Accents, the Good and the Bad

British accents portrayed in games range from the excellent to hilarious and all the steps in between. I’ve nowhere played as many games as most of the members here but the two extremes for me are The Books of Unwritten Tales which the many regional accents are manly excellent and the very bottom is Jack Keane which had me in hysterics. Not that’s it a bad game but every time Eric and Lawrence etc opened their mouths I started to laugh.

If you’re not British I suppose it’s not much of an issue but if the German developers can get it right in TBOUT surely others can.

Voice acting is expensive and most do the very best they can with what they have. I am sure every country has the same thoughts if the actor didn't come from there.

If the characters are supposed to be British then I could understand the questioning of the accent but a lot of the games are about a fictitious country so the "accents" are from whatever country the game takes place in. Therefore any dialect would be appropriate for that particular fictitious area of the fantasy world. (ie Aventasia for BOUT)

Now I need to play Jack Keane again.

Sure if you go to the expense of hiring professional actors it would be costly, but there must be hundreds of Brits who are amateur actors and would be willing to oblige just for seeing their names on the credits. A Mic, a tape and the script is all you need; they could do it from home. Dialogue in games for the most part is short and simple and no one is asking for perfect diction.
When you consider all the work over one or two years it takes to produce an adventure game why then spoil the game by having the characters speak with badly faked accents and to be fair, most take the trouble not to do so.

I must say that game characters with "not perfect" British/English accents don't bother me at all.

In many cases these days we are lucky to have a game where British dialogue is even available.

After all, how many games these days are developed in countries where English is the first language ??

Oh there are quite a few and those ones I have played usually handle the accents well by using those who can actually speak the language in a way that is reasonably familiar to us. I don’t in anyway expect ‘perfect accents’ just the need to avoid the badly faked ones.
The reviewers on the site often comment on whether the voice acting in the game they are reviewing is good or not good. My favourite reviewer, Gremlin, is usually very quick to comment on the voice acting and the quality or the lack of it.
To create likable and interesting characters in a game engages the players in the game’s overall atmosphere and how they speak the dialogue is fundamental to this.

But how can you associate with a character if whenever they open their mouths to speak their lines your reaction is WHAT!!

I don't see how badly done British accents would be any worse than badly done regional American accents or other foreign accents.


Considering it's a comedy game, are you sure the cartoony accents weren't deliberate?

"But how can you associate with a character if whenever they open their mouths to speak their lines your reaction is WHAT!!"

All I can is that my reaction is not usually "WHAT!!"

Storyline is always the major part of an Adventure game for me and as long as I can understand that I will be fine with any "not quite right" accents that might have been employed to tell it

As usual, it boils down to a matter of personal preferences

Under a Steel Sky which I believe is now a free game had an interesting mixture of accents, and as far as I could tell, they sounded fairly accurate. They included Welsh, Scottish, Irish, Cockney and even Australian. I can instantly pick if someone has a genuine Australian accent. Most Americans seem to think our accent is Cockney and it isn't, although we do have rhyming slang.

Even Meryl Streep in Evil Angels didn't get it quite right. There is a bloke on Youtube who does 24 accents and they mostly sound fairly good.

Big Jim Slade in Tex Murphy had a genuine Aussie accent. I forget whether it was Pandora or Overseer. Also the villain at the end of Tex Murphy Overseer had a genuine Aussie accent. I have previously discussed before about the phrase "cop shop", which in Australian means police station.

I find accents very interesting, and I like to guess where people come from.

Cheers barbarosso

There was an attempted Irish accent in Black Mirror 3 that had me gnawing furniture.

I would love to be able to do an Australian accent.
As a fan of Prisoner Cell Block H I have loved it for a long time. =)
I've seen that Youtube-video I think. Interesting to know that you think it's OK barbarosso.

To use the many English colloquial accents in a game would frankly be stupid. For example, I would only use my colloquial accent when speaking to a fellow Londoner, at all other times I amend my accent to something more in touch with the ‘Queens English’ and it comes as a natural thing to do with one exception, discovering the H sound again.
For a Londoner-- Have is ave.
Home is ome
And so on, it’s a real pain to avoid but a dead giveaway to anyone using a fake London accent.

Coming back to the unwritten tales, Gremlin spotted all the English accents in his review with the exception of one i.e. the Midland accent of the female Bounty Hunter. Never heard that one before in any game.

Do you want to hear the most unintelligible narrator of any game...EVER? Try "Drizzlepath". You'll want to pull your hair out afterwards!

I've been working in television and commercials as an editor for over 30 years. I also did a smattering of voice overs and character-narrations, as well,back in the day.
Once,on a kick, and this was at least a dozen or more years ago, I sent files of some of my "voices" to several gaming companies,large and small...and I offered,in my spare time, to do voices for FREE. For FREE.
I can do just about ANY accent; even cartoony-voice characterizations. Never heard back from any of them. Little surprise: I had no agent to speak of and no gaming experience doing voices for games...I'm assuming without some sort of fame you at least need a track record to do voices for the bigger game companies.
But...FREE?
It seems either well-known (or at least often--used) voice over talents or character actors are the norm for bigger companies, and for independents they may mostly use friends of the developers. At least it often seems that way.
It always made me (and my wife) giggle when I was playing a game and the male voices (and/or accents) made me cringe...and I'm sure it was not the developer's intent to do so.

It's surprising that "free" did not prove to be a draw for anyone. Very interesting info, robedits.

I thought so at the time, Marian. I was (and have always been) busy with work. If I had had more time...at that time...I probably would have pursued it further. Doing "voices" (and impersonations) has always been a hobby, and if I had my druthers I'd have done that for a living. Lord knows I've done plenty of that work gratis for friends in the industry, in a pinch. When you're a "ham", you're a "ham" always!
Not an easy field to get into unless you pursue it diligently....or have many "ins".
Rob

What would enry iggins think about all this?!?!?!......Hmmmmm

RebKean

I think you might find it a wee mite difficult to do an Australian accent well. However, work on it, you may get somewhere. I'm working on my Scots accent, and according to a Scottish friend of mine, I sound reasonable.

Cheers, barbarosso

My personal view is that there are enough actors out there with every conceivable accent that there's no excuse for using someone who does a 'passable' imitation of one. The worst ones are when an actor can't make up their mind whether they're 'doing' Irish or Scottish (for example), and get caught in between. If you're going to use an accent, be consistent. Except, of course, when the story calls for someone to have a dodgy, faked accent, as part of the character

Thanks Cari, for saying I correctly identified most of the accents in BoUT. As I'm English, I have a good chance with the English accents, and the list in the review wasn't meant to be exclusive (btw, the actor who voices Ma'Zaz, the midland-ish Orc is actually from Malta!)

As for diction, I have to disagree. It <i>does</i> matter enormously in games for a couple of reasons. First, the player needs to be able to understand, given that players have a wide variety of levels of understanding of a given language. It's particularly a problem for players with reduced capacity in their hearing, because we very rarely get detailed enough lip-syncing in games to permit lip-reading.

And finally, some accents are characterised by very clear diction - English spoken with a strong Welsh accent (especially from South Wales) has very good diction. It's also my favourite accent in Book of Unwritten Tales.

Note to self: finish that review of Book of Unwritten Tales 2. These people deserve to hear about that one too!