i finished a really fantastically illustrated & written visual novel called South Scrimshaw Part One. it is oodles of art & text presented and narrated like a nature documentary, investigating the biology of an alien planet while focusing on the life of a single whale.
i was absolutely compelled for the ~2 hours it took me to read through. the quality of it is super high.
getting to the credits, i wanted to know who voiced the documentary--there are two primary voices, a british male voice for the primary narration, and a british female voice for parenthetical asides. voice acting in this game was a pretty wild surprise: the game is free, ostensibly a one-person production, with no publisher or external funding.
the unfortunate realization is that there are no voice actors. the credits extensively list every single sound used from freesound.org and its author. it cites every royalty free music track it uses & its additional composer. credits to all the resources are very open and responsibly cited.
for narration: "In-development voice narration and speech synthesized using tools by ElevenLabs"
does this mean that the voice narration is only using synthesis for development & the final release will hire voice actors? given the type of presentation it is, i would hope so, but it's something i can't put my finger on due to how obfuscated the credit is.
out of ~800 overwhelmingly positive reviews on steam, many refer to it being fully voice acted. only a few mention the generated narration feeling a bit stiff, even fewer mark it as a negative addition.
ElevenLabs is not a great company, ethically-speaking. they're specifically creating ai generated speech tools to replace many actual actors' work, which is openly being fought for (even if fraught with their own ethical issues) by unions right now. i hate that they list 'Don't Nod' and "Paradox Interactive' as clients. i hate what it means for the possibilities of companies ostensibly doing good work with creative teams.
this game could have been released without voice acting. it adds to its appeal & charm, but the conflicted feeling i have about it now far outweighs my positive impressions of its contents. i don't know what to do with those feelings, so i'm writing about them here.
who are the actors whose work was used to train the models that then voiced the narration in this game? how much were they paid? why are their roles in the process that made the biology of this game about alien biology not counted amidst an incredibly detailed list of sources for its material?
where does this cross the threshold from microsoft sam to vocaloid to unidentifiable human-like acting
no answers necessary, really, just staring into the void
