The New Yorker has a great interview with Jennifer Hale (the voice of the female Commander Shepard among many other things) this week. There’s a lovely bit at the end when Hale (who has never played Mass Effect) goes through the opening of ME2 (which does have a spoiler for the first 10 minutes of that game).
Unfortunately, the whole thing isn’t available online (unless you subscribe). There’s also a little podcast with the author Tom Bissell talking about Mass Effect and bit of Ms. Hale there as well.
I listened to the last part of the podcast. It was pretty cool. Her “Sheppard” voice is very close to her real voice. I never recognize her in anything else.
She’s pretty much been the romantic lead (or female lead if main character is female) in almost every game ever, going as back as far as X-wing vs. Tie Fighter. It’s a bit weird that she’s that singular, really, but I can’t complain since she does an excellent job. I didn’t even know she was Samus Aran or Ophelia from Brutal Legend. She’s also in a bunch of animated work as well.
What with the Nicholson Baker piece and now this, it’s fun to see the writers in the hoity-toity New Yorker reacting to games. Their coverage of gaming has been fairly sympathetic and their writers are at least trying to understand, if not enjoy, the phenomenon of gaming.
While I agree with the sentiment of your post, I just wanted to point out that the New Yorker had Tom Bissell write the story because of his bona fides: He writes about video games for a living.
