We chat about videogames and videogame accessories.

Speaking of voice acting, I really want to do that someday.

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.

all i really know about this is that skyrim's voice acting really cut down on the amount of possible dialogue for npcs leading to a less varied experience and certain memes related to people saying the same thing whenever you got within hearing distance, which arguably is less immersive than no voice acting at all, in the same way that character models aren't exactly rigged with realistic movement in most games which makes it more jarring than stylized movement

in addition it hurts modded quests because they seem really empty without any voice acting in them by comparison, since there's nothing to fill in the auditory space left behind

i'd rather have more content than voices for every line in the game (to a certain point)

Honestly I can take bad voice acting, the only part of it that frustrates me is when games force me to listen to it with no skip button when I can read far faster than they talk

I can only think of a few games where voice acting has genuinely improved the experience for me (see: Bastion). I don't dislike it on principle, though. As brp said, modern games (especially AAA titles) would feel a bit empty without it.

That said, annoying/repetitious/poorly performed voice acting can definitely hurt my enjoyment of a game.

(HEY)

(LISTEN)

I am mostly dead serious. Go back to the exact words I used: “music is treated as this canned prerecorded thing as opposed to this thing that lives”—this is the primary point; the cutting edge of game audio was not afraid to play with that concept before voice acting came along. I don’t think I’ve seen a game more musically capable of film-scoring techniques than Monkey Island 2; Ocarina of Time’s dynamically adjusted overworld music takes a significant portion of the N64’s CPU time to bring you a more responsive experience than the meticulously recorded (and nonstandard-tuned for Celestial Sphere musical qabalah compatibility) orchestras of Skyrim.

First, I do mean it as a prevalent trend, not “it’s going to be bad in every case forever”. The hyperbolic phrasing I used is similar to an assertion that WoW ruined the MMORPG or that GoW ruined the third-person shooter—of course they didn’t! That’s not what they set out to do. But what happened is that they did inspire a lot of clones, which wouldn’t be a problem except that now that’s most of what people make and play in those genres now, to the exclusion of other major variations. When having a certain feature or set of features is so successful that people can’t imagine things any other way, the other ways die off or languish in obscurity for a time. And this is a multi-dimensional problem, by the way; I’m not saying that there is one right way or one wrong way to do things, but that one wrong way to do things is to ape what “everyone” else is already doing, particularly without first understanding why that may or may not be best for what you are doing (in fact, another equally wrong way is to commit the Chesterton’s fence fallacy of changing things without understanding the reasons for the initial state of things, hence the identification of voice acting as a problematic factor).

Now yes, I do think there is room in this world for the music I consider to be a part of the problem. Some of that is very good stuff! The problem is that I just hear this in a not-insignificant proportion of games, and not only is it happening at the expense of tonal music, it’s often done less competently than it is in movies because they don’t adjust for game pacing being player-driven. The problem is that they would rather duck the music track than remove instruments from the mix or be judicious in where they pan things. The problem is that they are not paying due respect to the interplay of music and what is happening on the screen.

I’m actually not making a plea for quality music here (I don’t think any professional game music composer is sitting down and thinking, “I will do my not-best today.”) or for assiduous Nintendo/LucasArts-level attention to detail, even though those things are very nice and wouldn’t hurt; I’m asking for a little more basic scoring techniques, rather than always resorting to the sort of music you could theoretically purchase and throw in. Some of the greatest film scores often sound pretty blah outside the film, because it is only an isolated part of a Gesamtkunstwerk (as long as I’m stealing a lot of thunder from the TUN videos here, which I am).

I think it’s rather telling that the game music you posted has a median release date of 2001-ish. As far as I can tell this general trend really started becoming noticeable around that time. What changed? Well, for one, it was the time for DVD format to shine, and that meant a lot more room for voice clips and prerecorded music—it was possible before, but CDs weren’t big or fast enough in comparison that you’d want to do it as much. In fact, a number of those examples weren’t even remotely being a part of what I consider to be part of the problem, many of the newer examples not being movie-wannabes nor mass market hits.

No, I am concerning myself with the trendy bestsellers that create a large-scale shared cultural context here, of the sort where I can run into another player of these games. I’m well aware there are plentiful exceptions; games like Bastion and Persona 4 are popular, but they aren’t chart-toppingly popular. You look at the chart toppers for the past few years and you see roughly three things in terms of music: a Nintendo/mobile preference for tunes of sufficient melodicity to fill in for a lack of voice acted dialogue*, and a sports/rhythm preference for Billboard spots, a shooter/sandbox/movielike preference for Rick Berman’s “sonic wallpaper” approach.

And the only sonic wallpaper I like concerns the Sega mascot.

* Yes, I have somehow not addressed the causation here, but at this point I’ve spit out a short essay’s worth of drivel and can’t help but feel I’d be wasting people’s time if I do—it’s partly my time being wasted, too, because I would have to dig through a ridiculous amount of research just to demonstrate this, and right now my research time is stuck in trying to get a dynamic music system of my own programmed in the first place. Nevertheless, I am firmly convinced that having the room for CD-quality audio is what’s the cause for temptation to put in voice acting and then not work around that—it’s laziness, it’s time commitments, it’s a lot of things all different in each case, I’m sure. It is, at any rate, not voice acting’s fault that it’s too desirable to leave out, or that it takes so much time to record, or that computers are simply incapable of it. Yet regardless of cause or my own inability to prove things, I am not ashamed to point my finger at it for making games less “watertight” experiences, and part of that is in the audio space where it’s a godmoding gloryhog.

I have nothing significant to add here, but The Wonderful 101 looks awesome and I'm surprised I haven't heard of it before now

EDIT: Also, the Cube World alpha is out! Aaaaand it's $20. It's a gorgeous-looking game, but you'd think they'd have a reduced price for people who buy during alpha. Still, gonna be following this one closely.

looks like the site crashed from everybody trying to get in at the same time

ah, technology

Well, I started a study in an attempt to refute with a degree of statistical certainty, but then I calculated the scope of the work involved, and it was not trivial in the least. It’d take weeks. Ain’t nobody got time for that (okay, someone out there surely does, but I’m not getting paid for this).

Then I started a different approach by conducting a literature survey, particularly looking at what various game music-related people said at various times. In context, a lot of these things they said were partly what they might have considered important to share with would-be game musicians. I do have a few sources with a number of such statements over the years*, but the scope was still too great and the gaps in materials even greater. To make matters more complicated, I got plenty of reminders that professional music people frequently outright contradict each other when it comes to opinions and interpretation of the exact same evidence. I mean, not that I need a reminder. I have Jeremy Soule as a “friend” on Facebook and that means I’m subscribed to the occasional (vague) commentary on actual pieces he did or YouTube link of inspiring classical music. But also to wacky trollposts and open letters to the DPRK to please not use his music for bad ends. Sometimes I notice other game industry composers commenting on these statuses, like when they don’t agree. Anyway, it was an interesting exercise in comparison and contrast, but to fully explore this and share the results would involve pasting an uncomfortable amount of text verbatim, which I don’t think the publishers/authors would necessarily appreciate. Plus some of them didn’t even give much of a hint about their own philosophy of integrating music with other kinds of sound.

Then I just sat down in a corner sucking my thumb because I have a fragile ego and I’m out of my depth anyway. Okay, actually I was glued to Fallen London and also dealing with a lot of bad shit at home, but it’s not a completely inaccurate way of expressing my sentiments.

* Tricks of the Game Programming Gurus (1994, Sams Publishing) ch. 10 by John W. Ratcliff, which is mostly concerned with how to code working MIDI playback, which was kind of a disaster to get working in DOS, but it also contains an amount of speculation and pontification on matters of why and how to use music in games, and a short part where The Fat Man (George Sanger) discusses his take on the same, which section was sneakily taken from a part of a Dr. Dobb’s Journal article Ratcliff did and is now available online [url=]thanks to the Canadian government; Game Design: Secrets of the Sages Second Edition (2000, Brady Publishing) ch. 14 has short distillations of interviews with Chance Thomas, The Fat Man, Tommy Tallarico, Bobby Prince, Michael Land, Kelly Bailey, Ellen Meijers–Gabriel, and Andrew Barnabas; Keeping Score: Interviews with Today's Top Film, Television, and Game Music Composers (2009, Course Technology PTR) has interviews with Marty O’Donnell, Winifred Phillips, Inon Zur, Chris Velasco, Jesper Kyd, and Jason Graves but the focus seemed more for fans of soundtrack music rather than advice. Despite the differences in approaches, all of these were very present-focused and would be good things to read and compare to each other for anyone interested in the history of video game music.

An “in my opinion” wouldn’t stop it from being a polemic, only temper the language. It is very definitely a falsifiable (if subjective and surprisingly controversial) set of claims I make, summed up in a single concise statement that I still feels sums it up appropriately. It nonetheless left me open to an uncharitable interpretation that remained misinterpreted after a clarification (for example, I am not making an argument for “quality” at all). I said there were “other things” because I wasn’t sure I wanted to go into them—and now I am sure I didn’t. I’m done here.

I will continue being in my office.

i got a peacethree send help

PSN thing: SciSolaris

Let's play Skullgirlssss

i dont knooooooooooooooowwwwwwww

i'm probably getting journey and maybe tokyo jungle and scott pilgrim??? but i dont know if im getting skullgirls ps3 on account of not having played the PC beta that i also paid for and how i intend to buy it on steam for like a bunch of my friends???

difficult choices

Don't you like, get to play with PC people from the PSN version?

I also want Journey :I

THAT'S WHAT I WAS TOLD IN THE MSPAF who knows if it's actually true.

lab zero wants to include it a few months after the PC release! if i had to guess they'd probably use similar majik to what valve used for the portal 2 co-op thingy

I wish more people played Darkstalkers Resurrection, matchmaking takes longer than the actual matches :(

No nunchucks though, can't be Kung-fu-wolfman without 'em.

That game looks neat.

solaris: how about the entire metal gear series plus art books and movies for fifty dollars

the ps3 has hit enough exclusive games for me

the entire metal gear series, journey, ni no kuni, that weird hd kingdom hearts thing, unfinished swan, guacamelee, the last of us, ico/shadow of the colosus, maybe a final fantasy or two, i might be missing some

tokyo jungle?

also like persona but i'm playing 3 fes on my friend's ps2 and i'd rather play golden than straight-up 4; maybe i can borrow a vita?

i hear the latest version of the console is kinda cheaply made so hopefully i can find a not-broken old one

if i had patience i would have gotten the gta 5 bundle in september i think but this panned out well enough i think

the only problem is that for some reason there is blank trophy data for CODBLOPS and that makes me irrationally angry

I knew about the mgs legacy but i didnt know it had ART BOOKS and the first two games so i guess im getting that and then not playing them because IM SUPER GOOD AT PLAYING VIDEO GAMES

*stares at SKULLGIRLS BETA that he still hasn't played*

i guess ill see if they have that at BEST BUY or something and if not order it on amazons afterwards

VIDEO GAMES

oh hey cool it would be fun to get into Metal Gear Solid

Currently, there has been no confirmation of a release date for Europe.

yep that sounds about right

SKULLGIRLS

Oh shit that's right I've always been meaning to get Skullgirls why do I not have it yet aaaaaaaaaaa.

Time to rectify this error immediately.

I preordered the PC version and then it started taking forever.

Okay, that’s not completely fair, it’s only about 7 centiforevers.

Just to be clear, I’m insistent on establishing one DNF as a unit of lag time, rounded off at 15 years for convenience over accuracy.

I :I at any review that criticizes short game length. There is nothing wrong with a short game! I think many people mistakenly conflate length and quality.

Wanna clarify that absolute (i.e. air a more specific grievance) or may I take a swing? I don't want to end up having tried to refute some hyperbole.