Ars Technica: Members of the SAG-AFTRA union have overwhelmingly approved a measure authorizing an "interactive media" strike that could have wide-ranging impact on the availability of professional voice talent for video game projects. The union announced today that 96.52 percent of its members voted in favor of the strike. That's well above the 75 percent threshold that was necessary to authorize such a move and a result the union is calling "a resounding success."
2 comments:
Wow! This is pretty exciting news. For a while now, video game publishers have totally been screwing over voice actors in ways that would not be tolerated in other industries. SAG-AFTRA has a set of rules and regulations that all other projects have to follow, so why should the video game industry be any different. As an avid video gamer (although not since coming to CMU..) I think that good voice work can totally make a good game a great one, and that bad voice work can make a good game a mediocre one. So much of getting involved and caring about the world and environment of the game is about having relatable and believable characters. When the voice work is of low quality, it totally pulls you out of the world that the developers have crafted. So in a sense, the voice actors in these games have a lot more power than I think they have exercised in the past. Although I hope it does not come to a strike, I do hope that video game publishers take these complaints seriously and will work sincerely to resolve them.
I love witnessing the back and forth of labor negotiations for emerging industries, like video games. I imagine that the game companies would have to make a pretty substantial offer to any scabs crossing the picket line, because I would imagine that most non-union actors are ultimately trying to get union protection at some point in their career, and it would be pretty catastrophic to be any sort of actor, voice or no, and be blacklisted from SAG-AFTRA.
I am interested in seeing how the internet/gamer community reacts to this, and if there's any internet buzz that adds a level of complexity to the negotiations. Gamers are often extremely vocal about causes that are important to them, but I don't think there's the inherent acceptance/support of unions as there is in the theater/film communities. I would think that, if the gamer community at large came around in opposition to SAG-AFTRA, the game companies could hypothetically be better justified in taking the risk of negotiating harder with SAG-AFTRA.
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