I’ve just read the post by Wilhelm about Discord and other voice platforms. I play MMORPGs and (virtual) tabletop gaming with a set of different overlapping groups of friends and family members. For the most part I game with a fairly static group of closer friends who I have know a long time. We adopted voice (and video) for gaming relatively late considering the technology has been around for many, many years.

As was discussed recently during a dungeon run in World of Warcraft Classic, I have pretty clear memories of the first use of this kind of technology: I can remember running a game of Shadowrun over IRC (a text chat program) circa 1997. I believe we started using Yahoo Messenger voice not long after that to have  catch-up chats, but not for gaming.

I can remember being asked to use in-game voice chat for Dungeons & Dragons Online…