat disturbed our team [wow]

Female voices are mostly to 'sex up' the game. Most players (especially online FPS) are male. Male voices are usually military in tone. It's part of the war theme of those games. Why choose one over the other, well TF2 does lack a female presence, and it's not a particularly serious military FPS (Quake 3 style voice would sound out of place).

An audio cue is much more direct than text or graphics. That's how we communicate information primarily, it doesn't clutter the screen, and doesn't distract you from the action as much (or shouldn't). It's like reading chat, versus voice comms. Although chat spam is far less annoying than voice spam, so it's a double edge sword.

Assuming your voice comms are clearly audible, and meaningful (i.e. not spam), I'd pay more attention to what my teammate would say, as it's more relevant to the current situation. However, there are occasions when it's extremely useful.

Imagine a spy sneaking on a capture point in TF2, the voice announcement usually triggers a mad stampede to the CP. It's more of a complement to the game, and the overall game flow information. And also character shouts. TF2 canned character shoots are very useful and well done as well. You wouldn't want 6 or 7 players calling for medic on voice comms.

Actually, humans interpret and respond faster to female voices than they do male voices.

This is why many of the most important warnings in aircraft are often stated in a female voice.

"The bomb has almost reached the final terminuuussss!"

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Original post by Swarmer "The bomb has almost reached the final terminuuussss!"

"Alert! Our checkpoint is being captured!"

There was a question posed on Yahoo! Answers that asked something like: "If you had a starship, which gender would you want the voice of the computer to be?" One of the answers cited a study claiming that most people find a male voice to be a little bit irritating, IIRC. Interestingly, most of the answerers picked "female."

I also remember on the news once when they were talking about why teen boys rebel against single mother's, where an expert said that males do not hear the sense of urgency in a female voice. I'm quite sure she worded it differently, but this is the essence I got. This may be why you don't hear very many female VOs for movie trailers.

[Edited by - shuma-gorath on June 10, 2009 1:02:26 PM]

I think it's very dependent upon the game and possibly less about the players. The biggest examples that popped into my mind when I read this the other day was Halo and Gears of War.

In Halo muliplayer the 'announcer' is a male voice. The voice isn't very abrasive and is more mocking in tone.

Gears of War multiplayer changes the announcer based on your team (humans have a male, Locust have a female). Both the male and female voices in that game are grittier.

Obviously Gears is a much darker toned game than Halo and I think the style of the audio suits each well.

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Original post by Talroth Actually, humans interpret and respond faster to female voices than they do male voices.

Probably because beatings from Mom are more prevalent due to Dad being at work :D

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Original post by LockePick Additionally, people almost always ignore text. Most people hate reading with a passion and will do everything in their power to avoid doing it (you would be absolutely amazed at some stories I can tell about this from play-testing games. Trust me, people will go to any length to avoid reading).

I want to hear these stories :)

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Original post by Zahlman Quote: Original post by LockePick Additionally, people almost always ignore text. Most people hate reading with a passion and will do everything in their power to avoid doing it (you would be absolutely amazed at some stories I can tell about this from play-testing games. Trust me, people will go to any length to avoid reading). I want to hear these stories :)

TLDNR

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Original post by Zahlman Quote: Original post by LockePick Additionally, people almost always ignore text. Most people hate reading with a passion and will do everything in their power to avoid doing it (you would be absolutely amazed at some stories I can tell about this from play-testing games. Trust me, people will go to any length to avoid reading). I want to hear these stories :)

Haha, okay, I'm bored and have been wanting to write this up for a while anyways. Enjoy!

Story 1 - Swiveling Memory
During development of one of my games, I put tutorial text throughout the beginning so people could read what the controls were and what their objectives were as they ran into obstacles. In one testing session I had a tester -- who I'll call Joe -- that was playing for the first time.

Joe encountered one of these objective instructions. It was a short sentence, 5-6 words long (small words too, IIRC). He looked at the text and then swiveled around in his chair and asked me if it was really important enough that he had to read it.

Just to be clear on this: Joe actually took the time and effort to physically swing his chair around and ask me a question instead of reading 5-6 short words. Joe is not dyslexic or a slow reader. He could read a sentence like that pretty much instantly.

Turns out, in fact, that he did. See, I've come across some interesting studies on how human memory actually works, and there was something I wanted to try out... just for kicks. So instead of answering Joe's question I asked him if he could tell me what the message said without looking back at the screen.

He told me what it said almost word for word. And immediately after saying it, he said to himself "Oh, I guess that was important." and swiveled his chair back around to continue playing as if nothing had happened.

To clarify again: Joe read the message, turned his chair around to ask me if he really had to read it, then recited it without looking at the screen, and THEN HE REALIZED WHAT IT SAID.


Story 2 - The Pits
In a different game I had a similar approach to giving tips to the player. There are little exclamation bubbles floating around that you can click on to get hints or additional instructions.

A new tester, Jane, was constantly getting stuck as she went through the game. She had a lot of difficulty with pretty much every obstacle. At one point she jumped into a pit from which she could not get out. She was completely stuck. Right next to her in this pit was an instruction bubble.

So Jane walks over to this bubble, clicks to open it, sees it contains text, immediately clicks past it and continues running back and forth in the pit. A little while later she goes back to the bubble, opens it, closes it, and continues running back and forth in the pit. She repeats this process two more times and gets very aggravated.

I finally cave in and suggest that maybe, just maybe, she might consider READING the instruction bubble instead of merely opening and closing it repeatedly. Finally Jane reluctantly opens it up (for the fifth time) and reads it. It very clearly tells her that she is stuck and should use the handy 'Retry' button on the HUD to get out of the pit.

Does this story get better? Oh, you betcha. She rapidly opened and closed every goddamn instruction bubble and NPC dialog bubble in the entire game without reading any of it, both before and after the ordeal in the pit!


Lesson learned: If you really, really need to get essential information across to the player... text is a BAD IDEA.