Debra Wilson, who voices dozens of iconic characters in all sorts of video games, believes her face shouldn’t be used so much. She’s become omnipresent in Western AAA, and while her voice work is pretty diverse and of a high range, she only has one face, which by now has been used way too many times to count.
Most recently, Wilson appeared in Insomniac’s Wolverine, where she plays Callisto, but instead of modeling the character, the studio decided to scan Wilson’s face and put it in the game. During a June podcast with Joseph Shepherd, which has now resurfaced, Wilson explained that it was never her intention to have her face plastered all over so many games, and even said that it was a “mistake” to have her looks replace an established character’s design in Wolverine.
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“The game designers do that, I don’t,” Wilson said. “[In] Wolverine, they made it look like me. They just said, ‘We’re going to make it look like you.’ In Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, [I was] Amanda Waller. They made her my avatar,” Wilson explained.
But she isn’t too keen on having her face in everything, and in fact, seems to prefer when characters don’t share her face. “Honestly, I love games where they don’t look like me at all. [Because] it’s like being on stage, I might as well go and do theater,” she said.
“But if it just looks like me, then how do you get a chance to really escape into a character? Callipso is a known character in the world of X-Men, so why make it look like me when there are so many iterations?” Wilson wondered.
And it’s true. The best-looking characters in gaming are those that were designed with purpose and an artistic vision, rather than just being carbon copies of real-world actors and people. I get directors like Kojima, who blurs the lines between film and game, to pursue real-life actors and have them in his games, because that’s sort of the point of his style of game. But in other instances where studios are making run-of-the-mill titles, what’s the point of using facial scans so frequently?
Take Arkham‘s Batman, for example. His looks are, by all means, rather unrealistic. He is massive, his features are pronounced, and his face is stark and commanding. He shares no similarity to any real person out there, and that is exactly what makes him hyperreal and appealing. Or characters in a game like Deadlock. They’re all quirky and weird and designed to fit within a certain aesthetic, with each feature, including their faces, telling something about them.
While real people and real faces tell stories about themselves silently all the time, it’s not exactly the same kind of storytelling that you would necessarily want to see in a game. It’s just way too basic, a cop-out move by studios. And it seems even the actors being scanned agree.
