Slashdot Mirror
The Problems With Video Game Voice Acting
The Guardian's Games blog explores the tendency of modern video games to suffer from poor voice acting, a flaw made all the more glaring by increasingly precise and impressive graphics. Quoting:
"Due to the interactive nature of games, actors can't be given a standard film script from which they're able to gauge the throughline of their character and a feel for the dramatic development of the narrative. Instead, lines of dialogue need to be isolated into chunks so they can be accessed and triggered within the game in line with the actions of each individual player. Consequently, the performer will usually be presented with a spreadsheet jammed with hundreds of single lines of dialogue, with little sense of context or interaction. ... But according to David Sobolov, one of the most experienced videogame voice actors in the world (just check out his website), the significant time pressures mean that close, in-depth direction is not always possible. 'Often, there's a need to record a great number of lines, so to keep the session moving, once we've established the tone of the character we're performing, the director will silently direct us using the spreadsheet on the screen by simply moving the cursor down the page to indicate if he/she liked what we did. Or they'll make up a code, like typing an 'x' to ask us to give them another take.' It sounds, in effect, like a sort of acting battery farm, a grinding, dehumanizing production line of disembodied phrases, delivered for hours on end. Hardly conducive to Oscar-winning performances."
Who would have thought it?
Rush jobs typically exhibit signs of low quality and lack of attention to detail.
Decent writing might help as well. In my experience, dialogue is written by game designers. Writing dialogue is not always their main talent.
I think they're talking about in-game interaction with NPCs, not cut-scenes. In Modern Warfare for instance, you *need* to listen to your friendlies or you won't get anywhere.
"..."
Likely because cartoons have a defined narrative flow(even the ones where coherence between episodes is considered minimally important).
Unless the game is totally on rails, a fair bit of the voice acting will basically consist of delivering lines used to fill out obscure corners of some dialog tree, or to be shouted pseudo-randomly by NPCs of various flavors. Cartoon voice acting may well, particularly in lower budget stuff, be done on the cheap; but it is much more likely that the voice actor(s) will have access to something resembling a script, which will allow them to inject some degree of plausibility into what they are doing.
Not at all, you get used to it pretty quickly. What you can do is replace the voice with some gibberish noises. For example, Zelda games tend to use vocal "calls" (think "hey!", a laugh, or some other attention-calling noise) but then the actual dialogue is text. Quite a few RPGs just make some sort of semi-random gibberish noise as the dialogue text is being scrolled onto the screen. It all works pretty well. You don't have to hear actual voices to convince yourself that the characters are speaking.
Getting voice over artists who understand the accents they're meant to be using would also be nice.
Having CoD4 ruined by the "British" voices pronouncing "depot" and "missile" in the USAian way (DEE-pot and MISS-le; rather than DEP-ot and miss-ILE) and using "cellphone" instead of "mobile". Five minutes work with a British person would have highlight this and minimised that ranting that I shouted at the computer screen.
I think morrowind went the correct route and just used text versus stilted dialog. I think bethesda though that with the greater budget for oblivion they could do the same thing with speech and it sounds awful and disjointed. Freelancer had the same problem with terrible pauses between the segments of speech.
zosxavius photography