Examples of Damage Control in Gaming: What Did Chucklefish Expect?

Chucklefish’s Wargroove has garnered deserved praise, a solid strategy game reminiscent of Nintendo and Intelligent Systems’ defunct Advance Wars in terms of its gameplay and aesthetic approach. Its success is why the development team is continuing their support through downloadable content. The newest will be Wargroove: Double Trouble, free content that will add a new story with unique characters and areas designed to be played in co-op. Three new commanders will be included: Bulky character Wulfar, and twins Errol and Orla. There’s also a new villainous whip-brandishing character named Vesper. It sounds good, especially for anyone who wanted to play the game with a friend.

They've got war cries, taunts and loads of grunt options; it's the voice actors behind everybody's favourite Outlaw faction!

🔨 Wulfar by @YeOleShrimpEyes
🌊 Errol by @EileMonty
🔥 Orla by @VivienTaylor
💨 Vesper by @JessicasVoice

🧾 https://t.co/6m44T4dup4 pic.twitter.com/e4H7kMTb0H

— ⚔️ Wargroove 2 ~ OUT NOW on PC & Nintendo Switch🔥 (@WargrooveGame) November 13, 2019

The problem here pertains to the voice actors chosen for the roles. Wulfar will be voiced by Adrian Vaughan, while Eileen Montgomery, Vivien Taylor, and Jessica Straus, will voice Errol, Orla, and Vesper, respectively. The cast choices were announced in mid-November, but it wasn’t until now that a good portion of the Twitterverse started noticing. There’s a good reason for the upset.

Errol, Orla, and Vesper are characters of color, but will be played by white actresses. I’m not sure how anyone Chucklefish couldn’t see the unfortunate message that tweet sends. It, perhaps indirectly, insinuates how they couldn’t bother to get actors of color to play roles that seem tailor made for them. The upset is the result of long, simmering issues with the voice acting and voice casting world that have boiled to the surface, a complicated problem only improving at a very, very slow pace.

It’s been common for white actors to play black or dark-skinned characters for a long time, and there doesn’t appear to be anything wrong with this in a bubble. General logic suggests that the casting director should be focused on finding the best voice actors to portray specific characters, regardless of race, unless the story or characters are focused on race-related issues. Our world is not a bubble, so this is not okay. It shouldn’t be this way, even if the actors can do good jobs.

This is sometimes out of the voice director and producer’s control, as the number of available voice actors of color has always been smaller. It’s a consequence of creators simply not creating enough characters of color for people of color to play, or only enough to fill a figurative Diversity Quota™, which has led to poor cultivation of minority actors. But this is slowly-but-surely improving over time, as creators are providing more diverse characters. So, it follows that a good portion of the player base wants to see the casting choices similarly improve. Not seeing that effort here is frustrating when other similarly (though not identically) budgeted works have.

For example: Lab Zero Games made sure to assemble a diverse voice cast for Indivisible to accompany its diverse characters. Not all of them are, but seeing what they did for most of them shows how good an effort they made. They also made sure they looked good while placing the actors’ faces alongside those of the characters.

There’s no way the game’s voice and casting directors didn’t see this, and there were quick responses. But even the responses are mixed at best and contain astounding admissions, especially from casting director Kimlinh Tran. It’s good that Tran realizes the mistakes made here in the lengthy Twitter thread, but some responses raised further confusion. In one tweet, she notes that the development team wanted the twins, Errol and Orla, to be played by minority actors, but they weren’t because… who knows. This section ends there. She also admits that her favorite voice for Vesper was a black actress, but she wasn’t cast because “the creative vision of the production had to be met, and every role had its own set of challenges.” I cannot parse what this means.

I don’t think Tran went out of her way to make sure there were minimal minority actors among the cast, but it’s not a good look when the excuses are hard to figure out. I hope Tran will be better as a casting director in the future, because she seems like an understanding person from the Twitter thread, particularly with how she asked people to respect those voicing concern.

Casting for minority voice actors has improved in recent years, but there’s clearly much more work to be done. There will also be people who simply do not want to understand this issue out of pure ignorance, and think voice casting should always be as blind as when Chucklefish did it. Choosing voices blindly is a problem when the so-called “best” voice for the job usually happens to be Caucasian. (These people are usually not worth the time addressing.) Voice actor Sean Chiplock prophetically raised this issue days before the Wargroove one blew up, and mentioned how actors of color are excluded from playing white roles at a higher frequency than the opposite. Kira Buckland agreed with him below.

Hopefully Chucklefish and Tran are serious about being better in future endeavors, especially since the former didn’t need another scandal. We all need to listen to each other more, and that also applies to minority voice casting. Promising to do better in the future is good