In theatre, that’s the challenge for actors (and director and writer), beat by beat, scene by scene.

In games, where does the player exist in the scene? Because if they are suddenly relegated to a listener after being an actor, that’s awkward. And how are you otherwise present in the question?

[I don't know much about cutting-edge console games, I'm at best an educated idiot here, so be kind]

Agree also that it’s tough to act your way out of the uncanny valley. Better surely to acknowledge and incorporate the constraints of representation.

Famous name actors are only valuable for their names. That’s actually true in theatre too, but certainly in games.

Glassy, wandering eyes, awkward pauses, excess body movement, over enthusiastic eyebrows, these all contricute to killing the performances. As mentioned, Naughty Dog are getting there though, and I do think it’s the animation that’s helping it.

In games, the tone is often wrong. The conception is wrong. The conventions aren’t understood. The purpose of a line of dialogue is not understood.

Mainly, there’s no agreement between the actor and the listener about the artifice required to get the job done … so it’s not about the quality (as in good / bad) of the writing or the acting but the quality (timbre) of both that and the *direction.*

– In theatre I (the actor) am up on the stage. You (the listener) are at the back of a large boomy room. This is an even larger impediment than your actor-avatar having no tongue — but it works. It works because we both conspire to *permit* the exigencies required so you can hear what I’m saying. I’m not talking to my fellow actors, I’m talking to you, in a loud voice. Actors, listeners, writers, directors understand this.

– In film, when I talk it’s supposed to end up on screen like a like a coloured version of how two people really talk to each other, although of course it’s just as unreal as theatre. There’s a different set of agreements that lets us ignore the departure from reality. Sometimes a camera frame puts your eyes two inches away from my eyebrow and can see the twitch which makes you know I’m happy without me saying anything. Actors, listeners, writers, directors understand this.

– In games, what agreements should we make so I can depart from reality and you’ll allow me to do so? What sort of voice should I use? How should the lines be approached? How are we colluding (literally, ‘playing together’) to make a great game?

Most often, games where the dialogue is important to gameplay get it right — because the dialogue has a purpose related to the entire artefact if something doesn’t work it’s not a cringy line, but a *bug.* And where the dialogue’s purpose is about immersion of the player in a fiction to make o game more or … dunno … ‘fun,’ game designers / directors don’t ask the right questions.

I don’t deny there’s a million and one brute-force necessities of game audio creation (such as ensuring the player doesn’t hear the same line 1000 times in the pursuit of a goal) but more often than not it’s an issue of philosophy more than talent of writers or actors. After all, I can go to an off-off-off-West End production and enjoy a bunch of actors no-one’s heard of.

Why not in games?

Delivered breathtakingly well by voice actors who gave their characters life that lingered long after the game’s release, Bloodlines is the pinnacle of active voice as a tool of storytelling in the inherently visual and interactive artform that games is.

Lines about S&M culture, vampirism, et al evoked horror and setting ambience instead of coming off like teenage writers trying to sound like Big Boys. It’s a rare find in games, and still worth the play through.

For me Grim Fandango, Half-Life 2 and its episodes remain the pinnacle of acting in games. You don’t hear any voice straining, exaggerated accents or bad delivery in the voices (unlike, say, David Hayter in post-MGS1 games), the dialogue (admittedly well written) flows naturally and holds depth and charm beyond the usual purpose of informing you where to go next.

I’m also very fond of Michael Ironside in the Splinter Cell games, specially the first three. The games’ plots were pretty hokum, but they managed to make Sam a properly cool, smart, charming character (Don Jordan’s Lambert too, come to think of it), making a lot of the game’s dialogue far more entertaining.

Aside from all the excellent points made above I think there’s also a problem of expectation; something both developers and gamers are equally guilty of, though to get to the kernel of an explanation you have to dig deep and think about how dialogue functions across media.

When you watch almost any TV show (okay, let’s discount The Wire / Sopranos straight off) you’ll notice the cadence and metre of dialogue differs significantly from that of film. Lines are delivered in a less naturalistic manner, either because writers and actors are aware events have to be wrapped up within a 50 / 30 minute time frame, or, conversely, because they know they’ll be able to make a line reverberate three or four eps along (think Lost). So long as dialogue is faithful to the overall logic of the narrative the audience’ll likely swallow it. Over years and years audiences become accustomed to hearing this strange configuration of unnatural language and accept it as natural, even though it differs immensely from the humdrum banter they hear in Starbucks, or wherever.

Feature films can generally afford a few more layers of naturalism, mostly because there are fewer demands on the pace of narrative. It’s still grossly unnatural – you’d laugh yourself sick if you got on a train and overheard a conversation so carefully staged – but it’s a different way of speaking to that of dramatic television… more aware of its own linearity and finality. Again, we accept it mostly through convention, just because decades of movie going has convinced us that that’s just how it is.

There are as many modes of dialogue as there are media. When you see a video game character open their flickering putty mouth you (unconsciously) expect them to sound a certain way; to carry the words in that stunted, unreal, Saturday morning cartoon manner gamers have become accustomed to. Bad dialogue / delivery becomes inertia for both developer and audience. It’s the way it’s “meant” to be. Tellingly, localised anime tends to suffer the same fate.

Strong writing, rendering and acting are all necessary for breaking out of this mode, though liberation will come at the cost of a hell of a lot of what Don Draper calls “nostalgia”. That is, more pretentiously, the aural baggage of video gaming we think we want to lose but might actually want to reclaim. Who would have thought the likes of Final Fantasy X could one day become our His Girl Friday?