The new generation of gaming systems wants the world to hear everything that happens in your living room while you are playing. Over the holidays, I inadvertently sang for an unwilling audience from my couch. Multiplayer games on the PlayStation 4 and the Xbox One broadcast your microphone to other players by default. There’s no clear indication that this is happening.
There’s no standard system-wide graphical or a hardware indicator to show that the microphone is streaming. With webcams (and their built-in microphones), we have all gotten used to a little hardware light turning on when the device is in use. There’s nothing like that on the new game consoles. (Nor the old ones, for that matter.)
I believe Microsoft and Sony wanted it to be up to the game developers to make their own decisions and user interface for social gaming. The trouble is that, for the most part, it looks like the games just wanted to stream everyone to everyone else in their session. Without making it complicated for the players. Games are launched, online sessions with other players are found and joined automatically, and then the microphone is turned on. Simple but a bit creepy.
After becoming aware of this, I’ve heard quite a lot of private conversations and phone calls from other players. No one seems to be aware that they are broadcasting their conversations.
I think the game platforms should do a much better job of notifying the players when their microphones or cameras are broadcasting. It should also be much easier to turn it off. I would personally prefer an opt-in scheme per-session to broadcast everything as the default. I hope there will be updates to these new platforms down the road to address this issue.
To all my fellow gamers out there: I apologies for my somewhat crazy and probably horrible singing. (I sometimes sing when I am alone.)