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Voice Actors, Game Makers At An Impasse
The relationships between game developers and voice actors are becoming increasingly strained, according to a report from the Los Angeles Times. One of the issues involves so-called “atmospheric voices,” or the background characters such as soldiers, monsters, and other NPCs that populate game worlds. The Screen Actors Guild, which represents about 20 percent of those actors, has proposed a contract that would give actors an $800 fee for up to 20 of those atmospheric voices with up to 300 words per voice in a four-hour session.
Game makers bristle at such demands, and even the voice actors themselves are divided. "Before, you were doing three characters dying a horrible death. Now you're doing 20 characters dying a horrible death," voice actor Dee Baker told the L.A. Times. "Not only will this mean less money for more experiences, it's also going to be a lot more vocally difficult."
In addition to that dispute, the very nature of compensation for work in the game industry has been controversial with actors. Unlike the film and television industries, actors in games typically don’t earn any residual payments for their work. Actors who are expecting that to change any time soon are bound to be disappointed.
"In our business we're all employees and any upside we get is purely discretionary, so many of us are not going to have a lot of sympathy for actors who want back-end residuals," says Uncharted 2’s director Amy Hennig. "That's why we're talking two different languages when we sit down at a bargaining table."
If you’re interested in learning more about the give and take between actors and their employers, you should definitely read the whole article. Both sides make a decent case, and it should be interesting to see how the issue is resolved over the coming months.
That said, am I alone in thinking that decent voice performances are still relatively rare within the game industry? For every Uncharted 2, there seem to be several more titles with monotone delivery, odd inflection, and death screams that probably wouldn’t make the cut in even the hammiest straight-to-DVD movie release. It’s great that games are being taken more seriously by Hollywood, but there’s still obviously a long way to go with voice acting. There's also the tradition of games being voiced by members of a team's staff, which at least gives the impression that developers don't think actors are providing an irreplaceable service.
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