Recasting Life Is Strange: Video Game Voice Acting during the 2016–2017 SAG-AFTRA Strike

Abstract

Video game voice acting does not rank among the core roles of video game production, yet actors in leading roles sometimes achieve wide recognition despite their contingent employment. In this article, we explore the role of voice actors in the video game culture using the specific case of the recasting of the video game series Life Is Strange, which was caused by the 2016 to 2017 SAG-AFTRA strike against video game companies. Our qualitative empirical analysis of journalistic coverage (including interviews with voice actors), promotional materials, press releases, and player discussions reconstructs the events of the game’s production and investigates the reception of the recasting with regard to actor-character identification and to labor conditions of voice actors. We find that voice actors, whose status is partly dependent on the popularity of their characters, attempt to rise “above the line” by engaging in relational labor.

Developer Credit: Para-Industrial Hierarchies of In-Game Credit Attribution in the Video Game Industry

“…The goal is to highlight the forms and structures by which credit is assigned and hierarchized. My close reading of in-game credits sequences, which I treat as multimodal phenomena, draws from previous research on key issues in production studies, including above-the-line and below-theline divisions (Bulut, 2015;Caldwell, 2008;Hill, 2016;Kerr & Kelleher, 2015;Švelch & Švelch, 2020b), authorship (Aarseth, 2004;Christensen, 2012;Consalvo, 2013;deWinter, 2019), or outsourcing (Kerr & Cawley, 2012;Ozimek, 2019).…”

“Definitive playthrough”: Behind-the-scenes narratives in let’s plays and streaming content by video game voice actors

“…Despite their crucial contributions to story-driven games, game production research has overlooked the work of video game actors, with just a couple of papers on the subject (Domsch, 2017; Švelch and Švelch, 2020). During the production process, actors usually provide voiceovers and sometimes—especially in higher budget titles—also motion capture or facial expression capture data for individual characters.…”

“…Video game acting is a specific category of acting different from film and stage performance, with a specific set of challenges deriving from the “non-linear and strongly decontextualized nature of the production process” (Domsch, 2017: 257). Over the years, many performers have specialized in video game work, some of them—like Troy Baker or Jennifer Hale (known for her work in the Mass Effect series)—even becoming semi-celebrities within a parallel star system of video game voice acting (Švelch and Švelch, 2020). But regardless of their achievements, actors’ position in the game industry is rather ambiguous.…”

“…Actors also tend to be kept in the dark regarding the games they are working on due to the secretive nature of the video game industry (Weststar, 2015), performing fragments of the script in sound recording booths or motion capture stages with limited information about what the finished game will look like. Unsatisfactory working conditions and financial compensation led to the SAG-AFTRA 2016–2017 strike against video game companies (Švelch and Švelch, 2020). In our previous work, we have found that video game actors at various stages of their careers engage on social media and create content for their fans.…”

“…They can address fans without cultural and industry intermediaries and solidify their status among fans by performing relational labor (Baym, 2018). This way, actors can compensate for the fact that their role in game production tends to be viewed as peripheral to game development (Švelch and Švelch, 2020).…”