Finding Our Voice
By Lewis Denby
Picture the scene. You’re knee-deep in an exuberant land of fantasy. Greenery sways in the summer breeze; a horse in a nearby field grazes convincingly. You approach the village gates. Two guards block your way, but you’ve a multitude of ways past them. You could sneak round the back. No, too risky. You could ready your sword for a fight. No, no need. You’re a great orator. You’re charasmatic. Persuasive. You’ll get in. Just stay sincere, serious.
You approach the guard to the left, and get ready to charm your way into the forbidden habitat beyond. The guard opens his mouth. He sounds like a children’s TV presenter on copious amounts of ecstasy. With a gargantuan, flaming ulcer on his lip. And a speech impedement.
You can write reams of spectacular, enlightening, literary text for your next big game, and still have the whole thing fall apart. You can create the most immersive worlds imaginable, the most tangible environments and the most realistic characters, and still rip the credibility away in one swoop. Voice work is destroying our games. We need rid. We need people to shut the hell up.
//A good book: no voice acting required
I like to read. When I’m involved in a good book, my imagination conjures up a whole cavalcade of subtle characterisations for the people I’m reading about. The way a single hair may be out of place. The way they gesture, or the look in their eyes. The way they speak.
And, in my head, it sounds wonderful, natural, effortless. It sounds real. And I’m totally there. I truly wish I could say the same about new-fangled, fully-voiced videogames.
Thing is, though, voice acting in this medium is of such an atrociously low quality that developers might as well not bother. Even film frequently struggles with the subtleties of human conversation, and that’s lightyears ahead of gaming in this respect. Is there anything more soul-eradicating and immersion-destroying than a misplaced accent, unnatural emphasis or an obviously bored actor? I’ll happily put up with glitches in technology – to some extent, they’re inevitible – but the ways in which a professional voice artist completely fails at his or her job? Totally unforgivable.
Frankly, even those games lauded for their voice work are lacking. Grand Theft Auto IV, widely considered the medium’s pinnacle in this regard, would sound incredibly shoddy next to even the most average television drama. Half-Life 2? Put these characters in a film and they’d seem wildly out of place with their comicbook enthusiasm.
//Old news
But we’ve talked about this before. It’s all a bit cliché, even though it’s certainly a topic of concern. What no one seems to consider is that, just maybe, we’d be better off giving up all hope. Scrap the acting. We don’t need it. And striving to improve it is making things worse.
Big-name actors are being paid big money to appear in the new interactive blockbusters. Actors whose names are littered with awards for their work in film and television – but actors who repeatedly fail to hit the mark in games. Patrick Stewart in Oblivion. Liam Neeson in Fallout 3. Even Vin Diesel’s performance in the Chronicles of Riddick games is well below his standard on the big screen. It’s money being poured into something that’s actually detracting from the quality of our games. And it’s money that, to much the same effect, could be far better utilised elsewhere.
Here’s an idea: we can read! We can read the words, and imagine the characters sounding good in our own heads! No acting necessary, money in the bank.
Where to throw this money? Why, at the scriptwriting, of course. Videogame writing has long been as generally hateful as the voice work, but by eradicating one of these evils, we can vastly improve the other. We can employ terrific writers to pen imaginative, original, engaging narratives and scripts. They can spend their time working on the subtle characteristics, the tiniest of traits, that the actors should be portraying in their performances. The things for which – judging by Planescape, the early Fallout iterations and ingenious IF creations such as Galatea – we can manage just fine without audible speech.
We don’t need to listen to gibberish nonsense while we read a novel, so why not take a leaf out of that book – so to speak – in our games? We can push boundaries here, if only we take the plunge. Sack the actors. Embrace the walls of text once more. Trust me on this, and you might never have to tear out your cochlea again.
I agree that most game voice acting is poor… but I think that to abandon it altogether is crazy talk, really… I’m surprised that you don’t think much of HL2’s voice acting, which I genuinely think is consistently superb and wonderfully married to the animation and writing of the characters.
I don’t think books and games operate on the same level at all – gaming is primarily a visual medium, and I think that whilst some games with huge amounts of textual dialogue (Planescape, Morrowind, etc) have actually been successful in telling their stories, the vast bulk of games would completely fail to tell theirs if they were denied a chance to at least attempt voice acting. Our eyes can’t be everywhere at once – sometimes we need to be watching some things and listening to others, and not all games can be slow enough to allow for this.
I think increasingly, developers are placing more importance on voice acting and it’s arguably better now than it’s ever been. There have been some great examples in the past – Tom Baker’s great narration in Hostile Waters, for example, or the appropriately comic book-esque readings in the manga-themed Oni – and as time goes on, the increased willingness to hire quality writers and actors, and to attempt more emotive games, will encourage and demand a gradual increase in voice acting quality. To assume this won’t happen and to turn the clock back to relying on text is a regression the medium can’t afford, I think.
As games become more and more profitable, better voice actors will be attracted to them, too – and better actors mean they’ll be included in the construction of their characters, rather than just being tacked onto them at the end of development, which is probably the case with a lot of games today.
Sit HL2 against anything reasonable on telly, and shut your eyes. Really, the difference will be insurmountable.
This was intentionally antagonistic, and I’m not sure I’d seriously suggest that ALL games sack off voice work. However, I do think there are certain games that really would benefit. Mainly, lots of RPGs. Bethesda’s in particular. I found Morrowind so much more engaging than Oblivion, and I’m certain there’s an obvious reason for that.
I disagree strongly with this whole article. I like voice acting in games. HL2 and GTA4 would be a lot worse off without it. I read books for my literature, I play games to shoot nazis in the face and steal cars etc, not having to read pages of text while I do it.
There are certain exceptions though such as Baldurs gate. But Morrowind was very badly written. There’s a crazy ‘looking through rose tinted glasses’ thing going on with that game recently. Actually go back and play it and you will see how it has all the same flaws you point out as Oblivion(Which is much better in my opinion). Went off on a bit of a tangent there and if it didn’t make sense its because I’m hungover absolving me of any responsibility for it.
Controversy! Lewis likes controversy.
I agree that voice acting, in general, is pretty lackluster in the games industry, though attacking the games that are most highly regarded in that area was an interesting (i.e. better) way of making your point even if I disagree immensely (and I do). Frankly, I think the reason the standards are so low is because the video game medium is seen as interactive first and foremost, while its potential as a storytelling medium hasn’t yet been embraced by most developers. I mean, when you think about it, most video game PLOTS are crap, too. Games like Mass Effect and BioShock are really flukes when you think about it.
But think about how much higher the standards for video game storytelling are now than they were, say, a decade ago. We still have a long way to go, but the more widespread the gaming industry becomes, the more it’ll be recognized as a major entertainment medium. Frankly, going back to text is the one you definitely SHOULDN’T do, because you’d be degrading the progress games have made and damaging their credibility. And as games are becoming increasingly more immersive experiences by the month, imagine the effect the removal of voice acting would have. How much would have enjoyed your beloved BioShock if every ten seconds you’d be distracted from the action at hand by being forced to look down at one of Atlas’s text boxes? (All of them starting with “Would you kindly…”)
It’s something that’s improving, and that improvement has had a significant impact on the industry as a whole. All it’ll take is more time.
I agree with your basic premise, that voice acting is generally bad. I also agree that it is infinitely better than scriptwriting. I think big budget actors are probably a waste of money, and would rather see the money spent elsewhere.
I do find voice acting and unnecessary characterisation a big plus in games, but only when done well. I think Bioshock and Bully had fantastic (over) acting that really contributed hugely to my enjoyment. In fact in both those games it was the ramblings of minor characters that proved the most enjoyable.
I don’t agree with Mike Suskie’s point about games being seen as interactive undermining their content. I think it is the limititations to the interactivity that is the problem. In many ways the shallowness of ‘Pong’ and ‘Space Invaders’ have survived the transition to photo-realism. Very little more than pointing and clicking is required to play most mainstream games.
Clearly, there are loads of exceptions, and the article was meant to be more of a starting point for discussion and an alternative throught than anything else. Loads of games absolutely hinge around their voice acting; others (anything Bethesda’s done, for example) could easily excise it completely and arguably be better for it.
I’ll probably talk about Fahrenheit soon. I never played it on release, but have been going through it over the last couple of days. Its approach is the antithesis: completely cinematic to the point where it presents itself as an interactive film. Yet the voice work and script are still horribly unstable, despite having some excellent moments.
As of the 32-bit era, I prefer gesticulation accompanied by voice acting – even if the characters’ mouths aren’t moving – to gesticulation with no sound, but text. Parasite Eve I+II seem like high points of the awfulness of lunatic gesticulation with text accompaniment. They made me pretty sure it’s a bad direction.
Overall I agree with your basic view that the effectiveness of current voice acting is poor. My stance though is simply that we give it tons of time to develop. I view it as a massively difficult task to coordinate separately recorded elements that will ever sound particularly natural together. This is even after you’ve secured a ‘good’ script, and some dynamics that you hope will work when you can’t control the pace at which the material may be delivered to the player in the game.
Film directors concentrating on nothing else still have to work hard to coax actors to work well with each other within a shot, in knowledge of all other context of the film. A good take and a bad one can vary by the tiniest thing. Actors voicing games are often actorless and propless, and even if they nail one thing, the game may take even a miniscule turn during development that suddenly makes their performance – which was perfect for one context, exactly what was demanded – suddenly sound stupid. Or the programming can just move their performance that tiny bit that was the difference between good and bad, even in a totally controlled environment.
There are so many elements to it, I view it as one of the hardest creative /technical tasks around. So my idea is that they just keep trying to practise. Maybe they will work it out. Maybe something else will change that takes us in another direction or makes it redundant. I don’t know, really.
Elven Legacy has voice acting that’s so bad its hilarious. It really cheered me up.
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