Another Round

Video game performers, like voice actors and motion-capture performers are currently striking, hoping to pressure video game studios into commitments around the rules for the use of generative automation tools to simulate their performances and to be paid for such uses as if it were new performance, royalties, in a manner of speaking.

In the same way as the broader entertainment industry strike earlier, I suspect that this is going to backfire to a certain degree, because there are always going to be small, independent studios that aren't covered by any agreement. A SAG-AFTRA member quoted in the NPR story on the strike casts the dispute as being one between studio executives and workers, because portraying corporate executives as greedy and hostile to those less well-off than themselves tends to be a winner, but unless the tools are expensive enough that only the major studios than afford to use them, the big names are as likely to be followers in the use of the technology as they are to be leaders.

And if they are followers, then all bets are off. Smaller studios, including those that are only a single person with some passion and a game idea, are going to be all over generative automated tools as a way of putting out games with the polish and appearance that the big studios manage. Sure, a lot of games indulge in quirky pixel art or proudly display graphics that haven't been cutting-edge for the past quarter-century, but a lot of that is driven as much by necessity as it is by aesthetics. After all, if people didn't want the latest and greatest, I'm pretty sure that Square Enix could have saved a fortune on their Final Fantasy VII updates by sticking to the animation style of the original. And some of what made Resident Evil so charming back in the day were clever uses of workarounds for the technology of the day; Capcom left the old look behind for a reason. Tools that allow lower-budget operations to put out better products will be adopted, regardless of how often SAG-AFTRA attempts to stand athwart progress shouting "Stop!"

One of the ways in which unions protect their members is by shielding them from competition; in this case from technology. But they can only shield members from organizations they have pull with. SAG-AFTRA may be able to intimidate some small studios by threatening to stifle them once they become large enough that they would need to rely on unionized labor, but that's unlikely to work on an individual or small group of friends who are working on a labor of love. And if these tools allow for these independent games to be competitive in the marketplace, they're going to attract more people to use them.

The answer to automation is always going to have to be the next thing. If automation is going to produce the next wave or jobs that only people can do, then the goal should be to start looking for that wave now, and bringing it about, rather than sitting on the shore commanding the tide to turn back. (After all, even kings know better than to think that would work.) But that's a serious ask for an organization that's built on protecting the ability of people to do things as they've been done in the past.