Will Video Games Ever Be The Same??!!!?? The Horror!

I'm not much of a gamer. I haven't bought a new video game since I spent $20 on a used copy of Silent Hill for the original PlayStation. I haven't played any of those games in 3 years. So, I may not be much of an authority on the subject,... but that's never stopped me before.

There's a new furor from, you guessed it, the actors' unions. This time it's about whether or not "voice actors" should get a percentage of profits from video game sales.

Well, anyone can see that they absolutely, without a doubt, should be paid in line with their abilities. I mean, c'mon, it's hard, grueling work to sit in front of a microphone for literally minutes a day, repeating lines like "Die, Alien scum," or "We've tracked the evil villain Prozac to the planet Ambien. Go get 'em, tiger." Sometimes they even run out of throat-soothing water, and must wait, actually wait, for some pimply-faced intern to bring them a re-fill.

Oh, the humanity!

I really like the quote in the article from the rep for the gaming industry:

"The union's demand for an equity stake, or residual structure, is unreasonable and not fair to the hundreds of people who often spend years developing a game," Howard Fabrick, an attorney representing publishers in the talks, said in a statement. "Voiceover work represents a small fraction of a video game's development and consumer enjoyment."

Kinda says it all, doesn't it?

Well, certainly not for the actors. They're already not satisfied with making only infinitely more money than the "hundreds of people" who develop movies or television shows; so why in heaven's name should we expect them to demand any less for their minimal efforts in the gaming world?

Why do we even put up with such garbage?



I know. Let's socialize the entertainment industry. How does the following sound?

From each according to his overly-inflated sense of ability; to each according to his actual, not imagined, need.

Sounds great, huh? We'll do an experiment in the entertainment industry, and see if the results can be translated throughout humanity. We take all of the gross earnings from every entertainment venture, and divide them equally among the people involved in the entertainment industry. That'd be fair, right?

I certainly think so.


See you all later. I'm going to go dust off my PlayStation so I can see if it's worth writing to the game's makers to demand that they give more money to the label-printer-guy.