The Guardian's Games blog explores the disposition 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 media nature of games, actors can't be given a measure film script from which they're able to gauge the throughline of their figure and a feel for the dramaturgic progress 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 separate 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 by the numbers to David Sobolov, one of the most versed videogame voice actors in the world (just check out his website), the meaningful time pressures mean that close, in-depth command 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 trait




roget's ii: the new thesaurusmain entry:reference
part of speech:noun
definition:a statement attesting to personal qualifications we're performing, the exec will silently direct us using the spreadsheet on the screen by simply moving the cursor down the page to mark 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 management line of disembodied phrases, delivered for hours on end. Hardly conducive to Oscar-winning performances."

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