The Problems With Video Game Voice Acting 251
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Soulskill
from the who-called-in-de-fleet dept.
from the who-called-in-de-fleet dept.
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."
Like the games themselves (Score:5, Insightful)
Who would have thought it?
Rush jobs typically exhibit signs of low quality and lack of attention to detail.
Left click (Score:2, Insightful)
solves that problem. Left click...left click...left click.....ooh, I can play the game now - cool!
Note to developers: I play games to avoid having to watch tv (along with all the hackneyed plots, poor acting, terrible dialogue etc), not so I can experience more of it.
Want to pay $100 per game? (Score:1, Insightful)
That's what it's going to cost to deliver across the board AAA assets consistantly in games.
It's not just the voice acting (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Left click (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:How about just not having voice acting? (Score:2, Insightful)
Except that surely it would be jarring in a different way to have all of this background noise but then not have the characters speak?
I do agree that the voice acting can be terrible in RPGs, though. Oblivion and Fallout 3 sounded very "samey" with a lot of characters, even if you've walked miles to get to them. They also didn't always match the character that well.
Re:Like the games themselves (Score:5, Insightful)
It takes some talent, but if you have played Bad Company 2 you know how great the sound environment is. Voice acting doesn't sound as bad when rest of the sounds are done correctly [youtube.com] and when having a dynamic sound world. It's amazing how good it sounds in BC2 - you hear close things like team mates talking, huge explosions and everything happening around and in distance, and voice and gun sounds sound different inside and outside buildings.
If you're only listening to talking, even mediocre voice acting will sound bad. Surrounded with all the other sounds in the world and it doesn't sound so bad anymore. However, it doesn't mean it all has to be explosions and high volume - while sneaking in a jungle you could hear the grass you're walking on, leafs, bugs, and your team mate whispering to you while at the same time hearing distant sounds. It takes the whole thing to make one part of it to feel good.
Re:How is this different from a cartoon? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:How about just not having voice acting? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
How about fixing accents? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Like the games themselves (Score:4, Insightful)
Brutal Legend was one game that I was thinking recently had some great voice acting, and it seems this guy was one of the voice actors in it :)
Voice acting is a very important component for making an immersive game, but you also have to have a good script. Was playing through Bad Company 2 in the last week and the script was awful compared to the first. Same great voice actors, but there was a sudden injection of swearing into every cut scene, and slightly less humour. I don't even have a problem with swearing in general (see Brutal Legend for details :) ), but after the first game having little to no swearing IIRC, it was out of place for those characters to be swearing like troopers all of a sudden. Despite being troopers.
There are a few games where you can tell that the actors had to record masses of dialog completely out of context - Oblivion for example has a lot of interactive voice dialog and the inflection in some of it can be rather iffy.
There are exceptions... (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course this works under the premise that acting is a profession, which some disagree with.
Re:Like the games themselves (Score:0, Insightful)
just like software translations. Sames process, same bad quality!
Re:Like the games themselves (Score:2, Insightful)
On behalf of "stupid monkey" actors everywhere, allow me to invite you to bite my... you know what? Forget it. You typed exactly one sentence and made about 48 errors. Anything I say is just going to be as pointless and unhelpful as your post.
Re:How is this different from a cartoon? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Like the games themselves (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't understand people who say "This voice acting is terrible". Sure if I play something like Mario Sunshine, which has atrocious voicing, then I'll notice but for the most part I don't. It's just vocalized reading of the words on the screen.
Of course I also don't understand people who say "Babylon 5 has lousy acting" or "Japanese anime sounds better in Japanese". To me B5 acting is no worse or better than Star Trek stiltedness. And my copy of Love Hina (old but a classic) is just as funny whether I watch in Japanese or English.
Maybe I'm just not as picky or sensitive to voice nuances.
Re:It's not just the voice acting (Score:3, Insightful)
If I remember correctly KotOR, along with some of their other earlier games, suffered from having a mute main hero. You select lines, but they never say them out loud, thus you end up with a very unnatural dialog flow in the game. That kind of high level game design stuff bothers me much more then any lack of voice talent when it comse to individual lines.
Re:Like the games themselves (Score:3, Insightful)
I almost always watch my Japanese animation in Japanese. There are a couple reasons for this, starting with the fact that sometimes awkward phrasing is needed in English to match the mouth flaps of the character. Also, I don't speak Japanese, so if the voice actor is horrible, I won't know it :P
It's more important to me that the voice fits the character, that it sounds right. And, often, the Japanese seem to do a better job of that then the Americans. Just my opinion and preference.
Re:How is this different from a cartoon? (Score:2, Insightful)
Daggerfall also had great voice acting. Too bad Bethesda dropped the ball while creating Oblivion ...
Re:Like the games themselves (Score:1, Insightful)
If these are what typify acting for you, it's no wonder that neither looks better or worse. If you pick two chunks from the manure pile, it doesn't matter how you compare them...they're both crap.
Re:Like the games themselves (Score:3, Insightful)
Funny, but true. I've often thought that geeky shows get a pass in acting quality because a large segment of the target audience cannot discern good from bad acting anyways. Dr. Who and Babylon 5 come immediately to mind. Which is weird, when a show like Battlestar Galactica comes on with mostly third rate actors, it is hailed as acting supremacy (relative to other sci-fi shows, of course).
Re:Like the games themselves (Score:1, Insightful)
That's what you got out of his post? He's talking about a quality mix, you fool. Listen... take your favorite band, then pull all the instruments down in the mix so you can only hear the lead vocalalist. Now listen to that over and over on your ipod. Not so great any more, is it? Think it will sell?
*Hah!* ?
What an idiot.
Re:Like the games themselves (Score:3, Insightful)
I think you're forgetting that many actors audition for a single role. There are lots of "actors" out there who bring down the average. The problem with this thread is the usual problem with discussions - the lack of specificity or boundary setting.
The average actor will give a terrible performance. To correct that, we can say the average actor who wins the role will give an average performance. Or the average performing actor will give an average performance. If you took all of the actors, all 50k of the non-cited anonymous registered actors, and had them perform whatever they wished in whatever setting they wished, you would have a few remarkable performances, a lot of average performances, and decide to euthanize the rest for the good of humanity. It would be American Idol auditions scale terrible.
So AC's point was, out of 6 billion people, only 50k have officially put any thought into acting. There are probably many more closet cases of "I did a community theatre production of Annie or Wizard of Oz once." But out of those 50k, the best are going to be performing more, probably as much as they can manage to. The not-best actors will win an audition when the role suits them more, or when the best can't make it due to performing on live world-wide television.
So the fundamental assumption we must make is that above-average actors will have more performances, on average, than below-average performers.
To conclude, the "average actor" is not representative of the "average performance".
How does this apply to the argument at hand? One guy says that anyone can read a script (6 billion people) and an actor says nuh-uh it's more like some other number that I can't really decipher, but there are numbers involved other than 6 billion.
Who's wrong? They both are, but because the second guy rambled into incoherence it's hard to pin him down. You can't hand an English script to any of 6 billion people and have it work - some will be too old, too young, or the wrong sex. Or not sound just right for the part. Or they might not even be able to read English, or not pronounce it correctly. Unless you want a foreign accent in there, you're going to need to limit yourself to 400 million, to round up. Gender takes that to 200 million, age maybe makes it 20 million. Then remove people with speech impediments or other reasons not to hire, maybe you're down to 10 million. So the potential pool of voice actors might be 10 million, at most.
Out of those 10 million, how many people could readily study a script, have a conversation with the director, and make a recordable performance? I've spoken with a lot of people, and the clarity of voice and inflection necessary to convey meaning and emotion varies wildly. In my experience, I'd say less than 10 percent, leaving 1 million hypothetically capable people in the pool, of which most are busy in other lines of work.
Of these, the other guy as I've been calling him says 50k actually work - and that's not just voice, that's apparently everything. Whatever calculations were henceforth derived are far more plausible than the 6 million figure, making the second guy more right than wrong. digitig (1056110) took the word average out of context, and the responding AC posted a short version of this overly long comment. Out of context, digitig (1056110) and yourself are correct and you are doing logic correctly. In the context of the conversation, however, you fail. Sorry, I was trying to be polite but that last part just slipped out.
Now, specifically for The Ultimate Fartkno (756456), "stupid monkey" referred to how the actors were being treated, which is the whole point of the article. Voice actors are treated as if they simply follow steps and poop out a result, and fling it at the audience. Your offense is misplaced. Forgive me if I don't stick around, you're not the only person to be wrong on the internet.