Gaming hosts Josh and Ryan are back with special guest Chris Tester! Chris is a gamer, but he’s also an accomplished voice actor with some awesome insight into the world of voice acting. We get insight into what it’s like to work in the world of video games, what some of the challenges are for voice actors, and chat about the best and worst parts of the job. We get the insight gamers truly want to know and have a blast while doing it! It’s an episode like no other, filled with gaming knowledge and video game chat from the Video Gamers Podcast! Help Chris support voice actors: https://navavoices.org/donate/ Thanks to our MYTHIC Supporters: Redletter, Ol’ Jake, Disratory and Gaius Connect with the show: Support us on Patreon: patreon.com/videogamerspod Join our Gaming Discord: https://discord.gg/Dsx2rgEEbz Follow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/videogamerspod/ Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/VideoGamersPod Subscribe to us on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCU12YOMnAQwqFZEdfXv9c3Q Visit us on the web: https://videogamerspod.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: What is the main topic of this episode?
Hello, fellow gamers, and welcome to the Video Gamers Podcast. Video game tester, voice actor, lead game developer, motion cap actor. These all sound like any gamer's dream jobs, but are they as fun as we think they are? Well, we're about to find out.
Because on today's episode, we're going to be diving into the world of voice acting with an inside look at the fun and challenges voice actors can face. But first, some introductions are in order. I am your host, Josh. And joining me, if we don't hear at least three impressions from him this episode, I'll be sorely disappointed.
It's Ryan. I'm not a puppet. You can't force me to do anything, man.
Come on, Ryan. You know you want to.
No, no. I'm classically trained, bro. Oh, man.
And joining us, he is an actual voice actor with work in games like Dark Souls 2, several Warhammer games, and much, much more. It's the one and only Chris Tester. Hello. Hi.
Hi. Lovely to be here.
Oh, Chris, we are so excited to have you, man. Thank you so much for taking the time to hop on the podcast with us. It's not every day we get to interview a voice actor, man.
I mean, they are sprouting up. There are quite a few of them. So I think you're timing it absolutely perfectly. Right this way. As every other person goes, that would be a really cool thing to do. I could get into that. I'm sure it's not very difficult or very hard. And here I am to prove that that's the case. They'll let anybody in now.
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Chapter 2: What challenges do voice actors face in gaming?
So the games that I'm most passionate about actually probably being a part of are also the games that I probably have the least amount of time to play, which are the ones that actually have the time to explore a longer narrative, more in-depth characters, all of that exciting kind of stuff.
What that actually means is that 90% of my gaming right now is like FIFA in my pants for 15 minutes before bed because I'm living my best life. Yeah.
Yeah, we understand. Hey, we had to make a gaming podcast just so we had excuses to play video games.
Yeah, it keeps you responsible. It's like an accountability group, which is great.
It really is. We just hopped into Kingdom Come Deliverance 2, and so that's going to be a bear. Oh, which looks amazing. Yeah.
For slow fighting.
Yeah, and we've been playing Marvel Rivals for like two months. We haven't had any really games to cover, and so now we're like, oh, we got to buckle down for this one.
Yeah. Time to get back to work. Yeah. Yeah.
Exactly. I wish, you know, I mean, it used to be, it used to be able to justify it as like, oh, okay, I'm doing research. So, you know, all of the different kind of takes on characters or how do you play a protagonist where they could be good or they could be evil?
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Chapter 3: How does Chris Tester balance voice acting and gaming?
Chapter 4: What are Chris's favorite video games and why?
Okay, I get that.
But where are we going with this? Oh, it's the big bad, but what's... I don't care enough. That kind of thing. And then with the latest one, it's like, well, what we're going to do is we're going to give you even more choice with lots of technical to learn. And it'll be great because it's like the biggest, most open sandbox ever. And to me, my brain just goes like, oh, great, more stuff not to...
be good at. And so for me, it becomes crippling. I walk around these worlds and they are beautiful and they are stunning, but they don't have that, you know, like something like The Witcher did so well, which was like, okay, I've got to get from point A to point B, but guaranteed, I mean, Red Dead Redemption does this absolutely perfectly as well.
Between points A and B, within 10 to 15 seconds, something is going to come and distract me. And it's like, then do I go into the woods and, you know, find the racists hanging somebody? Or then do I go and, you know, delve into this other kind of side thing? It's all so concentrated at the same time.
And it's all rich enough so that it's not just a pure Ubisoft experience of I've got to collect them all. I've got to finish everything right now. I've got a shopping list that I need to do apparently of. completely inconsequential tasks. So there's that level of richness. I didn't find that in the three hours in total that I attempted to play either of those two games. But that was it.
So again, that is probably a bit like with The Last of Us with you. That's probably my loss, but I am okay with that loss. I do not foresee some great transformational moment where it's going to get better.
Yeah, I mean, I think they're good video games, but the response to them and calling them some of the best games ever, I think is what we kind of take like some.
I think there's an element of Nintendo. Yes. Oh, God, that's part of, you know, what made us, you know, fans of this since childhood in the first place. You want it to be good. You want it to be good as when you were a kid. And I'm like, but I don't feel it. It's not doing the same thing for me anymore. It's simple as that. Yeah. Yeah. We sound like the exact same gamer.
Honestly. You guys are very similar. Because that's the one thing I did. Thanks for a great podcast. Lots of non-conflict. Great.
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Chapter 5: What is a day in the life of a voice actor like?
Can I improvise on this at all? Or with voice acting, there's a lot of what some people call pre-life. So it's the noises, non-verbal noises that you make before or after or during a line, that kind of thing. Some directors love it. Some go like, no, we need a clean cue into it. Don't like warm up into the line and then give me the line after.
well the thing is it's like no we need well the thing is you know um so just act it interesting um so so so you just need to gauge so again you need to be aware of what questions you can ask and how quickly and then make some informed choices off of the back of that wow so i mean i think uh we probably know uh some of the answers to this but like what you're talking about here with the uh directors kind of
getting real hard line on on certain ways things are said and types of things you know with uh you kind of branching off what is your take on this with the emergence of the ai and them doing that and bringing it into this kind of realm well i mean the thing with ai really i mean the whole ethically sourcing thing is a huge massive thing anyway because like if you're using 11 labs even
That's arguable how ethically switched that is. I know we're getting to a point where it's like, well, it's a copy of a copy of copy, so who cares, right? It's like, well, a lot of people. But anyway, the one thing that you can't really do well with an AI still is direct it exactly.
You can tell it to speak faster generally or slower or put an emphasis on a different word, but it's still ongoing and it's still laborious. So it's kind of like... that will necessarily take a lot more time to do. Also because there's no cognitive process going through it. It's not understanding what it's saying.
It's literally just kind of rereading the thing, you know, observing whatever emphasis that is there. So that's also an issue I would say. In terms of really nuanced kind of like stuff, it just simply can't do because it doesn't understand what it's saying. And also you will never be surprised. which fundamentally goes back down to why you want to hire voice actors in the first place.
If it's purely just to execute a vision that you've already had, you just need it made flesh, then maybe AI will get there eventually at some stage. But if it's like, oh, no, I want to surround myself with people who are better than me at what they do to up my game and make my writing or my direction or my thing even better...
then I don't trust AI to be able to do that because it's still fundamentally a copy of a copy of a copy and it's predicting going on what's been based before and people's, you know, it's the median. It's the road that's right in the middle.
Whereas, sure, I can give you a really bad choice on lines two or three, but there'll be a bold choice that's out there if that's been kind of like discussed and my whole job is to kind of surprise you and myself. By, oh, actually, that moment could work in a completely different way. Oh, great. Fantastic. Now we're actually learning something.
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Chapter 6: How does Chris prepare for voice acting roles?
But there's still that insecurity always of like, what are they doing right that I'm not doing? And not quite knowing, you know, if there is. It's that lack of autonomy, which is the scary thing. Which is why I try and source my own work by building relationships as much as I possibly can organically.
And then I'll audition for your stuff, but so that I'm one of maybe five or ten options and not one of a hundred options. Because I've been on the other side of casting in the theater world. And I've seen it a little bit in the voice acting world. But for a lot of people, for that first round of auditions, you've got like 100 clips of the same 10 lines.
Your ears aren't going to be as fresh about 20 in. Yeah, yeah. By about 40, you're questioning your will to live. By about 60, what are words? Yeah. By 80, it's kind of like we've only got 20 to go. So, I mean, we should. And by 100, it's like, I don't know what. Did we even press play? I can't.
I don't know.
We don't know. That kind of thing. So that's when you see the whole number of random factors in it. And I think that's probably the toughest thing to do is to kind of like take it on the chin and then keep going and finding ways around it and not questioning yourself too much about it. But you've not got ultimately different directors and different casting people do have different tastes.
So there's not a definitive like, well, this is what you need to do to nail an audition because they have everybody would do it.
Yeah.
Like one casting director who I know is like, if you want to use music in your audition, if you want to change the order of the lines or anything, go for it. Be creative. Make it an opportunity to be as creative as possible. I want to be creative. I want to see your creative response. Make it a fun thing.
It's no surprise that they were originally an actor who's now become a major casting director in video games. There are other video game casting directors who are like, if you do not deliver the exact lines in this exact format, if you ad lib, if you do this, I will automatically delete your audition and move on. And you don't know. You don't know which they're going to be.
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