Troy Baker—the man of a thousand voices and a thousand digital faces—engages in a dialogue with Eva Carducci during a panel that delves far beneath the surface of voice acting. The theme is fascinating: imperfection.
When discussing antagonists, the common tendency is to label them. But for Baker, an actor’s perspective must be radically different. He has stirred up fans in the past, and he reiterates it now with conviction: he has never played a “villain”. To Troy, every character is the hero of their own story; it is us—from the outside—who perceive them as evil thanks to the privilege of our perspective.
“I cannot judge that character and say whether they are good or bad. They do what they believe is right… and if we do our job well, we leave the judgment to you.”
This suspension of judgment is the fundamental tool for bringing three-dimensional figures to life. The actor does not seek to morally justify every action, but rather focuses on the truth of the individual moment. One need not know the entire narrative arc to be effective; one needs only to understand the choice the character makes at that precise instant.
One of the greatest challenges for those working in video games is navigating “grey” morality. Eva Carducci raises a crucial point: how does one make an audience love a morally questionable character? Baker’s answer is disarming: that is not the goal. The objective is not likeability, but emotional impact. The actor cannot control the audience’s feelings; they can only work on the nuances—collaborating with directors and writers—to make that character believable. Complexity arises not from stopping at superficial emotions, but from digging so deep that one disappears into the role.
“The trick isn’t not getting lost; the trick is getting lost and then finding your way back out. When someone says, ‘I didn’t know that was you’, that’s the highest compliment.”
Finally, the panel strikes a chord that resonates with anyone who has ever held a controller: failure. While in real life we fear it, in video games, failure is the engine of improvement. Baker offers a poetic reflection on this connection, explaining that it isn’t the fall itself that scares us, but the consequences. The video game thus becomes a training ground for resilience. We bond with Joel, Higgs, or Booker because we share their mistakes and, above all, their capacity to get back up.
“You know, it’s not the fall that kills you, but the sudden stop… I think that’s a really important point. The reason we feel so connected to these characters and these stories—particularly those in video games—is that we experience failure alongside them and, most importantly, we overcome it. We realize that the consequences didn’t kill us. That not only did we manage to get past that moment, but we made it to the very end. We managed to win.”
Through the words of Troy Baker, “Game Over” ceases to be an ending and becomes part of that imperfect beauty that makes a character—and ourselves—profoundly human.
