'Everyone Felt Like They Owned It': Collaboration and Empathy in Video Game Acting

Performance capture (pecap) acting for videogames blends acting practices for traditional film, television, and theatre into a distinct form of screen performance. Veteran film actors must learn to adjust their creative cognitive work to accommodate the intensely collaborative industrial logistics of the pecap volume. This article analyzes pecap acting practices for videogames as examples of distributed cognition, wherein actors learn how to think with and through the volume’s technological apparatus in order to collaborate with directors, animators, and more in the articulation of their characters. The article draws on interviews with AAA game pecap actors, game directors, animation directors, and acting instructors, and on observations from a pecap acting for videogames workshop at Toronto’s MoCapU in October 2023.