Rogue | Polygamer

Tristan D. Lalla is a star of stage, screen, and game. His video game voice-acting portfolio includes Far Cry 2, Deus Ex Human Evolution, Rainbow Six: Siege — and, most notably, the slave-turned-pirate Adéwale in Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag and its sequels and DLC. But both Tristan and Adéwale had to grow into their roles: Tristan overcome both a speech disorder and shyness to become an actor, and Adéwale was originally from Martinique until Tristan invested his Trinidadian heritage into the character.

In this interview, Tristan shares family and teachers helped him overcome his personal challenges and become an actor; how a stage actor broke into the video game industry, and how being a gamer himself informs his performances; what it’s like to be motion-captured into a game and then to play a game that he’s in; the importance of representation in games, even when gamers can’t see the voice actors; whether directors should take an actor’s personal history and experiences into consideration when casting; and why video games should tackle difficult topics such as slavery.

Stream the audio edition of this interview below or from iTunes, Stitcher, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, Overcast, Pandora, Pocket Casts, iHeartRadio, TuneIn, RadioPublic, or the Internet Archive. Click past the jump for his demo reel and for links to resources mentioned in this episode.

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Podcast: Download (Duration: 57:09 — 27.0MB) | Embed

Gillian Smith is a professor of Art+Design and Computer Science at Northeastern University in Boston. Her field of study is procedural content generation, in which aspects of a game — the world, its inhabitants, individual levels — are created on-the-fly. The resulting output, rather than being completely random, follows a predefined set of rules that results in a world that conforms to its designer’s vision, even if the exact manifestation is unexpected.

In her essay “A proceduralist view on diversity in games“, Smith argues that these rules can result in a game world that is more or less representative of its audience, as determined by the definitions and boundaries fed into the system. In this podcast, she discusses how this is so, some examples of procedural generation that does diversity right, and what the future for procedural generation is.

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Podcast: Download (Duration: 55:29 — 26.3MB) | Embed

Tag Archives: Rogue

Polygamer #52: Assassin’s Creed voice actor Tristan D. Lalla

Polygamer #48: Gillian Smith on procedural generation