RE: We chat about videogames and videogame accessories.
07-04-2013, 05:28 PM
Okay, this is a digression, I know, and voice acting can be great and all, buuuut I really would posit that the sacrifices (of varying avoidability) made to put it in leaves the state of the typical game in a worse place than they would be without. This would not necessarily be a problem but for that “everyone’s doing it” in the AAA space.
Text is not just faster to develop than graphical levels (the MUD author’s advantage over MMORPG content churn!); computers are better at splicing it together in various ways, which leads to a greater capacity for simulative experiences and opportunities for moments of emergence. Games that do attempt to take advantage of these properties are at present mostly driven into a niche.
Voice acting also ruined video game music. Now it’s turned into the landscape of samey ambient/minimalist stuff that plagues modern cinema. Yeah, there are definitely other issues going on in all that, and certainly not every game needs to sound synth-y, but the potential and impact of dynamic music is lessened when music is treated as this canned prerecorded thing as opposed to this thing that lives just like the sprites dancing at the beck and call of their button-pressing overlord.
The impact of voice acting in video games on non-verbal storytelling is left as an exercise to the reader.
I consider this particular aspect of gaming strongly analogous to the state of film in the late 1920s. Talkies did more than drive the old talent out of town and leave thousands of live-playing theater musicians jobless—the technology was not quite where it needed to be in general (to say nothing of the state of overdubbing and mixing at the time). The required equipment bulked up, since sound necessitated a consistent frame rate; microphones were only so advanced, and magnetic tape hadn’t been invented. This meant stiffer camera work and less free movement in acting (the boom mic did get invented pretty quickly, though). No more were handcrank camera operators following actors out into a busy street with a camera or anything experimentally adventurous like that; if you can’t carry the camera, that’s not an option. This is not to say that the technology would not catch up soon enough (it did, within a few years) or that the studio system that emerged didn’t pump out some quality stuff at an inhuman rate (it did, for quite a few years), but that the artistic growth of the mainstream movie may have been stunted at an early stage as the increased expense of filmmaking drove smaller studios and more experimental out of business.
So forgive me if I seem a bit dubious on the benefits of voice acting. Yes, there will be no moratorium on its use that I can see. As a consumer, things will even feel a bit empty without it, I’ll admit that (and I find games with only partial dialogue voicing a bit jarring). The genie’s out of the bottle, and it has been since, like... Sinistar or something.
I did not even touch on the issue of poorly executed voice acting in games or the highly subjective nature of what even has good voice acting (the bulk of it does not impress me; I’ll put it that way), and have only skirted the issue of what it does to budget and production schedules compared to a game that doesn’t have it (like, if you need to patch the dialogue later on, but can’t record any more or fake it somehow? well that’s too bad), or that it makes people who read the lines slip up due to the different speed, or that it adds so much memory usage that could have been spent on more substantial resources, etc. That said, I have not touched on these issues because someone is no doubt going to be an apologist for the illiterati, that is, people who eschew reading for no intellectually defensible reason and I’d rather *blather blather*
(dear hypothetical employer using Google to see if I care about game audio as much as I say I do: Yup. Game audio is SERIOUS BUSINESS. And your voices will be fine! I’m a dissenter, not a rebel.)
Finally, it’s true I’ve wanted to voice act for some time (or real act!) but I’m afraid I’m not cut out for it and my lot in life is to be a useless stereotypical overeducated and underemployed Internet gadfly.
Text is not just faster to develop than graphical levels (the MUD author’s advantage over MMORPG content churn!); computers are better at splicing it together in various ways, which leads to a greater capacity for simulative experiences and opportunities for moments of emergence. Games that do attempt to take advantage of these properties are at present mostly driven into a niche.
Voice acting also ruined video game music. Now it’s turned into the landscape of samey ambient/minimalist stuff that plagues modern cinema. Yeah, there are definitely other issues going on in all that, and certainly not every game needs to sound synth-y, but the potential and impact of dynamic music is lessened when music is treated as this canned prerecorded thing as opposed to this thing that lives just like the sprites dancing at the beck and call of their button-pressing overlord.
The impact of voice acting in video games on non-verbal storytelling is left as an exercise to the reader.
I consider this particular aspect of gaming strongly analogous to the state of film in the late 1920s. Talkies did more than drive the old talent out of town and leave thousands of live-playing theater musicians jobless—the technology was not quite where it needed to be in general (to say nothing of the state of overdubbing and mixing at the time). The required equipment bulked up, since sound necessitated a consistent frame rate; microphones were only so advanced, and magnetic tape hadn’t been invented. This meant stiffer camera work and less free movement in acting (the boom mic did get invented pretty quickly, though). No more were handcrank camera operators following actors out into a busy street with a camera or anything experimentally adventurous like that; if you can’t carry the camera, that’s not an option. This is not to say that the technology would not catch up soon enough (it did, within a few years) or that the studio system that emerged didn’t pump out some quality stuff at an inhuman rate (it did, for quite a few years), but that the artistic growth of the mainstream movie may have been stunted at an early stage as the increased expense of filmmaking drove smaller studios and more experimental out of business.
So forgive me if I seem a bit dubious on the benefits of voice acting. Yes, there will be no moratorium on its use that I can see. As a consumer, things will even feel a bit empty without it, I’ll admit that (and I find games with only partial dialogue voicing a bit jarring). The genie’s out of the bottle, and it has been since, like... Sinistar or something.
I did not even touch on the issue of poorly executed voice acting in games or the highly subjective nature of what even has good voice acting (the bulk of it does not impress me; I’ll put it that way), and have only skirted the issue of what it does to budget and production schedules compared to a game that doesn’t have it (like, if you need to patch the dialogue later on, but can’t record any more or fake it somehow? well that’s too bad), or that it makes people who read the lines slip up due to the different speed, or that it adds so much memory usage that could have been spent on more substantial resources, etc. That said, I have not touched on these issues because someone is no doubt going to be an apologist for the illiterati, that is, people who eschew reading for no intellectually defensible reason and I’d rather *blather blather*
(dear hypothetical employer using Google to see if I care about game audio as much as I say I do: Yup. Game audio is SERIOUS BUSINESS. And your voices will be fine! I’m a dissenter, not a rebel.)
Finally, it’s true I’ve wanted to voice act for some time (or real act!) but I’m afraid I’m not cut out for it and my lot in life is to be a useless stereotypical overeducated and underemployed Internet gadfly.
sea had swallowed all. A lazy curtain of dust was wafting out to sea