SAG-AFTRA’s Duncan Crabtree-Ireland on Potential for Video Game Publisher Holiday Season Boycott Amid Strike: ‘It’s a Tool That’s in Our Toolkit’
SAG-AFTRA is getting back to negotiating with the video game publishers next week in hopes of reaching an end to the actors strike that has been going on since July 26, the same weekend San Diego Comic Con kicked off.
Both sides say they remain optimistic that they can reach an agreement on their final sticking point in a 25-item proposal — issues surrounding uses of generative A.I. in games, particularly in regard to motion and performance capture. But SAG-AFTRA is considering the possibility of enacting a tactic they didn’t use during last year’s TV and film studio strike: a formal boycott.
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“It’s a tool that’s in our toolkit,” SAG-AFTRA executive director Duncan Crabtree-Ireland told Variety. “These businesses run on both supply and demand. And yes, we’ve disrupted the supply of labor to produce those projects, but we haven’t even begun to seriously disrupt the demand. And the holiday period is a particularly effective time, if we were to choose to do that, to deploy a campaign like that. And we’ve got the support of the AFL-CIO and the 15 million union members and their families around this country, on top of the members of the public, who have shown that they actually do care about AI abuses, because they all see how it can affect all of us.”
As of the end of September, 90 video game titles had signed either SAG-AFTRA’s proposed Interim Media Agreement or the indie developer-focused Tiered-Budget Independent Interactive Agreement, as the strike is largely handled on a title by title bases rather than studio by studio. Among the biggest developers to agree to the conditions for their games, in SAG-AFTRA’s opinion, is “Last Sentinel” maker Lightspeed LA. “Does anyone think they are destroying the future of their business or making it impossible to produce games? They are not doing that,” Crabtree-Ireland said.
The performers union’s national executive director says the reasoning given by video game publishers as to why they cannot agree to the A.I. language regarding motion and performance capture is unfounded. Publishers argue that motion capture work is largely used as an amalgamation of actors’ performances in video games and not something producers are capable of accounting for when it comes to compensation.
“Video games, just like movies and series, are collaborative works and they require the talents of all types of actors and performers,” Crabtree-Ireland said. “This is why the video game bargaining group’s tactic of trying to divide performers and treat voice actors and on camera actors differently is so wrong. When these companies hire a performance capture performer, or a movement performer, or a stunt performer, they’re casting that person because of the unique contribution they make to the game. To pretend that’s not so, and then try to use their leverage to bank those performers’ creations and performances so they can reuse them to make new performances in the future – using AI – without any consent or compensation is absolutely unacceptable and just plain wrong.”
Crabtree-Ireland added: “The justification that the video game bargaining group is articulating is designed to try and sound good to the public, to provide cover for creating a repository of actors and performances that they can use without informed consent or fair compensation, especially targeting actors who don’t have the individual leverage to block them. This is done with the clear intent to use digital replicas of performances in the future to avoid hiring the artist themselves or even securing their consent. And as far as I’m concerned, that’s wrong; our members know that’s wrong. And there’s a whole bunch of people in the industry, including people who work for those very game companies, who know it’s wrong.”
Crabtree-Ireland spoke with Variety shortly after SAG-AFTRA called a strike against “League of Legends,” a massively multiplayer online game produced in part by studio Formosa Interactive, which was previously exempt from the strike. Formosa, a member of the contract bargaining team on the publisher side, runs the voice acting aspect of “League of Legends” and SAG-AFTRA called a strike on the game after accusing Formosa of attempting to cancel a different game during the work stoppage.
“Formosa is a longstanding employer of union talent, and we refuse to let these baseless allegations distract us from the goal of reaching a fair deal that will benefit everyone,” Formosa Interactive senior vice president Paul Lipson said in a statement to Variety in response to Crabtree-Ireland’s comments. “We look forward to returning to the bargaining table to build on the substantial progress that has already been made in these negotiations.”
The companies bargaining alongside Formosa include Activision Productions, Blindlight, Disney Character Voices, Electronic Arts Productions, Insomniac Games, Llama Productions, Take 2 Productions and WB Games.
“We value actors’ contributions to our productions and want to continue working with them to create great entertainment experiences for fans,” Audrey Cooling, spokesperson for video game companies party to the Interactive Media Agreement, said in a separate statement. “We have already found common ground with the Union on 24 out of 25 proposals, and we remain committed to resolving the remaining issues at the bargaining table so we can end this strike and deliver historic wage increases, industry-leading AI protections, and many other benefits to video game performers working under the IMA.”
Prior to Tuesday’s news that the SAG-AFTRA negotiating committee and the video game companies bargaining over the IMA will be resuming talks over the contract, Crabtree-Ireland said it “has been noticed that we have such a large number of companies that are signed to the interim and the tiered independent agreements,” including Lightspeed LA.
With those video game companies aligned on SAG-AFTRA’s values when it comes to A.I., Crabtree-Ireland hopes the mega publishers will come around on the wording the actors union has gotten approved by the smaller brands.
“The language of those agreements is publicly available: interims, publicly available; tiered independents, publicly available. That language is what we’re looking for,” Crabtree-Ireland said. “If there’s some reasonable adjustment to the language that can help make a deal, we will explore that. But we’re very transparent about what we’re looking for. Our members don’t want to be on strike; they have to be on strike. So the second that we can make a fair deal with these companies and put them back to work, that’s what we’ll do. So you know, the ball is really in the companies’ court.”
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