The actors have put their boards in their hands again. But this time, members of the Screen Actors Guild are hitting out at the video game industry after negotiations for a new contract governing interactive media and video games broke down. The union began striking on Friday, July 26, preventing more than 160,000 SAG-AFTRA members from taking on new video game projects and hampering games already in development from major publishers to smaller indie studios.
Negotiations broke down due to disagreements over worker protections around AI. The actors’ union, SAG-AFTRA, negotiates the terms of the interactive media agreement, or IMA, with a negotiating committee of video game publishers, including Activision, Take-Two, Insomniac Games, WB Games and others representing a total of 30 signatory companies. Although SAG-AFTRA and the video game bargaining group were able to agree on a number of proposals, AI remained the final hurdle that resulted in the strike.
SAG-AFTRA’s provisions on AI govern voice and movement performers in relation to digital copies — or the use of an existing performance as a basis to create new ones without the original performer — and the use of generative AI to create performances without any initial input. However, according to SAG-AFTRA, the negotiating companies did not agree on what type of performer should qualify for AI protection.
SAG-AFTRA’s head of contracts Ray Rodriguez said the bargaining companies originally wanted to provide protection for the voice, not the movement performers. “So anyone doing a stunt or a creature performance, all those people would have been vulnerable under the employers’ offer,” Rodriguez said in an interview with Consequences.
Rodriguez said the companies later extended protection to motion performers, but only if “the performer is identifiable in the output of the digital copy of the AI.”
SAG-AFTRA rejected this proposal as it could exclude most of the movement’s performances. “Their proposal would create anything that doesn’t look and sound identical to me,” said Andy Norris, a member of SAG-AFTRA’s IMA negotiating committee, during a news conference. “[The proposal] would leave movement specialists, including stuntmen, completely out in the cold, to be replaced … by soulless synthetic performers trained for our actual performances.”
The shopping game companies argued that the terms went too far and would require the approval of actors. “Our offer directly addresses SAG-AFTRA’s concerns and extends meaningful AI protections that include the consent requirement and fair compensation to all performers working under the IMA. These conditions are among the strongest in the entertainment industry,” wrote Audrey Cooling, a representative working on behalf of video game companies at the negotiating committee in a statement to Threshold.
SAG-AFTRA’s strike rules include a number of exceptions for the companies and labor struck, making it difficult to know the true extent of the strike, especially the games it affects.
For example, work done under the SAG-AFTRA Scale Independent Interactive Media Agreement or an Interim Interactive Media Agreement is exempt from the strike. Additionally, a specific clause in the IMA called “side letter six” grants an exemption for games in production before August 2023. This means that even though Take-Two is a hit company, Grand Theft Auto VI it is not considered hit work. However, members of SAG-AFTRA’s negotiating committee have encouraged others to refrain from working on letter six side matches.
“Appointment Six allows, but does not require, performers to provide services during a strike,” Sarah Elmaleh, a video game performer and chair of SAG-AFTRA’s IMA bargaining committee, said in a TikTok video. “This language entered our contract for one reason only, to undermine our union’s most valuable tool: a strike.”
The last SAG-AFTRA video game strike was in 2016 and lasted 11 months, bringing performers fixed rate increases, improved set safety guarantees and better oversight to prevent vocal stress on voice actors.