Topic: The screen actors Guild is seeking a strike against video game companies

@EaglyBird Right? It’s messed up what company’s are doing to VA, animators, developers, and all the like, it’s terrible and they don’t deserve it. So I’m all for the strike.

“Also no British va means no xenoblade”

(I couldn’t find any good gifs for this, next time I’m making my own)

At least the VAs have a union.

Most of the rest of the people involved in games development don't, and would probably get fired on the spot if they tried to start one.

@Matt_Barber That’s so messed up.

@EaglyBird You know, I agree with you, it would actually give me a reason to finish stuff like during the 19, so I think I too wouldn’t mind.

That’s kinda crazy when you think about, to overwork them that much, like what’s wrong with people, but company’s are company’s, money starts looks more human then the people working for them.

Ok good lol! Because for a second I thought I missed something, however I do look forward to it all! Wouldn’t be the same is right, it just, everything, so much charm from the game comes from the story and so much of the story comes from the characters and so much if the characters comes from, you guessed it voice acting.

I couldn’t agree more, I made a pretty silly meme with chainsaw man a while back and I have still yet to see anyone make a gif out of it, that or I just don’t pay attention. Guess I should grow my memes more often.

@EaglyBird It depends. Formosa also worked on BOTW and TOTK, so Nintendo COULD be effected, but also not. It all depends what they have in the pipeline for 2024 and 2025.

I honestly don’t understand why people would want to do that, you’d think with like two decades worth of movies telling you that’s a bad idea, you would think it’s a bad idea no?

@EaglyBird So money is the root of all evil eh?

Would this affect Indies? I know indies have hired professional VA's without going through the VA agencies as kind of a side-job before...would that still be a thing during a strike? If so I guess we can live with this for awhile, but if this strike lasts years as suggested by some analysts we might see the entire entertainment industry disappear if nothing new is released for years...

I personally root for this. AI should not be used for lazily pushing out games, movies, television, books, etc.

I also hope this strike also makes a change to overly-rough crunch times somehow someway, no game developer should have to endure weeks of intense crunch.

@EaglyBird and sadly history has shown us this to be the case ): time, and time again, gosh, the idea of A.I being used for movies is just, I don’t like the thought.

If you only watch big CGI blockbusters films like Marvel I’m not sure you’d be able to tell the difference between a hu-man writer and an AI one anyway since they are rightly or wrongly formula made anyway.

I’d think people would probably prefer it, if you look at something like Velma that was a show written in the personal voice of Mindy Kaling but if an AI wrote the show it would have sourced the most popular Scooby Doo google results making the most typical Scooby Doo-ish type show possible. Thinking about it they should do a Batman AI movie, instead of making him Nirvana sad Batman or kooky Tim Burton Batman they may actually use some of the decent Batman comics as the base source and have him not kill people for a change.

You make it sound like people don’t actually want mass market consumerist product movies though.

We are at the point where a bog standard straight forward drama is viewed the same way as an experimental arthouse film nowadays whilst people complain franchise X has too much personal voice in it or the franchise isn’t franchisesy enough. Unfortunately the audience have cultivated the perfect breeding ground for AI written movies to be successful already and it’s just a knee jerk reaction to hearing it’s AI that people aren’t already celebrating AI movies.

Upon seeing this topic, the thought of a writers or VA strike in video games was a bit dismal.

But, then I remembered I could use a break to work on my backlog.
And also, half the games I buy are ports or rereleases of previous games.
And then again, I play mostly Japan-produced games anyway.

So I’m good! Strike away I say. Anything to delay our AI overlords’ ascendency, if even a little.

I genuinely think that people have kinda overblown the impact AI will have. Of course some types of work will disappear and some will be augmented. But at the end of the day what we're talking about is data-set in, prompt, prediction out. Ultimately you still need a set of training data and you still need someone to create the prompts and prune/refine the output

I think the future doesn't quite result in the death of acting or writing as a profession. I think it does reduce the amount of work required but not kill it entirely. I mean games are a bit of an interesting one given it's an interactive media. You might want to have some form of generative dialogue. But even then the way you'd go about it would probably be more like, a writer comes up with a set of lines and variations for a subset of in-game states. Then you train a model on that conversion of states to lines. You then get a voice actor in to read a subset of lines that you create a voice model out of

So of course, 100%, this will change the way that this whole thing operates. And at the low-quality end there will be some that will try and cut costs at the expense of quality. But I don't think it's the end of the line for writers and actors. It's more along the lines of the transition from practical to digital effects. Of course practical effects jobs became less in demand but they didn't disappear and digital effects aren't just this "push button and thing comes out" magic

Infairness I don’t think Star Wars fans are capable of happiness, they have been especially unhappy ever since all the inter family loving was removed from the films. I bet an AI bot would have included that with how popular it is now on the internet webs.

I’m also 99% sure Stranger Things is the result of asking a chatbot to tell you a Stephen King story.

Random but it reminds me of a mate who’s does half practical effects and half CGI effects. His last job was working on Gladiator 2, the team he usually works with are normally in the UK however as it was being filmed in Morocco the practical effects team all moved to Morocco for 5 months (paid for including everyday expenses by the production) whilst he was the only member of the team told he wasn’t needed to come over since he was doing digital stuff so he worked on the movie from his flat whilst watching the WhatsApp group post messages of how they are living it up in their spare time including a production delay of a month when there was no work to do but still being paid.

Do I get a gold star for knowing the correct answer?

I always like the riddle about the girl who goes to her mother’s funeral and see’s a mysterious man she doesn’t know, the next day she kills her sister. Why?

@Rambler it is a question often put to serial killers and psychopaths who get it correct. I got it correct when I first heard it so yay me!

That is some romantic stuff right there!

"The things I do for love!" - Courage

@Zuljaras @Rambler it doesn’t have to be about her wanting D, she could just be curious about the mystery of the man. The question is more about looking for the cold hard logic and how expendable she views someone’s life like how murdering psychopaths do.

In any case we need to ask the script writing AI bots to take a break from writing the next Marvel and Minions films to ask them this question to see if they are likely to go Skynet on us!

@jump Love(romantic) =/= wanting the "vitamin" D (in some cases). Maybe it is other(not so healthy) affectionate feeling like Harley Quinn and the Joker Like you said she is ready to waste someone just to see her target.

Btw Skynet is not that far if AI bots are starting to lie just to make you fill the CAPTCHA for them