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There are a lot of frustrating things in this world, and I hope I’ll get around to freaking on all of them, one at a time, week by week. If you have a rant, or want to suggest one, keep it to yourself. I’ve got enough of my own. Don’t make me any more hateful and evil than I already am. My therapist told me to tell you that. Voiceovers. Is there anything more annoying, or embarrassing, than crappy voiceovers? I’m paying upwards of fifty bucks for a game that sounds like a high-school production of The Importance of Being Earnest. And I’m not talking about that Earnest from the baloney commercials and subsequent feature films. Why would a company spend millions of dollars developing a game and then allow some untalented amateurs to aurally piss all over it with their terrible acting skills? What’s going on? How does this happen? Believe it or not, I have some answers. Voiceovers are one of the most important elements of a game. It certainly is important to the movies, TV shows, and cartoons. Most people wouldn’t know if an actor had poor body language, but if that person can’t act, the show’s over. Take South Park for instance. The graphics couldn’t be worse, but it’s the acting and the dialogue that make the show. And radio? Voiceovers are the only thing radio can count on to deliver the news, commercials, and music info. I can’t stress the importance of the voice. Nothing destroys an illusion quicker than badly recited lines. So, why are games so horribly overlooked? The main factors contributing to terrible voiceovers in games are laziness, stupidity, ignorance, and nepotism. Let’s start with laziness. The producer is getting burned out having to coax a professional performance out of an amateur thespian improv group the company hired for economic reasons. They were funny at the company Christmas party. So the producer gives up out of frustration and just tells the gang to read their lines into the mic so he can go to the bar and forget the last few days. Stupidity is hiring the local thespian improv group in the first place. You get what you pay for, stupid. Ignorance can be contributed to the developers that don’t speak English. They need to have their games translated to English. So they hire local English teachers to read the lines. But the developers are ignorant of the subtleties of English inflections. Of course, the teachers think they’ve done a great job and tell the developers so. I know this to be true because I know of such a teacher. He’s an absolute idiot, and is not an accredited teacher as most overseas English teachers are. And he’s a terrible actor to boot. Last but not least is nepotism; it extends beyond the immediate family in this case. Developers may have investors or CEOs with huge egos. They want their kids, or themselves, to be the voice of a certain character. How do you tell the guy that put two million dollars into your company that his daughter sucks? You don’t. You live with it. And that means we have to as well. There’s an old saying: If you can’t say something good about someone, don’t say anything. Allow me to amend that to: If you can’t say something good, shut the hell up and get someone that can. You will note that I also mentioned dialogue as helping to make a show. Bad dialogue can make even the greatest actor sound like a complete moron, but at least a good actor will sound believable as a complete moron and not someone just reading lines, badly. So I’ll rant about dialogue in an upcoming article, if I don’t stress out and die of a heart attack before then. |