Video game actors are going on strike tomorrow

Another summer, another strike: After more than a year of negotiations, SAG-AFTRA announced this afternoon—via America’s most famous Crabtree-Smith, Duncan—that the actors union is striking tomorrow on its Interactive Media Agreement. That, in case you weren’t up to date on your various union Media Agreements, is the one that covers actors appearing in video games, and represents negotiations with almost every single major publisher in the business. (Including the gaming branches of both Disney and Warner Bros., who are, presumably, old hands at this stuff by now.)

The upshot is that gaming actors—whose work appear in pretty much every one of the hundreds of games published every year, as the industry only gets more and more lucrative by the day—are headed out of the recording booth, and on to the picket lines at 12:01 a.m. Friday morning. The sticking point, you will be absolutely shocked to hear, is A.I.: In his statement about the pending strike, Crabtree-Ireland highlighted “fair compensation and the right of informed consent for the A.I. use of their faces, voices, and bodies” as the key sticking points on the contract.

SAG-AFTRA has had a 98.32 percent strike authorization vote in its back pocket since last September, as negotiations between the union and the publishers have stretched, semi-productively, for a year and a half at this point. Now, though, they’ve apparently hit a breaking point. (Although Variety notes that proposals were moving back and forth as recently as yesterday.) A spokesperson for the publishers claims that they’ve offered “meaningful AI protections that include requiring consent and fair compensation to all performers working under the IMA,” but the union clearly isn’t biting.

Video game actors last went on strike from October 2016 to September 2017, the first major union work stoppage to ever hit the industry. Because games take so long to make—and because acting represents a smaller fraction of the work done on them—it’s been difficult to track exactly what impact the nearly year-long strike had. (No titles were delayed, for instance, although a few were re-cast with non-union performers.) It’ll be interesting to see what the current version of SAG, freshly energized from last year’s strikes over in film and TV acting, will do to make its impact in gaming keenly felt.