Audio is often underrepresented in conversations about collaboration. Perhaps that’s because podcasting is no longer new and telephony is old (and Skype has recreated all of its features for low or no cost). Text is more portable and video is sexier. But one community, online gamers, has continued to evolve audio communication in some interesting ways.

Modern gamers have to be good collaborators: most games now include or consist solely of online play. But early in-game communication was mostly via text chat. Being under fire and communicating with the soldier next to you by typing instead of shouting was clunky. Typing got you killed. Gamers quickly realised that some form of conference call was required: but one that worked without a ‘phone and cost nothing, because nobody had a conference ‘phone at home and the soldier next to you lived in Brazil.

Enter products such as TeamSpeak and Ventrilo. Like Skype (which both preceded), these enable players to talk with each other for free over the Internet; but like chatrooms the focus is on persistence and multiple participants: a single channel might contain 100 players.

So far, so much like a gigantic conference call; but as games became more complex this medium evolved too. In massively multiplayer games like World of Warcraft or EVE Online, players can belong to groups numbering 100 or more. Operating like small corporations, such groups frequently employ dozens of different audio channels, each reflecting a sub-group of players focused on a particular activity or mission.

Unlike conference calls, these channels are unscheduled and persistent; players move between them with a single click. Perhaps more importantly, etiquette also makes it permissible to eavesdrop and flick between conversations as befits one’s interest or current activity. In many circles it’s considered perfectly acceptable to enter a channel and, at a suitable break in the conversation, ask a question on the off chance that someone listening might know the answer. For those of you who use Twitter, this model of crowdsourcing / friendsourcing answers should be very familiar.

Despite this revolution in communication, gamers still spend a lot of time being dead. So having a channel for the dead is also commonplace. Being able to simply chat with fellow players is a vital part of building a community, in exactly the same way that golfers congregate in the clubhouse bar between rounds. So when not actively playing it’s normal for gamers to lurk in a channel as they might in a chatroom, half-listening to the conversation and participating occasionally. Crucially, the ability of these applications to share your earphones with iTunes makes it a background feature, like the chatter in a real office.

In an era of increasingly dispersed teams I think communicators and collaboration specialists might just find this approach interesting.

Consider a team split across multiple locations. A common audio channel in which everyone lurks provides the digital equivalent of talking with colleagues over the desk partitions. For impromptu break out conversations individuals simply move into an empty channel for as long as required (without sending meeting requests and booking dial-in numbers). Leaders and co-ordinators might also find use for special paging features, which allow them to broadcast urgent announcements across all channels. Like evolving a forum, it’s relatively easy to tailor these tools to reflect a team’s structure and working practices.

Personally, I suspect it’s the listening component of this set-up that has most value. When one’s colleagues are physically distant, being able to listen to their background chatter can inform and connect in ways that formal update meetings (or even daily blogs) might not.

Update (15 DEC 2009): Apologies to the open-source community, I should have mentioned Mumble in my original edit. Mumble is worth checking out, especially as it comes packaged with its server software (Murmur) – perfect if you want to do some free testing with friends or colleagues.