It scares me. A lot. Its daunting and intimidating. Its kind of like a box of chocolates – you never know what you’re going to get. Of course, it’s “home” to millions of gamers out there and, if the last outage for scheduled maintenance a few weeks ago was any indication, many of them feel lost without it.

Gamers have had the ability for voice communication while gaming for years, well before Xbox Live was introduced. The majority of my experience with voice communication over the Internet has been with Ventrilo. I used to use it quite often while playing WoW, especially back in my hardcore raiding days. Even after that, I used it quite frequently to talk to other friends and guild-mates while playing around in Azeroth. Voice communication in general isn’t the issue. The problem, for me and I’m sure many other gamers, is that, with a service like Xbox Live, you come into contact with complete strangers all the time.

Unlike a close-knit group of friends, such as a guild in an MMORPG, Xbox Live thrusts you into a world of mostly strangers. I used to be a very shy person. I still am, to some extent, but its gotten better over the last several years. I’m very cautious about jumping right in and talking shop with complete and total strangers, even in a semi-anonymous setting like this. But that, in and of itself, isn’t where my true phobia originates. What’s worse than dealing with a different set of total strangers in each different game and setting that you can find yourself in on Xbox Live? Being at the blunt end of a nerd rage attack that happens more often than not because of the aforementioned semi-anonymity of these services.

Basically, people don’t really care who they’re yelling at and don’t take anyone else into consideration, because its all about them and what they want and what they feel. True, there are rating systems in place, and if its too bad it can be reported and/or you can ignore the offender. That still doesn’t change the fact that nerd rage conniptions happen far too often. That, my friends, is why I tend to steer clear of Xbox Live communication.

Now, I’m not the sort to be offended by every little thing that someone says or does. One time, some friends and I were playing Halo 3 and, to be honest, we weren’t very good. We were playing online in the “newbie” games and having a lot of fun. Of course, even in the “newbie” games, veteran players tend to come in just to show off and stroke their own ego. In one game we finished, there was one such person with quadruple the number of kills that the best player of us four friends. We didn’t do a thing to him, besides be on the opposing team. A few minutes later we had a voice message from him telling us that we sucked. In fact, according to him we were so bad we should never play Halo again and take our game down and sell it. Now, we got a good laugh from this. It was both funny and sad at the same time.

I would like to know how lame someone’s life must be that they have to take time away from perhaps more game play or whatever, to record a voice message to send to us to tell us something we already knew – that we weren’t that good at Halo. Seriously people? How much easier it would have been to just ignore us low-scorers and continue on with your gaming. No, but this dude had to stroke his own ego by sending us a voice message telling us that we sucked.

This one instance we laughed it off. It was all the rage the rest of the night, that’s for sure. It helped matters a lot that he sounded like a 12-year-old. But, I can only imagine that it has to get to a person who is on the bum end of a nerd rage rant on a fairly frequent basis. It gets hard to laugh off eventually. And, this isn’t the only time I experienced a similar scenario.

Experiences like that are enough to “scare” me away from spending much time with my headset attached and in free-for-all voice communication with the randomness on Xbox Live, or any similar service. What can be done to curb this? Nothing, really. Jerks will be jerks, especially when given a mostly anonymous way of communication with other human beings. There’s no force in the world that can stop a stupid person from doing what it is they do. I speak from experience.

I would definitely enjoy being able to communicate verbally with those I’ve befriended, but I don’t play multi-player online games enough to have a very large friend’s list. Besides playing with friends, I tend to stay away from these experiences because the bad apples ruin it.

I’m not saying all this to diss Xbox Live, definitely not. It’s a great service and has proved quite useful on many accounts. Its boosted the gaming industry overall and helped usher in a truly new generation of how we play and experience games. However, I can’t imagine I’m the only one who feels this way – I’d rather just avoid the voice communication aspect of the service in most cases, instead of finding myself upwind from a pungent dose of nerd rage.