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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   2603 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 17, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

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For those of you who play video games in the same room as someone else, how do you communicate with each other over the sound of the game itself? My wife and I like to play video games together, but we haven't figured out a good solution to the sound problem. Some obvious possibilities and their downsides:

  1. We both wear headphones. The problem with this is that we would have to lower our volumes so much to hear each other past the game sounds and the headphones' partial external sound dampening.
  2. We use microphones and join a voice chat together on Discord or something. The problem with this is that we can still hear each other's voices in the physical world, so then the microphones' delay causes a double perception which is quite confusing and jarring. And even if we had sufficiently soundproof headphones (which cost money we don't really have), microphone delays are just so goddamn annoying because of the unintentional interruption of someone who started speaking a second earlier than you (likewise on Zoom meetings).
  3. We use speakers. Obviously this is a problem because we're not necessarily in the same location in the game, so each of our game's sound would bleed into each other messily and confusingly.

I've never had this problem either. Maybe airpod style earphones that don't block external sound?

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