The Screengrab

As you probably know from the last hundred or so articles about the very big business of video games, they're no longer a niche market.  The biggest titles routinely outgross Hollywood movies, and major motion picture studios are beginning to tailor their releases so as not to conflict with the street dates of huge video game titles like Halo and Guitar Hero.  More and more, video games are being treated like movies:  the scripts get more complex, the special effects get more elaborate, the money gets bigger, and release dates become more important.  There's one way in which the two industries aren't exactly the same, though, and that's in the way they pay their actors.

The bigger video games get, the more they begin to attract brand-name Hollywood actors to do voice work.  Rockstar Games' Grand Theft Auto franchise pioneered this, getting big stars like Samuel L. Jackson, Peter Fonda and Ray Liotta to provide the voices of characters in previous installments.  This time around, with the critically acclaimed and best-selling Grand Theft Auto IV, they went the opposite direction, hiring a cast of relative unknowns to play Eastern European immigrant Niko  Bellic and his rotating cast of friends and enemies.  But one thing has held true, as the New York Timesrecently reported:  unlike with television, film, and all other media, actors in digital media receive no royalties or residuals for their work.  As a result, Michael Hollick (who plays Niko Bellic, and received $100,000 for a little more than a year's work) finds himself starring in the most popular entertainment product in America -- and isn't getting a single dime more than he was originally paid.    It's an unusual situation without an easy solution, and Hollick doesn't blame Rockstar -- he blames the Screen Actor's Guild, which hasn't been especially forward-looking in its negotiations over digital media.  Indeed, if predictions of an actor's strike this summer come to fruition, it's likely that, just as with the writer's strike earlier this year, digital media royalties and pay rates will be the central issue.  Meanwhile, Hollick and thousands of actors like him will have to suffer through getting no royalties for their video game work, regardless of the product's success.

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My friend and fellow Screengrabber Scott Von Doviak gets nervous when he watches me play Grand Theft Auto, since I tend to skip the missions and just barrel-ass around Rockstar Games’ big, fake virtual cities in a variety of stolen cars, tanks and cement-mixers, randomly killing as many pedestrians as possible until some Vice City or San Andreas S.W.A.T. sniper puts me down like a rabid dog.

While this kind of videogame behavior may demonstrate uncomfortably revealing things about the darker corners of my id, I’ve never been a proponent of the “video games lead to violence” argument for one simple reason: just like online porn is a release valve (so to speak) for those who don’t have the time, skills, money and/or moral inclination to go out and get some actual sex, violent video games strike me as a fairly harmless method for polite, law-abiding citizens like myself to unleash our pent-up road rage and fury at all the bad drivers, asshole co-workers and neo-conservative Executive Branch turd blossoms we have to suffer in real life. If I were an actual sociopath, I’d be out doing real crimes and/or running for higher office instead of sitting around playing with my computer.

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