'Everyone Felt Like They Owned It': Collaboration and Empathy in Video Game Acting

Dan Leberg; Anika Falkenberg

doi:10.24140/ijfma.v10i2.9457

Dan Leberg University of Groningen https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5350-7866
Anika Falkenberg University of Groningen https://orcid.org/0009-0005-3544-6111

DOI: https://doi.org/10.24140/ijfma.v10i2.9457

Abstract

Performance capture (pecap) acting for videogames blends acting practices for traditional film, television, and theatre into a distinct form of screen performance. Veteran film actors must learn to adjust their creative cognitive work to accommodate the intensely collaborative industrial logistics of the pecap volume. This article analyzes pecap acting practices for videogames as examples of distributed cognition, wherein actors learn how to think with and through the volume’s technological apparatus in order to collaborate with directors, animators, and more in the articulation of their characters. The article draws on interviews with AAA game pecap actors, game directors, animation directors, and acting instructors, and on observations from a pecap acting for videogames workshop at Toronto’s MoCapU in October 2023.

Author Biographies

Dan Leberg, University of Groningen

Dan Leberg is an Assistant Professor in Film and Media Studies at the University of Groningen. His research focuses on the intersection of cognition, creative collaboration, and film and television acting practices; his recent monograph, Screen Acting: A Cognitive Approach (Edinburgh University Press, 2022) analyzes modern western film and television acting as a practice of soliciting empathetic relationships amongst actors, characters, and audiences. He has also written about creative materiality in puppet media production, Shakespeare on film, motion-capture acting, and racial performances in music videos.

Anika Falkenberg, University of Groningen

Anika Falkenberg is a recently graduated Research Master student from the University of Groningen, specifically the Research Master Arts, Media and Literary Studies. She specialises in video games and is interested in the intersection between video games, culture and marginalised communities, bringing in her heritage and background as a mixed Asian and European, Singapore and the Netherlands in particular. She is starting her PhD about cultural representation of Southeast Asia in video games in Charles University Prague and playing multiple games for fun and for analysis.

'Everyone Felt Like They Owned It': Collaboration and Empathy in Video Game Acting

Abstract

Author Biographies

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