REBUTTAL TO: Narration: The Technique That Voice Acting Gave
Drew Robarge makes the argument that voice narration is more effective than text narration; I'm here to present a few counter-arguments against narration and voice acting in games in general.
The first obstacle to good narration is the narrator. A poor actor doesn't add anything to a game; rather, he can detract from it, creating a whole new dimension of self-consciousness, not to mention being irritating. For some reason, English-speaking voice actors seem unable to bring life to their roles, and either flail about like they were taught their lines phonetically or act wooden to the point of sounding sedated. While Japanese voice actors are of a much higher quality and sound more natural and more spirited, there's not a lot of point of listening to narration in a language you can't understand. It would sound better, but again, you'd be stuck reading the text, this time in the form of subtitles. The only solution would be to find good, believable, English-speaking voice actors, and there seems to be a shortage of those. Indeed, this situation is only getting worse; please see Star Ocean: Till the End of Time if you don't believe me.
The other consideration is interactivity. I don't know about you, but I would rather be playing the game than listening to the characters talk. Constant vocalization does nothing but slow down the game and make cutscenes more tedious; as I said before, the quality of acting is usually so bad as to add nothing but an extra factor of annoyance to the game. There is an oft quoted study that states the brain is less active while watching television than while sleeping, and the reason for this is that one can recieve images and sounds passively and automatically. Reading, however, stimulates the brain, and imagining what Cloud's voice would sound like is a creative exercise in itself. The fact that games have been becoming less and less like games and more like trite, poorly-acted movies is something we should be protesting, not embracing.
I admit that poor voice acting has been a pet peeve of mine for some time now. I find nothing more agonizing than having to listen to some hack struggle through his lines, trying to sound enthusiastic, or worse, cool, but mostly coming off as confused. It's bad enough when people can't make their battle noises sound authentic; butchered dialogue is far worse. Yes, there used to be well-acted games:Metal Gear Solid, Star Ocean:the Second Story, so on and so forth, but I think the era of decent English voice actors has come to a tragic end.
Drew's example of voice being used to illustrate tone has a point, but to go back to Final Fantasy Seven for a moment, I think Cloud's animations conveyed his tone and mood pretty well. Only the least imaginative and empathetic of us could have been confused by his gestures: when he slumped forward and shook his head, or when Tifa put her hands behind her back to look 'cute', or Sephiroth's grandiose 'Christ on the cross' act. Also, I'm puzzled by Drew's stating that he can't recall a game that 'talks to the audience through text as a way of telling the story'. Of course not; we're talking about role playing games. You're not supposed to be constantly reminded that you are in the audience. This would bring yet another level of self-consciousness to the game. You're supposed to get into it, to use your imagination, to become one of these people; you're not a spectator, you are Cloud! RPGs are supposed to be known for the depth of their characters; having 'the game', an anonymous entity, tell the story, from, I assume, an omniscient third person perspective, would make for an incredibly shallow and staggeringly pointless gaming experience.
Yes, RPGs are games that are supposed to tell a story, and some have done it so masterfully that they deserve to be known as interactive literature, rather than a simple game, and given the same respect recieved by novels. Games should be literary, and should not attempt to be movies. Let me pose a question: If you had fifty hours to kill, how would you choose to spend them? Would you read a long novel, play an RPG, or watch fifty hours worth of movies? How many of you have been able to sit for hours and hours reading, or stay up all night long playing a game, yet find yourself fidgeting near the end of a long movie? The reason for this is that the novel and the game are both interactive; you aren't just sitting and staring, you're processing text, you're turning pages or pushing buttons, you're imagining what the characters in the novel look like, or what the game characters sound like. In other words, you are creating something. It's something personal, something that doesn't exist outside your mind, but you are creating aspects of a character that are nonexistent otherwise. You are involved and engaged like you can't be with a movie, and your brain is being stimulated in a way a movie can't. Video games are a unique experience; please, let's try to keep them that way.
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