Do people in real life really record audio logs like in Doom 3?

I wonder if some jobs in real life also require routine audio reports like the UAC workers in Doom 3. I just think that written reports are a lot more efficient as well as confidential (no over-hearing possible). Or was it done this way in Doom 3 just to showcase the game's voice acting?

The correct answer is: It was cool in System Shock 2.

I've seen medical doctors do that. Though that's mostly because of budget cuts: instead of each doctor having their own assistant who types down what the doc says, they have one assistant-secretary per block which types down the recordings.


In games, the main advantage over text is that it allows the player to focus their eyes on the action while listening to the exposition. The text alternative forces the action to be cut, which works fine in an RPG or other slow-paced, atmospheric game, but would be detrimental to a fast-paced action game. You don't have to pause the game, or risk the player getting killed by monsters that approached invisibly while the screen was filled with a notebook page.

What I do know is that DOOM 3 handles audiologs is a much more realistic way than most other games: there's only one PDA per person. I never understand it why would people have fifty different devices to record thoughts and then randomly drop them around after a single recording for someone to find in a chronological order. Audiologs have become the copy&paste system and most devs do not pay any attention to how little sense it makes. But for what it's worth, in DOOM 3 it's handled appropriately.

Touchdown said:

What I do know is that DOOM 3 handles audiologs is a much more realistic way than most other games: there's only one PDA per person. I never understand it why would people have fifty different devices to record thoughts and then randomly drop them around after a single recording for someone to find in a chronological order

I agree! F.E.A.R. and Alien Rage come to my mind with this random scattering of audio logs.

Gez said:

In games, the main advantage over text is that it allows the player to focus their eyes on the action while listening to the exposition.

That's fine and all, but requires multitasking. I bet that by the time you reenter the action, you stop paying attention to the words from the recording.

printz said:

I just think that written reports are a lot more efficient as well as confidential

I would guess that paper would be very scarce since they're on a space station and the worlds resources are slowly dwindling, however maybe the idea is in the future people no longer used pen and paper and instead just type things down on the computer programs.

I found that while audio logs were playable during combat in Doom 3, 99% of the time the gunshots and monster noises completely overshadowed what the person was saying anyway. So when you listened to the log you basically had to stay still and wait for them to finish. Still, I much prefer this over text because you can literally hear the terror in their voices. I somehow doubt people keep audible logs like this in real life though.

printz said:

That's fine and all, but requires multitasking. I bet that by the time you reenter the action, you stop paying attention to the words from the recording.

Which is why you can relisten to them.

There's the trade-off that you can read faster than speech goes, so if the text is long it'll interrupt the action less to read it than to find a quiet corner to listen to it. So texts should be short.

Dictating notes into a machine for a typist to handle later used to be sufficiently common that companies sold a lot of dictation machines specifically for the purpose. The machines used for playback of such recordings sometimes had interesting features like peddle controls so typists didn't need to remove their hands from the keyboard.

From a game lore POV I like to think there are audio logs because the company didn't trust most of the workers' writing skills enough to retrieve accurate reports. I know I've been asked to build features into software to get workers to click on a preset list of inputs because they were too lazy to type anything meaningful. Applying it to scientists could just be a shitty corporate policy thing, though.

Audio logs also allow for recordings of things that wouldn't be likely in text, like infected/possessed marines going insane in the background while med-techs try to figure out wtf is going on, battles, etc. Good voice acting helps build atmosphere and tell stories anyway. I liked that part of Doom 3, even if they just copied it from SS2.