Posted in: Games, Video Games | Tagged: Ashly Burch, voice acting

Vocal Hemorrhaging And Low Pay – The Real Experience Of Video Game Voice Actors

In an interview with the Washington Post, voice actress Ashly Burch, who is described by the Post as "a rising star in the small world of voice actors, best known for her work in video games," went on the record about the difficulty facing voice actors, particularly in the video games sector. Burch's testimonial is basically a horror story in the making of overworked vocal chords, low pay, and mismanagement. And Burch is far from alone, she spoke of friends and acquaintances in the business who have suffered due to the way that the video games industry treats voice actors. One friend even suffered a hemorrhage in her vocal chords due to overexertion. Some taste blood in their mouths after recording sessions, others have fainted from screaming for prolonged periods of time.

As video games become longer, more nuanced, essentially functioning as 40-100 hour long movies instead of just games, things become even worse for the voice actors. While the voice actors of SAG-AFTA, the largest actors guild in Hollywood, went on strike last year against 11 of the largest video game developers over bonus pay and safety issues, the guild is still trying to settle a deal with those developers. One of the major hopes is that the typical four-hour recording session gets cut in half for stressful vocal work, you know, like the usual death scream. Which actors often need to record over and over for hours. On top of spending hours recording lines upon lines of regular dialogue, the vocal stress the actors are under in games voice over work is frankly a little bit frightening.

And that deal for shortened recording sessions would only cover guild actors. One other major issue with voice over work in "new media" – computer interfaces, video games, AI, even some ADR work – is that companies can and do try to cut corners using non-guild actors. And because getting into SAG guilds can be an incredibly difficult and lengthy process that often involves working as a non-guild actor for some time before being accepted, there's a pretty viable supply of non-guild actors out there looking for work. And since using non-guild actors hurts the guild actors by taking work away from the guild, this entire thing is a ridiculous perpetual cycle motivated by greed.

Because video games are now much more like movies and tv shows than they ever were before, but they're still being handled as if they're inherently different. And those in charge of recording sessions for game voice actors don't actually understand the physical limitations of voice work, which leads to things like actors performing repetitive death shrieks over and over for hours on end. All because hiring a proper talent director would cost an extra salary, and hiring guild actors with guild protections comes with a much higher cost as well. It is, pure and simply, the usual corporate greed at work. Save a few thousand dollars just because you can, even if you're getting sub-par work from non-guild actors pushed to their absolute limits.

And it needs to end.

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