Challenges of Voice Acting in Video Games

Hello! Can you tell us who you are and what you do?

What’s up, everyone?! Keythe Farley here, I’m a performer, writer, casting and voice director by trade, but I’m mostly known for my voice-acting roles in video games. I’ve been in the voice acting industry for more than 25 years, and 35 years in other performing media, like acting on stage, TV, films, commercials… you name it, I’ve done it!

For my most famous voice-acting roles in games, they would be… Thane Krios from the Mass Effect series, Conrad Kellogg from Fallout 4, probably!

What’s your favorite game to play?

These days I don't get much time to play games, sadly. I grew up with video games, though! I started as a pinball player in my youth, and I was probably there the day they wheeled the Pac-Man console into the arcade. And I've played Atari ColecoVision on television, Sega, PlayStation, started with 1, went to the 2 and the 3 and the 4. 

And once kids came along, every time I would sit down… I'll tell you a story about playing Red Dead Redemption. I picked it up at GameStop. And one night when the kids and the wife were all in bed, I snuck it into the PS3, fired it up, played for three or four hours, then took it out and hid it so that I would never touch it again. Because I knew that parenting and playing this game that I was utterly obsessed with were not going to be conducive. But I really enjoy a wide variety of games.

The first time I played Tomb Raider, I lost my mind because again, I'd grown up with Sonic and you know, sort of platformers, action side-scrollers. And the first time when she runs into that canyon and the wolves are coming at her and the symphony orchestra kicks in, I was like, “Holy crap, I'm in a movie!” And that experience of controlling the films, controlling the narrative, even though you were on rails was just so great. And then other games like Driver, I loved that game. I love the car games. Played a lot of those before having kids. 

So yeah, the story is really important to me. Although I really enjoyed games like Flower and Journey, which are just these beautiful sort of pastoral settings that you can sort of float through and just make flowers grow or turn on the lights and just kind of relax into it. With my kids, we played a lot of Guitar Hero and Rock Band when those were popular. 

Coming up, we played Rayman Origins was a fun one to play with the kids. Just a kooky, cartoony action side-scroller that was just a blast. And then the games that I've touched recently and again, I don't get the time I would like to. The latest Tomb Raider was amazing. I remember my son came walking through and I was playing it on the projector in the living room. He's like, “Holy crap, that looks good.” That's like same thing that I said the first time. It's like playing a movie.

Absolutely wild that from little maze games, we got these interactive stuff to play with. Pac-Man and now pinball seem to be making a resurgence which I love. It's fun to be back in control of a physical interaction with a table and a ball. And then they've added all the video game elements of being able to save your progress. So now you can log in with your phone. The next time you jump on a game and toss a dollar in, you're picking up where you left off. So it's pretty cool, kind of a melding of the two things, like video games and pinball and do a comeback together.

So short answer to what I’m playing right now? Nothing. Hahaha!

What was your first role as an actor?

Rumpelstiltskin. When I was a kid, Robert Redford and Paul Newman did Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, which is a great movie that I loved. And then they were tapped again to do a movie called The Sting, and I think they were both paid like $1,000,000 each to do the movie. And I thought you could dress up and play gangsters and get $1,000,000. I want to do that. Only after I was completely and utterly hooked that I realize that making a living might be a little more of a challenge than just walking into the studio and going, “Can I have $1,000,000 to be cool in a movie?”

But the love of acting was born early. Then I fell in love with the radio when I was a kid, and I still love the radio, the podcasts and the audio medium in general. And so I pursued radio alongside acting and ended up in the Top 40 station in Sacramento my senior year in high school, working the princely shift from 2:00 to 8:00 AM on Sunday mornings. So it was the graveyard of all graveyards, but I was there. I always used to say I got to DJ people home from the bars and then also got to DJ them on their way to church on Sunday mornings.

And then in college, I was a drive-time DJ in a little station in Davis, CA, and I kind of realized that I needed to make a choice whether I was going to go the radio route or the acting route. And I chose acting at that point. And it wasn't until many years later when I was working at Klasky Csupo, the animation studio that did Rugrats and Duckman, Edith Ann with Lily Tomlin, that I would get these cassettes back in the 90s. 

This cassette of the assembled script that the animators would then use to animate the show and it would be labeled Duckman 3O7 radio show. And that's when I made this connection that all those radio dramas that I loved growing up, this is where it went, that there's still an opportunity for actors who use their voices to still be able to tell stories. So it was kind of the coming back together of my radio experience and my storytelling experience.

Creating the narrative with voices

With voice acting, you're controlling the narrative. When I played Thane in Mass Effect, that was the first time I saw branching dialogue used to affect the outcome of the game. When I directed Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2, we had some branching dialogue, but it was basically in the hub where you could walk up to any of the characters and start a conversation and have a choice about whether you were going to be friendly, mean or snarky. And then the character would respond, it would end and you could go to somebody else and be friendly or mean or snarky.

But wow, with Mass Effect 2, I really realized the way that they were integrating choice. And then again, like I said with Red Dead Redemption, it's all about the choices that you make and whether you're welcomed or feared by folks in the world. It's an amazing evolution from video games that are linear and you're on a rail and the story plays the same way every time, to having choices where the game will play differently if you make different choices. And that, I think, gives the game the replayability factor. The bang for your buck for video games today is off the charts because the replay will be different than your first playthrough.

What is your creative process both as an actor and a director?

That’s such a great question because it's almost as if you have a changeable script. What I mean is…  I'm used to being a stage actor, the play is the play. It doesn't change. It does change a little bit from night to night based on responding to people, but there are guidelines there that the river flows in the same direction every night with branching dialogue. It's like playing a scene that might have three different outcomes, which then will affect how you feel about the character the next time you run into them. It is almost like schizophrenia. 

You're sort of going along a scene and we would play the scene out one way and then at this point it branches and it goes down here. So there's a different choice here. Now the scene plays out differently, but it also branches out down here in three different ways. And so you sort of go back and it's really important to remind the actor because we're always dealing with “Where am I?” or “Who am I talking to?” or “What do I want?” and “How does that make me feel?” Those are the building blocks of a performance.

So those things don't change except for the “How do I feel?” So “What do I want?” stays the same, but maybe I'm not getting it on this branch. So that's going to change the emotional state as we're playing through this branch and then maybe this branch brings you back closer to what it is you want. So as a director, it's about being in communication and cooperating with the actors to keep them apprised of where we are in the scene.

And as an actor, it's so much fun to be able to play all these different outcomes in the scene, whether it's falling in love with somebody or learning to hate somebody or becoming antagonistic to somebody and maybe not making it through the next battle, not surviving to go on.

So in video game parlance, it's next level. It's a real next-level approach to storytelling, which requires a higher level of flexibility in the performer. Because once I learn Death of a Salesman, I know what I'm doing. I know how to play Willy Loman from the top of the show to the bottom of the show because it's the same top to bottom every night. The challenge here is to keep that fresh for the audience, not to become bored or churlish or silly because I've done it 100 times, but to be respectful to the audience that is seeing it for the first time.

So that's the challenge in that repeating of a stage performance, whereas the challenge in video games is being quick on the uptake to new information, being able to play whatever's in front of you and get there immediately. Because a lot of times we don't get the scripts ahead of time. We don't see what we're doing. We're leaning on the directors and the writers to take us through, but as the actor, you have to remain open to not knowing, which is a great tool for actors to have and something that's not inherent to every actor out there.

Actors often need to know what they're doing to be able to perform. But in a situation with branching dialogue and you've never seen the script before, you've got to be improv and that is paramount. Being able to just accept and then respond at the moment, moment to moment, and then go back and play a different moment and then that branch and then go back again.

How do you enter the right emotional state to voice act?

Oh boy, we're getting into the fine details of acting. It's important to know what your character wants on a global level. Are they about justice? Are they about chaos? Are they about peace? Are they about friendship? And then that informs what's at stake in each scene so that understanding is really important. 

And I'll tell you a story about—I won't mention the game—but there was a game that I worked on where we did a level where the player character wakes up on a subway and then has to interrogate somebody. And then that interrogation gets foiled. And then you have to chase the people that foiled it to the exfil spot to get out of there and get out of there alive. So a couple of weeks later I get a script for a level called Prologue and I go, “Okay, so this comes before the waking up on the subway scene.” And they're like, “What are you talking about?” I said, “Well, the waking up on the subway scene, the beginning of the game.” They’re like, “It's not the beginning of the game. That's like the 7th level in the game.” I was really shocked. Haha!

You guys need to tell me the story of your game. I thought that was the first thing that we did. And it would just happen to be like a demo level that they played at E3 or one of the conventions. That was the demo level. And it felt to me like it was the beginning of the game because it was the first thing I saw. But these things happen out of order most times. So I just told them like, “Send me a treatment, bring me into your office, take me to lunch, and just tell me the story so that I can be up to speed and be more effective as a director.” 

Now in Final Fantasy XV, I'm proud to say that we went from the beginning to the end in chronological order so the actors were able to play the scenes. And then we went back and did gameplay stuff and we went back and did AI stuff. That banter in the car as you're driving from one location to another. So I'd have to remind the actors where we are and where this little gameplay might show up, whether it's in Hammerhead or Altissia, Capital of Accordo. And so they had that knowledge of where are you in the timeline is going to affect what the character wants. But if we know what the character wants globally, then each scene becomes much easier to play.

How actors create a compelling scenario

That's what actors do. It's our job to unlock those doors to emotion and to be technicians as well, to be clear in the way that we speak. You have to have a technical facility and an emotional availability in order to be a really effective actor. 

And to be an effective voice actor, you lose facial expressions and gestures and so it's all focused through the spoken word. And that's a specialized skillset that not everybody has, not every actor has. I mean, actors can be so reliant on the visual aspect of performances. My wife is a costume designer. I've seen her hand an actor a character by putting them in a costume. I’ve seen actors who were struggling to perform their roles but once they get in this costume that she's constructed for them, all of a sudden they understand everything about the character. We don't have that luxury as voice actors. So we have to be more fine-tuned in expressing ourselves through our words.

So sometimes in Final Fantasy XV, once again to use that as a great example, it was recorded in Japanese and by brilliant actors. But we decided early on that we wanted the English language actors to be free to play the roles the way they wanted to, the way that if it were created in English, what would it sound like? So we were constrained by timing and length because those files are already there. 

So we had to make sure that the files conformed to the length of the performance and we would use the performances as a reference if we had a question like how far away is this character when I'm talking to them? Are we shouting here or is this still conversation in the back of a car? And a lot of times the Japanese would help us to get there. So each track had the lines for a specific actor. So if it's Noctis, Ignis, Gladio and Prompto, right, four tracks and the lines were spaced out, the files spaced out in such a way that it was playing like a scene. So if I had recorded Ray Chase as Noctis, I could play in Robbie Daymond as Prompto with his lines and you would just pick up and play off of Ray.

If we didn't, if you were the first one to record a scene, it's up to me. And I got pretty good at approximating those guys. So that it was like, I have my Prompto and my Gladio and my Noctis and my Ignis, my approximations of what the other actors were doing to try to help them and read them in. So there was a luxury that we don't often get on. 

I think it was the Mass Effect 3, which I was in briefly, but for wonderful deathbed scenes, they had recorded Jennifer Hale, and they had a system where it played back Jennifer's lines for me. And then I was able to play off of her, which was great. It was amazing. Doesn't always happen. A lot of times we're just in a vacuum.

How often does a voice actor get multiple roles in one video game?

Most times, I mean, you're generally you'll do your main character and then you'll do a couple of secondary characters, smaller characters that populate the world. Maybe around 8-15 lines. 

And in the contract with the union set with SAG-AFTRA, there's a thing called atmospheric voices where you can play up to 15 roles in one session. There are a number of lines designated and the characters cannot advance the plot. So you can't be a character that you fight or who gives you a quest or gives you money. Just overheard voices in the overworld like “This fish is delicious. I'd like to come back to this restaurant.” Which are all over the JRPGs in particular.

You just overhear little snippets of conversation as you're walking through the city. Those are atmospheric voices. They don't advance the plot and they're just in the background of the world. And those are really fun because then you really get to play with your instrument and try to make sure that none of the characters are recognizable from each other. But the worlds are so vast, I often joke like you might know me as Thane Krios in Mass Effect 2, or Conrad Kellogg in Fallout 4 or Generic Male 5 in Guild Wars. That's one of those where you just swallow your pride and take the money.

Is the game still being developed when you voice act, or is it already finished and they add in the voices after?

It's interesting because, in film and TV, there's a very clearly defined production schedule. In animation, when I worked in animation, there was also a very clearly defined production schedule and the same events happened. Say, you get 14 weeks, and the same events happen at every interval. And then each episode is staggered and then there's a hiatus week to catch up with everything in case you're running behind and then it kind of starts over. 

Not so in video games. Everybody has a different way that they do it. So like I said in the game earlier, the one with the character waking up in the subway, when I didn't realize I was doing level 7, I thought it was the first level. So they're developing in parallel with what we're recording. 

So we had this with Asgard's Wrath 2, which I directed over the last few years. And it was really imperative because they were just plugging in little bits and pieces as we went along. They would expand a little scene that was already there or flesh out and it was just sort of put together like a jigsaw puzzle. So what are we working on on the jigsaw puzzle today? And I had to really lean on the brilliant team at Sanzaru, Grace Lingad was my backbone in that, like where are we? She was sort of looking at the master scripts while I was looking at the scene that we were working on, so she could give the actor and me context about what was going on.

So there's a million different ways that it gets done. Frequently, though, I've discovered that there are sort of parallel tracks. The game is being developed and the performers are being recorded at the same time.

What’s your opinion on AI becoming a part of your industry?

Well, AI has been in video games from the beginning. I mean, the way NPCs respond to you is programmed in whether the people that you're around are aggressive or whether once they're hit, they run away. Once they're hit, they become aggressive. Those are all sort of computational underpinnings of the characters that you run into. So that's games. 

Let’s go back to Pac-Man, the way each ghost comes after you is AI. It's programmed artificially into the game, and the ghosts respond to the way they've been programmed, which is swell. AI can be really effective in coding. It can be really effective in lots of different ways. I don't think it's necessarily really effective from an artistic standpoint. It's fun to be able to create a Rembrandt portrait of yourself. 

That's fun, but it's not the same as having your portrait painted by someone who is trying to get at your soul. So with AI, the position that several organizations that I belong to, whether it's SAG-AFTRA, or NAVA, the National Association of Voice Actors, have basically come to the position that if you want to use an AI replica of me or a character that I've played, let's treat it the same way you would treat me. I know that I have a session that I go to and I'm going to record. It's going to go in a certain game and I'm going to get paid for it. And that's the box it lives in.

What we're trying to avoid is taking a character that I created and then making it do something that I might disapprove of or using it in a sequel without compensation. To use it in another, you know, side quest in another game entirely. To have Thane walk in and say or do something without my consent. It's just not cool. 

So basically the idea is to treat the clone of me as if it were me. I want to be contacted, I want to give permission, I want to be compensated, and I want to know what it's going to be used for. I have a friend who's the voice of CBS. When you call CBS, you hear her take you through your prescription information, right? So she made a clone of her voice. CBS has licensed it and they pay her, and that's the only thing they're allowed to do with it. They can't take it over and sell it to Ralph's. They can't sell it to the supermarket. They can't sell it to anybody else. 

If she has some control, it's going to be a year or two at a certain price point, and then we renegotiate. So ideally, that's the way it should work. It's just funny. I had a conversation with a buddy of mine this morning about AI and the game corporations would like us to think that we’re just data.

Let’s give an example. Movement performers are the people who do all the movements that the NPCS will conduct, especially when you're in battle, running around the world, whether a character zombie comes after you or runs away or attacks you with a crowbar, all those movements are performed by actors. The video game corporations would like to have us believe that that is just data that they can then use anytime they want to in any game they want to. The data of someone coming after you and swinging at you with a crowbar, which an actor performed on a performance capture volume, they're saying that's not a performance. To them, that's just data that they can then use any way they want because they own the data. 

That’s like saying a recorded performance is just the grooves on a record or the dye on a celluloid that runs through a projector. Is it just data? And so that the movie distributors, the movie makers can just use that data any way they want? No, these are performances, and when you're reusing someone's performance, you pay them again for their performance. It's pretty simple and they want to make it more complicated. 

During my conversation with my buddy, I was like, there's so much reinvention of the wheel in tech. What's wrong with the wheel? What's wrong with the way it works? It rolls perfectly fine. Whether you put rubber on it or you make it cement or plastic or aluminum or titanium, it's still a wheel. And not always, but often in tech, they want us to think that we're it's something that has never been done before when it's really just a wheel.

More on the monetization for the usage of voices

What I think that the actors’ unions are trying to protect against is that whenever their performances are used for something, they should be compensated. There's me, Keythe Farley, my voice. And if I'm licensing my voice to read the LA Times, that's impossible for me to do. I can't sit in my booth and read the LA Times and have it online by the time the paper hits the doorstep.

But with an AI version. Easy peasy lemon squeezy. That's it. Happens like that. So pay me. You want my performance, the sound of me that people like, and you're selling ads, you have to pay me. People are still looking at ads. Some of that revenue goes to me. It's my intellectual property. 

Now if I'm playing Thane Krios, Thane Krios has its own IP. My performance as Thane Krios is the part that I control. But the character itself, I can't do a one-man show as Thane Krios without permission from the folks who made the game. I don't have rights to Thane Krios, but by the same token, Thane Krios is impossible without me. So there's a symbiotic relationship there that I hope that we'll be able to negotiate with and come to a resolution.

And there are a lot of folks who are signing contracts right now that have AI protections in them so that they can keep working during this strike action. For anything with a budget of under $20 million down to nothing, you can sign a contract that is really reasonable to hire union actors. And for the big-budget games, there's an interim agreement where if you sign that you keep working, no problem. It just provides those protections to the performers to make sure that you're not stealing our performance and monetizing it forever without any compensation coming back to us.

On advertisers and blockchains

There are a lot of folks who are trying to do that right now who are working on that. And it's something we've been talking about for almost a decade. Like, how do we know if our voices are used for a product? Like, musicians know, right? They know when their song gets played. You better believe it. And musicians get paid every time their songs get played, particularly on the radio. There are embedded markings that report that. They pay a bit of the ad revenue because they're selling these songs to advertisers. 

So if you like Taylor Swift, you know you're going to hear Taylor Swift, you know, once every 90 minutes on KIIS FM and maybe you're going to hear an ad that's based on what Swifties like, which is everything I guess because that group is like a quarter of the planet. It could be anything. So Taylor gets a little piece of that, and rightly so, because she's making Coca-Cola a lot of money. She gets a piece of it.

What tools do you use for your work and personal life?

I don’t use too many tools. I mean, aside from telling my phone where I'm going and navigating me there, or when I tell it to play something on Spotify or Apple Music, which doesn't work half the time, I really don’t use tools much. 

I do old-fashioned research. It's great to have YouTube to be able to look at other versions of the game. I tell my students like, “Hey, if you don't have time to drop 40 hours to play XYZ game, you can always go onto YouTube and find a playthrough with no commentary and you can just watch it and learn from it.”

So you know, sometimes you get auditions that reference different actors. So it's great to be able to go and listen to Morgan Freeman in a commercial as an inspiration, not to mimic him necessarily, although there are people who do that and do it very effectively. But what's his tone, what's his feeling, what's his vibe? And that sort of stuff just didn't exist 35 years ago. 

You had to just kind of remember like, what is Clint Eastwood? What does Dirty Harry sound like or Harrison Ford in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Now I can go and just type in Harrison Ford Indiana Jones clips and spend the better part of an afternoon learning from a master. 

So those sorts of research, I wouldn't trade it for the world. They're just almost as good as non-linear editing. I used to cut tape, man. I'm old enough. I started out cutting tape and every time I just splice something and move it around in my workstation, I just give thanks to the audio gods. 

So yeah, I don't really use AI. I mean some things help with your workflow. I have a chain of compression and EQ that I use when I'm working that helps me sound good, which is nice to have automated. But in terms of AI, I suppose I could ask it to generate sides for students. Give me sci-fi, space opera, heroine sides. But for my craft, I really don’t.

Where can we find you to learn more about you and your performances?

I'm on Facebook, Instagram. My website is Keythe Farley. It's a great way to get in touch if you're looking for coaching especially. There's a good spot there. A little bit about my bio, listen to my demos, sort of see what I'm doing. I’m on Facebook and Instagram mostly, and I look forward to hearing from folks!

Meta Description

What goes into making the voices you love hearing in your video games? The voice actor behind Thane Krios of the Mass Effect series tells us here!

Summary

A good, narrative-driven game needs more than just visuals and music—it needs to feel alive. The characters and scenarios must have emotion in them. An adventure doesn’t feel fulfilling if the characters aren’t relatable. But what helps piece together the ensemble of a great video game cast? Voice acting. 

This is how a stage actor ended up voicing two of the most well-known video game assassins.