June 25, 2005

Voice Actor Strike

As frequently happens these days when someone talks about unions, the reaction from gamers to the possible voice actor strike was pretty much to not support the union at all and call them greedy. Keep in mind that most of them don't know much, if anything, about either unions generally or what the voice actors are asking for specifically, but as Something Awful tells us, the internet makes you stupid. Penny Arcade also did a comic on this effect, but their archives are completely impossible to search with any usefull results so you'll just have to take my word for it.

Anway, Will Wheton, King Nerd of the Intarweb, has a great post on the strike. Besides being generally a great post, towards the end he makes the point that perhaps the reason gamers and game makers are so hostile to the voice actors union is because the gaming industry, as with most professional industries, is woefully underunionized. If you need any examples of what happens to labor with no unions, you need look no further than our friend Electronic Arts.

1 comment:

Noumena said...

Playing groups of workers (programms vs. artists, in Wil Wheaton's post) off against each other is an incredibly old tactic. It even predates capitalism in the Adam Smith sense: most of the stereotypes of Jews were developed in the late Middle Ages to turn peasant riots (demanding more food and pay for work and the like) into anti-Semitic lynch mobs