Voice chat made the game playable at a whole new level. Now instead of rushing headlong into death hoping for the best or becoming sitting ducks as we typed out a chat message, hoping the other guy saw it in the thick of combat, we could talk to each other.

Soon we were working together as a team, making and executing plans of attack, providing cover fire, healing each other, and providing ammo and support. It was awesome.

Anyone who has played a squad capable, first-person-shooter will tell you straight up that that any time you have a cohesive squad that communicates and works well together they utterly dominate the game. Quite often even one such squad well be so effective that they can more or less be the deciding factor in who wins a round or match.

Teamwork is the other half of that equation. Many of these games breakdown individual skill activities into character classes, where certain tasks and jobs can only be accomplished by certain types of characters.

My dad and I have had no end of fun by establishing a good defensible position where one of us was a medic and the other a support guy, and we rack up the kills and points healing, re-arming, and picking off enemies. If a friend joins us and we can add a sniper, we are all but unstoppable.

Of course that didn’t happen instantly, nor do these kinds of skills just magically happen. You need to develop them and in doing so, you are also developing your communication skills. One of the very first things we both noticed about voice chat was, that if we actually wanted to use it, we needed to be able to communicate and understand each other. Which is something we had both prided ourselves on being able to do fairly well.

What playing the game illustrated for us though, was just how much of a gap there sometimes was in what we thought we were saying to each other. At the same time because we were sharing a defined, common experience, the game gave us the opportunity to work on this and enabled us to close that gap.

Soon a conversation along the lines of:

“Kill that guy over there!”

“Over where?!”

“Over there, he’s right there!”

“Too late I’m dead.”

Became:

“Sniper in the 2nd story corner window of the western building” or “Claymore, left side of the south exit from the alley.”