Special Delivery: Acting Styles in Video Games
What can games learn from film acting?
Some happy news: I’m starting a column for Melbourne film crit site called Rough Cut, looking at resonances between games and film.
The first article looks at the world of video game acting, discussing Oblivion’s janky NPCs, the idiosyncies of non-actor performances, System Shock, Hitman, Facade, Out for Delivery, and sundry other topics. Very grateful to editors Indigo and Tiia for the feedback and curiosity about the subject!
Apologies to Nadine Nortier, star of Robert Bresson’s Mouchette, for the super-sacrilegious thumbnail which pairs her with a cursed close-up of an Oblivion NPC named “Maglir”.
One theme in the essay is the non-actor, which I mention in this passage praising the unpolished performances of System Shock’s famous audio logs:
This nerdy, inexperienced cast lend an unrehearsed vulnerability to the characters; as with Nortier in Mouchette , the awkwardness is a boon. With mixed levels of charisma, the characters convey the passive-aggressive bickering of the ship’s workers—even before the horrors broke out, it seems this place was a low-key hell. The resulting style is one that feels appropriate to the subject matter: ordinary people caught in desperate situations.
The last game I played is a pico8 puzzle game, Woodworm. A short simple-yet-tricky puzzle game which sees you chewing up bits of wood to create shapes.
Presentation-wise, these simple hand animations really make it:
Til next time.
—Austin