Uh-oh, the emotionally disregulated citizens of the internet are revolting again (as in, they’re in revolt, but also revolting human beings–get it?). Apparently quite a lot of people have reservations about the quality of voice actress Lily Gao’s turn as the iconic Ada Wong (includingour own gone-but-not-forgotten Elijah Beahm in his review). That’s fine, because who doesn’t love a bit of well-argued criticism? Among the many detractors, however, a small but vocal minority has been unable to express those reservations without completely losing its shit.
Now, getting all overly aggravated over an issue like a single character’s voice-acting on Metacritic or Steam and giving the game a 0/10 is obviously a bit pathetic, but hey, it’s your life; you’re entitled to an opinion, even if it’s as worthless and asinine as effectively saying ‘this game is awful because of this one single side-character’s bad voice-acting.’
I’m playing through The Witcher 3 Next-Gen version right now, and you know what? I find Triss’ flat voicework flat-out annoying (exacerbated by the fact that she seems to be the only one with an American accent in the whole game). She’s so annoying in fact, that I might not even try to sleep with her, which as Geralt I generally feel duty-bound to do with all women in the game (despite the inherentcringe factor of sex in video games).
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However, that’s not going to stop me enjoying the rest of the game. “Bu-but it’s different, because Ada Wong had abettervoice actor in previous games, so why couldn’t they just–” because they justdidn’t, alright? Capcom made a creative choice, and even if it wasn’t the best one, it’s on you to self-regulate, and put some limits on just how pissed off you’ll let yourself get over such a minor infraction.
Regardless, leaving a badly argued user review on Metacritic is fine (in fact, it emphasises why the world needs games press, so by all means carry on, because you’re keeping me in the job). The real problem arises when people starthurling abuse at the voice actor in questionon social media platforms like Instagram, to the extent that said voice actor actually leaves the platform. A line get crossed at that point. It feels like a tendency weirdly unique to gaming too, and I don’t recall this kind of stuff happening over bad performances in movies, or TV shows, or when someone writes a novel that doesn’t live up to the previous ones.
Just because there are others like you who react the same way, don’t delude yourself into thinking that that vindicates you, because evidently there are alotof losers out there.
There are many of us who self-identify as gamers, but there’s a strange subsect of gamer that’s allowed too much of their identity to become integrated with a certain game, or character, or IP, to the point that when something doesn’t line up with their expectations (or how thingsusedto be in some idealised nostalgic past), they see red. So when Ada Wong’s voicework is a bit wonky inResident Evil 4 Remake, instead of just chatting about it with their friends down the pub or their colleagues at work–where they can bounce ideas around and hear other perspectives while maintaining those invisible rules of decent face-to-face social conduct–they start yelling about it through their only social outlet: the internet.
It’s an unfortunate and miserable way to interact with the world, yet seemingly more and more common. When a similar thing happened to voice actress Laura Bailey over her role as Abby in The Last of Us Part 2, Naughty Dog CEONeil Druckmann rightly suggested on Twitterthat these people “get the mental help they so clearly need,” and there’s a truth to that. There’s a social malaise behind all this stuff. A growing number of young adult men (25-34 years old) are still living with their parents. Thelatest Census figuresshow that in 2022, 19% of men (and 12% of women) are living at home with their parents. People are spending more and more time online, socialising less (via Newsweek), and fewer men are getting into relationships (Pew Research). Combine that with the fact that more and more people are playing video games, and you’re increasing the pool of male live-at-home loners in gaming. Based on the figures, chances are that many of those are inevitably not going to be the happiest, most well-adjusted people.
A quick word of advice to those haters: discourse and discussion is important. You have all the right in the world to dislike or disagree with a creative decision–you may even say youhateit (because sometimes that just feels good to say)–but if you can’t express that without losing your cool, then go outside, get a breath of fresh air, and learn some mindfulness techniques. If you get so wound up over something so trivial as a dicey bit of voice-acting that you vocallydespisea whole game (and, more importantly, a human being) because of it, then at that point the game really isn’t the problem, it’s you. And just because there are others like you who react the same way, don’t delude yourself into thinking that that vindicates you, because evidently there are a lot of losers out there.
These things do tend to snowball in weird ways, and I don’t think that certain narratives in the gaming press help the situation. There’s a story circulating, for example, that RE4 Remake has been review-bombed on Metacritic because of Gao’s voice-acting and the game’s apparent ‘wokeness,’ but scanning through through the game’s 89 reviews on Metacritic (than you, Ctrl+F), there are only three mentions of ‘woke’, four mentions of Lily Gao, and six of Ada Wong (which actually includes a couple of aforesaid losers who pasted their frothy-mouthed reviews across every platform version of the game). There are far more criticisms of the game’s graphics, voice-acting at large, and stiff controls, and the vast majority of them are written without vitriol.
Sure, users like the game less than the media, and there’s a whole bunch of stuff to dissect there, but let’s not discredit gamers at large and aggrandise the idea that there’s some kind of review-bombing campaign or movement, because thatgives these chumps a platform they don’t deserve. There’s a bigger societal problem here, but a lot of it has fallen at the feet of the games community, and it may be on us–gaming sites, media, the vast majority of gamers who can say ‘I wasn’t into Ada Wong’s voice-acting’ without throwing a hissy-fit–to clean it up.
