GYGO Variety Hour: What Is a Performer, Really?

Welcome back to Get Your Game On Variety Hour! I’m freshly unemployed (voluntarily!) and have spent my week of rest playing Ni no Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch and Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga because nostalgia has a death grip on my tired mind. Also, it’s easier to play games that are like, finished finished so I don’t have to worry about why the voice acting is randomly dropping out of new installments. We’ll talk about that later.

First, your weekly reminder that the people of Gaza are slowly rebuilding their home during the current ceasefire. If you can contribute cash, GazaFunds.com is still active and will show you a new fundraiser every time the page refreshes, and Medical Aid for Palestinians still has their work cut out for them—injuries don’t just stop needing treatment once bombs stop falling. Operation Olive Branch is still reliably collecting grassroots updates, campaigns, and actions.

Video Game Performers Are Still on Strike, and Studios Are Getting Weird

In July 2024, SAG-AFTRA officially went on strike against “major video game studios.” The strike has drifted out of the news cycle, but as of this writing, it is still ongoing… and getting stupider. On February 4, 2025, Bungie dropped the most recent Destiny 2 update, Heresy Act I, with a fun little note alerting players that two major characters are “missing recorded lines”; the update also enabled subtitles by default so cut scenes would make literally any sense at all.

While missing voice acting in major releases may be the most obvious effect of the strike, voice actors are not the only union performers the disputed contracts cover. The contracts currently being negotiated cover all union video game performers; this includes things like motion capture, background or stand-in work, and capturing any particular actor’s visual likeness as well as their voice.

The main disputes in the current negotiations concern the training and use of AI models: what footage can studios use to train models? If they use AI models in future releases, what compensation do they owe the performers whose performances trained those models? What counts as a “performer,” really?

Bungie’s willingness to launch an update with major components missing represents a weird and worrying escalation from game developers: if the cost-benefit analysis has developers choosing to pay the cost of releasing an unfinished product and show consumers very plainly that putting out content is more important to them than solidarity with performers, what does that say about the magnitude of the financial benefit they’re expecting at the conclusion of the strike? If studios are expecting to save so much money by using AI instead of live voice talent that they’re willing to temporarily forego voice talent at all, what does that mean for the viability of voice acting as a profession if the studios win this contract dispute?

The answer, to me, is clear: it’s bad. The performing arts (and art in general) are teetering on a precipice: either we—as a society, as weak as that sounds—install protections for skilled performers that make it financially viable and sustainable for them to practice their trade, or profit-driven CEOs are allowed to run wild with AI, thus reducing work opportunities for performers, which reduces the number of performers the industry can sustain, which reduces the accessibility of live talent, which makes AI an even more appealing option for less draconic developers. This is gross on a labor level—performing requires a great deal of talent, skill, and training, which performers deserve to be paid for—but also on a content level, as AI performances can only be derivative: they are a pattern recognition and repetition model, and as such can only reproduce. They cannot truly create anything new. Games made using primarily AI assets will only ever be more of the same, over and over, in perpetuity.

In a recent Bluesky post, Marin Miller, the voice of Athena in Supergiant Games’ Hades and Hades II laid out additional concerns for performers who are currently navigating the intricacies of union or non-union contracts. While union performers can choose to take non-union gigs, those gigs come without the myriad benefits of union work: to begin with, they do not contribute to the quotas that qualify union workers for SAG-AFTRA-sponsored healthcare, and SAG-AFTRA cannot offer legal protection for work done in non-union jobs. This means that even if a studio—like Hades developer Supergiant—claims to be against AI, performers working with them outside of a union contract would have no recourse but their own funds if Supergiant chose not to pursue legal action against third-party voice scraping. As of late February, Supergiant has not yet entered into an interim agreement with SAG-AFTRA that would allow performers like Miller to work on their games with union protection.

Miller’s dispute with Supergiant—and her nuanced reasoning—shows that just because a studio is equitable in its individual dealings with its workers, refusing to engage in collective bargaining efforts can still severely limit those workers’ options on a systemic level. Based on the company’s history, I’m willing to believe that Supergiant does take care of their full-time employees… but why can that care not be extended to contract performers, for whom union jobs are a path to the health care and benefits that full-time Supergiant staff enjoy? With over 49 studios and 120 projects signed to interim agreements with SAG-AFTRA, what’s stopping Supergiant (or other studios like it) from doing the same?

In other news…

GameStop is selling off its operations in Canada and France because they’re, uh, too woke?

The entire editorial staff of Christian(?) games journalism site God Is a Geek have resigned after the site’s founder, Calvin Robinson, imitated Elon Musk’s Nazi salute and then tried to play it off as a joke. Nobody took it that way—the Anglican Catholic Church revoked his priest license, too.

Medium Quality, a fellow adherent to Sidequest’s “hot takes about cold games” philosophy, wrote a lovely little review of Tales of Symphonia… but what I found really interesting this week was their 2022 review of Tales of Phantasia, which includes some really fascinating comparison screenshots of the game’s various ports—the original PlayStation, the Super Famicom, and the Game Boy Advance. Apparently the Game Boy Advance edition’s English translation “famously lackluster,” which is unfortunate for me because it’s the only one I’ve got.

Lauren Morton at PC Gamer nails my biggest frustration with Dragon Age: The Veilguard: in Veilguard, BioWare is obsessed with reminding players about cause and effect around their choices, but most of the choices don’t have any reason to matter to the player. Morton contrasts this with their experience playing Obsidian’s new release, Avowed, and in doing so took me from barely acknowledging its existence to anxiously awaiting a PlayStation 5 port.

Three years after the passing of Mohammad Fahmi, creator of Coffee Talk, developer Pikselnesia has released his final game. Afterlove EP is, suitably, a game about grief, friendship, and the inexorable passage of time.

I’m intensely jealous of anyone old enough to participate in this oral history project by Geoffrey Ramirez, but I’ll be keeping an eye on his dissertation as it develops! Ramirez is searching for people who played TTRPGs between 1970 and 2004 (I cut my teeth on D&D Edition 3.5 in 2007), and interviews will be archived at the Strong Museum of Play.

For the fifth year running, Peach Garden Games is running a solo TTRPG bundle in conjunction with Take This, the gaming mental health nonprofit behind most if not all the AFK rooms at the conventions you go to. All the games in Solo But Not Alone 5 are brand-new (to the bundle, at least) this year, so no need to worry about repeats if you’ve bought it before.

Blockbuster poker game Balatro has been released from PEGI 18 purgatory as PEGI promises “a more granular set of classification criteria” for “gambling-themed games” in the future. Hopefully this will involve also taking a look at the PEGI 3 rating for all the sports apps riddled with random card packs or loot boxes or whatever.