Women’s voices in games have been fighting for a long time to be heard, even though our voices tend to get relegated to the video game equivalent of no-talent ad-libs.
But that’s changing, and thank goodness for that.
The Early Days: Voices in the Shadows
If you heard a woman in a game at all, she was likely the princess who needed to be rescued, the scantily clad sidekick, or the minor NPC (non-player character) with a few lines about needing directions. Those voices – many of them by extraordinary actors – were rarely the ones celebrated. For women, seeing our contributions so minimised was frustrating, our talent so underutilised.
The Turning Point: Stronger Roles and Characters
Then came a shift, a glorious breath of fresh air. The games changed, and with them so did the characters – now we started to see female leads with substance, complex, flawed, human. And the world of voice acting responded. Female voice actors began to get roles where they could utilise their full talent.
Consider, for example, Jennifer Hale – the one-woman wrecking ball who played Commander Shepard in the Mass Effect series. You might argue that Hale wasn’t just being a woman playing at being a man: her performance was nuanced and layered, and revealed that gaming protagonists could be more than just men with a me-machine. Here was a female voice as the game’s focal point, not just a peripheral part of the game. Hale’s Shepard showed that women could lead, not just support.
The Impact of Representation
It’s not just the roles, though, it’s what they symbolise. When you have a strong, nuanced female character voiced by a strong, nuanced female actor, it does something for an audience. It makes it a broader gaming world, and allows more potential players to see someone they can relate to in that world – and that’s huge.
As a girl growing up, I didn’t really have that in games, and now girls and women are spoiled. I can see a character that I could look up to, and other women can see characters they can look up to, and that’s awesome. Okay, so how do we get more of those characters?
Lest we forget Ashley Johnson, who provided the voice of Ellie in The Last of Us, raw and wrenching and hard to shake.
This kind of work is game-changing, showing the industry that female voices aren’t optional, not another fill-in role, but essential.
Challenges and Triumphs
I’m not saying it’s all been easy: while female voice actors have been getting more prominent roles, there’s still been a reluctance by the industry to give us the credit; pay gaps, typecasting and lack of recognition have all been problems we’ve faced. The women in this industry wouldn’t be women in this industry if we weren’t a hardy bunch, though – we’ve kept at it, kept on proving we’re just as good, just as deserving of the big roles, as the men can be.
Then there’s Laura Bailey, whose work as Abby in The Last of Us Part II – a character who was a controversial mess for sure, but still an objectively great performance, full of power and nuance and, yeah, divisiveness – but isn’t that what acting is? She made people feel something. And what is this industry for if not that?
The Road Ahead
The best is yet to come. It’s not women stepping into the spotlight of voiceover; it’s women owning it. And it’s not just in the traditional female roles, either. We’re seeing women play a wider variety of characters – the leads, the bad guys, the morally dubious in-betweens. It’s a great time to be a female voice actor in games; the roles are expanding, and the credit we receive for our work is growing, too.
Conclusion
As gaming narratives keep getting richer and more varied, it isn’t just a passing trend for more women to be cast as heroes, but a necessary evolution. From NPCs to protagonists and beyond, the women working in this field aren’t going away. And we’re not getting any quieter, either. To the future, may it be filled with female voices loud and clear.
