Saturday, March 29, 2008
On automated voices
This is in response to the voice scientist that came to speak a couple of weeks ago. In the game The Sims the sim people have their own language that sounds like a mixture of all major world languages. Sometimes I think I should be able to understand what they are saying (that's how convincing it is) but when I listen harder it's only gibberish. I was wondering how the game developers came up with such a convinding sounding language. Like, was it generated by a gibberish program? Or did a group of scientists/writers sit down around coffee and donuts and make up a Sim script of gibberish? And how did they get the voice actors to read it right? Were they instructed to read a line as if they were in a certain circumstance? It must have been an ordeal. But then again, I'm not a voice scientist.
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2 comments:
That's interesting. It makes the game more personal by excluding the language factor. It leaves more to your imagination in the "Sim World" that you create. This way, you hear them talking, but it's your story, so you should be the one who decides what they're saying. If they were speaking a language you could understand, someone would have to come up with the entire story line, leaving nothing left to your own creativity. I couldn't find information leading to the conclusion to this question. See if you can dig further, so we can straighten out this dilemma!
I remember when I used to play the Sims and I wondered what they were saying also. I was waiting for the bus with my sister along with these two women who were speaking another language. We were unsure of the language they were speaking so we compared their language and conversation to that of the Sims people. As far as the questions on how the language in the Sims was developed, those are some good questions. I think that they did have to sit down and decide on how the characters would sound, and I think they decided on a gibberish language so that people would actually have to pay attention to the game rather than the conversations going on.
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