Ready Player One: Video game voice actors deserve recognition

These days it seems to be in vogue for celebrities to try their hand at acting in video games.

Actress Ellen Page stars in Quantic Dream’s highly anticipated game “Beyond: Two Souls.” The “Juno” and “Inception” actress was quoted saying the experience resembled a “crazy acting bootcamp.” With a role that encompasses about 2,000 pages of script, tiny motion-capture dots all over her face and over 70 cameras capturing her every move, it’s easy to see why she’d characterize the experience as such.

But video game voice actors regularly spend weeks in the studio recording their parts, tweaking the dialogue, refining their voices to fit the character.

Now acting in video games is considered cool, and everyone from Christopher Walken to Neil Patrick Harris is getting in on the action. But with the influx of big name actors beginning to flood the market, will the veterans be swept aside to make room?

When you consider the amount of work that goes into recording dialogue for a game, especially an open world game in which there’s a myriad of choices and scenarios to put the character through, you start to realize the extent of the work voice actors put into games.

The actor might spend days or weeks in the studio recording things like “Oof!” and “Over here!” over and over again, in various ways so the fight scenes don’t get repetitive and so that the characters respond organically in-game.

Sadly, even though these game actors spend more time in the studio than the average A-list celeb, they are not really considered stars. Not a lot of people will run up to the voice of Mario on the street. Not a lot of people even know what the guy looks like.

Some big name actors deign to come and do cameos, have just a few lines, and they’re championed as the stars of the game, yet when a video game voice actor lays down hour upon hour of dialogue, he is still not really considered the star of the game.

Video game actors and voice-over actors go hand in hand. And voice actors tend to be just that – actors who are masters at manipulating their voices to match whatever is on the screen. Most physical actors probably haven’t spent so much time refining their voices, and often the characters they voice end up being rather forgettable.

Voice actors learn how to put emotion and nuance into the slightest utterances; they have to make the most of the lines they are given because it’s essentially the only thing they are in control of.

I’m not saying that big-name celebrities shouldn’t be involved in games, I’m just pointing out that voice actors are trained for this specifically. It would be similar to a football star joining a hockey team – he might do OK, but he’s certainly not going to put in the same time and effort that the other hockey players have devoted to the sport.

It’s a nice hook – something that will get the consumer to buy the game – but it’s not necessarily what is right for the game itself.

Sure, I’d be curious if I saw Tom Cruise as the star of the new “Call of Duty” game, but the curiosity would soon wear off and then we’d be left with a game that relied on a hook to sell rather than its own merits. I also doubt high-caliber stars like Cruise would be up for recording for days on end with a 2,000-plus page script, which a lot of games work off of.

Video game voice actors should be recognized more. It would be great if we had an Academy Awards for video game actors – we could call it the “Throaties” and give statues out that are shaped like voice boxes.

(OK, that might be a little weird – we’ll work on it.)

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