03.21.07
On international entertainment industries
I stayed home from today’s lecture so I could catch up on the Film History reading. It’s a subject that wobbles precariously between entertaining, fascinating, and boring. But it did get me thinking about the internationality (is that word?) of the games industry - funny how most things make me think about games these days.
Originally, the film industry was very international. Denmark, for example, was one of the major producing countries in the silent era, thanks to Nordisk Film (Great Northern) 
, and France and Germany were also very significant players on the international market. Localization was a breeze back then, as it was just a matter of translating the words on the intertitles and at most filming an alternative, more depressing ending for the Russians. But when the sound film came about just before the start of the 30′ies, the national film industries became much more localized and Hollywood pretty much became the only major international film industry, largely thanks to the language (there were other factors, but language was a major one).
So now I’m thinking… when you make a movie, you make heavy use of actors, right? In fact in anything but animation movies, the actual shooting phase wherein you use actors takes up a lot of time, even though editing is a time-consuming process as well. And the Star System is also a major selling point in films, we want to watch movies with good actors that we know (personally I would watch anything featuring Johnny Depp, even if it’d received abysmal reviews).
But in games, the voice acting phase is comparatively minuscule. It takes AGES to design the art assets, program the engine, script the interface and the story, design the levels, test for bugs and balance, and wrap it up into something playable. Voice acting is pretty much an afterthought, which I think is a large part of the reason why it’s possible for Danish IO Interactive to gain international success with the Hitman series, for Ukrainian GSC Game World to earn everybody’s attention with their bold plans for S.T.A.L.K.E.R. , and for French Ubisoft to kick so much ass you wouldn’t believe it. Sure, American studios have a huge share of the international market, but that seems to be mostly because they invented the damn thing, so I’d say they kinda deserve it. I’m just happy it’s possible for everybody else to sell their games to the US, seeing how it’s damn near impossible for a foreigner to break into the American film market.
Bethesda has upped the ante by hiring Patrick Steward and Sean Bean to voice act for Oblivion though. Perhaps that’ll finally bring the Star System into play within game development as well, and we’ll see the American market cut off from foreign game studios just like the film industry? One could hope, however, that gameplay, narration, and even graphics will continue to be more important than acting, even when the acting in games finally achieves the same level of professionalism that you find in the film industry.
If you have any input, please feel free to drop a comment, I’d like to get some perspective on this subject 
mikearthur said,
March 21, 2007 at 14:49
To be honest, I’m finding graphics less and less important. It’s going to be a long time till we get anything that truly changes things like Quake did.
Quake’s 3D graphics ENHANCED the gameplay, not through making it more pretty, but allowing better level design. I haven’t seen this in a while.
I agree that gameplay and narration are really important but to me the lead actor’s voice acting can be crucial to creating the right ambiance for a game to affect you.
Jonas said,
March 21, 2007 at 16:45
Well, I must admit I find the acting more important than the graphics already, as bad acting can really break a game for you (case in point: Keepsake; EWW!), but acting has never really been a selling point for games up until now. Even Deus Ex featured the developers in several major roles.
I do think visuals (if not graphics) are important. There aren’t many games out there where you can pass the time just walking/riding/driving through the landscape, admiring the beautiful vistas as you can in Oblivion. But the different between visuals and graphics is that World of Warcraft can give you that exact same feeling; flying through the colourful woodlands of Ashenvale can be just as soothing and impressive as riding through the amazingly detailed forests near Chorrol, even though Warcraft sports far less sophisticated graphics. So really, it’s not a question of how much detail you have to play with, it’s a question of how you use it. I think you’ll agree with that, I’m just extrapolating on my own opinion
Not that graphics don’t have their use. Compare the character animation of Deus Ex with that of Half-Life 2. I find that the higher detail level of HL2’s characters has allowed Valve to convey a much broader array of emotion than ISA could in Deus Ex. Better graphics bring us closer to fulfilling the old mantra “Show, don’t tell”. Torment managed to tell a beautiful story by using an extremely text-based interface, but imagine the game with as much detail as Oblivion, depending on animations rather than text to show you characters’ emotions.
Lastly, about the protagonist, you are absolutely correct that if the protagonist is voiced, it MUST be by a good actor, or the whole game will be marred by it. But many modern games don’t have any voice acting from the player’s avatar at all. Knights of the Old Republic, Jade Empire, Neverwinter Nights 2 - all have silent protagonists which works because the player always clicks on dialogue options to make his character say something. That wouldn’t have worked in DX of course.
I don’t know what I wanted to say with that last point, I guess I thought it was just worth bringing up. Because obviously, in Half-Life 2 where Gordon never says a word, it’s still pretty important that the supporting cast is voice acted well. That game would just not have worked if some random intern had been made to record Alyx’ or Breen’s lines
Gelo said,
March 21, 2007 at 16:54
I think the big reason Hollywood took over as the nexus of the film industry is because of funding: in the U.S., with it’s non-socialist economy that allows for easy investment in high-risk projects, you could raise the most money (and thus attract the best talent, and produce the most ambitious and sophisticated products). Especially as film budgets went through the roof, that became more and more important if you wanted to put together an ambitious film. A good example is Alfred Hitchcock jumping ship to go to the US after he made it big in England - he could just do more over in the States. While there are a lot of foreign films, it’s very rare to see a foreign film with a significant budget (which is probably why US action and sci-fi/fantasy films make so much money overseas :-).
As game budgets get more and more expensive, I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a similar “concentration effect” where only a few countries (Japan, US) will be producing AAA titles in the future. But who knows, with globalization maybe funding won’t be so dependant on locla government regulation.
Jonas said,
March 21, 2007 at 17:08
That’s certainly one aspect of it, but if I remember my classes well, the main reason why Hollywood had so much influence was because by far the most Americans only went to see American movies, which meant Hollywood had the huge American market all to itself and could ALSO export Internationally. Since Hollywood could easily earn back all their investment in a film domestically, they could afford to export their films really really inexpensively, in effect squeezing national film industries out of their own markets, which in turn gave them far fewer profits and less money to produce more films for.
Whether language is to blame for Americans favouring American movies, I can’t say. But already, it seems all non-American game studios are funded by American publishing firms. The exceptions that come to mind are Eidos (British, unless they’ve been bought up by an American company, which I think may be the case) and Ubisoft (which own their own awesome development studios as well). So I’m not sure funding will really be a factor.
Gelo said,
March 21, 2007 at 18:19
“But already, it seems all non-American game studios are funded by American publishing firms….So I’m not sure funding will really be a factor.”
0:-)
Gelo said,
March 22, 2007 at 13:10
Hey…I just realized that you called me and Spaic an afterthought :’-(.
Jonas said,
March 22, 2007 at 16:30
Yeah, don’t want you to think you’re special.