Voice Acting or Subtitles

            Games are a visual medium for storytelling. Well, they are now at least. They don’t have to be strictly for telling a story, but should you want to make a game solely for that purpose, keep in mind that it’s just like a movie, only interactable. The most common advice I get for working with a visual medium is “Don’t tell me; show me.” That being said, which is better for games: voice acting or subtitles and text dialogue?

            Voice acting is a bit like regular acting, just less memorizing lines and more making your voice be heard. Having a unique voice helps, but being able to replicate a variety of voices is invaluable as an asset. Most big budget titles opt for voice acted characters to explain the plot through lots of exposition. For a complex plot, this is necessary. However, for a story that can easily be summarized without leaving out critical detail, there’s hardly any need to have characters speak. 

            Here’s an example: we have a hero of the story who is caught in a bind. The villain explains his plans in explicit detail and then laughs maniacally and leave the hero alone to escape. A scene like this may last well over five minutes. A better way to do this is to have the hero be bound, the villain maybe does a little interrogation, gets what he needs, attempts to kill hero, and then hero manages to avoid death and escape. A scene like this can occur in under three minutes. It’s all a matter of how much the audience sees and how much dialogue the characters speak.

            That example is more fitting for a movie rather than a game. But imagine if the plot was very complex and the characters had to say a lot of information so the audience can understand why the events of the story are happening. This is where text and subtitles come in. Most voice acted games have subtitles, but are by default toggled off. For a game that has only text for their story such as the early Final Fantasy games, players had to read everything. Coincidentally, the plots to these games were pretty complicated and reading the story just helped me understand it better. 

            How about this: which is easier for you as a person; reading words or reading faces? Faces convey emotion and expression. If you’ve seen enough faces, you can tell exactly what a person is feeling the moment their muscles contort into a frown or stretch into a grin. Connecting those faces with the surrounding environments and events happening can give you an idea of what is going on. Words give descriptions, but the scene can be imagined in your head. This is what makes books so entertaining to readers. They read the paragraph that describes a character’s appearance, the setting they are in, the events that led up to this point, and that character’s reaction to it all.

            Is there a clear winner here? I doubt it. Both are excellent ways to portray a story. I prefer text simply because I usually mishear what a voice actor may say or the acting is done poorly. Imagine Tidus doing his horrendous laugh during that one scene. Now imagine it without the actual laugh, but his body and face stay the same. You can still tell he’s laughing and you almost want to laugh with him. Now if acting is done great enough, you might not need to read the words as the facial expressions and the voice of the character say it all for you.