On Black Friday, my husband and I purchased a second Xbox One. We weren’t initially going to do that, but we had reached a tipping point between the cost analysis (it’s expensive and we’re just two people) versus the games that we wanted to play together, namely Halo 5 and, in 2016, the new Crackdown. Our discussions were long. We ended up making lists of games that could be played co-op and only were available on the Xbox One, or that we had already purchased and could play co-op if we so desired. There was Halo: The Master Chief Collection, Halo 5, Borderlands: The Handsome Jack Collection, the Gears of War HD Remaster, Sunset Overdrive, Destiny, and of course whatever would be released in the future. Eventually, it just made sense to bite the bullet, buy the second console, and get to playing some games together.

Soon after we got our new console, my husband asked me if I wanted to play through the Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 campaign with him. I admit now that I have never played a full Call of Duty game before, either campaign or multiplayer. I have watched my husband play through a lot of the games, but I kind of just felt like watching was more than enough for me. I always gravitated towards fantastical FPS games, stuff like Halo, BioShock and Borderlands. COD titles just kind of repelled me. But, for whatever reason, I readily agreed. I would be able to play as a woman (woo hoo!) and my husband and I would play through the campaign and be able to get some enjoyment out of our new dual consoles.

We ended up setting up both consoles in the same room. We have a computer room where we do most of our gaming and it made the most sense to have one Xbox One plugged into my computer monitor (a Playstation 3D display from years ago when 3D was the next big thing) while the other was already connected to the big TV. I would sit in my computer chair and he could sit on the couch. We would be able to wear our own sets of headphones and still be able to talk normally since we were only a few feet from each other. It was a good solution for co-op play, almost hearkening back to the good old days of setting up a LAN.

But this story isn’t so much about co-op play, although it is something that I love to do. It’s more about what this situation revealed about Black Ops 3 and the main character that you play, both the male version and the female version. When I play a game, and the developer gives you a choice of whether to play as a man or woman, I guess I always assume that the direction that the voice actors are given is similar. Like, your arm gets ripped off in this scene, so scream really loud and try to convey that you’re in a lot of pain, or you’re threatening a guy in this scene, so sound tough. It’s obviously more complicated than that, but that’s just the thought process that I have. I know that people reading the same lines can make them sound very different, even if they’re trying to convey the same emotional beats. I always think about how the two Shepards in Mass Effect can vary so much. I know this not just because I watched other people play the game as a guy, but also because I started a Renegade playthrough with a male Shepard as well. I felt like they were the same characters saying the same things in a lot of ways, at least so far as the words on the page go, but also seemed very different in others. Of course, one could argue that my familiarity over many hours with one Shepard influenced my feelings when I switched to the other. Be that as it may, I felt like my original Shepard was more organic and realistic, while the male Shepard felt somewhat stunted and had less emotional range. But the differences were mild enough, and they never reached a level to where I was thinking about them too much. It was an interesting exercise to compare the two, but not really much more than that.

Playing through the campaign in Black Ops 3 was a very different experience. I was hearing the lines virtually at the same time, given a second or two delay on either console. I decided to wear headphones, but I kept my left ear slightly uncovered so that I could hear my husband if he needed to say something while we played. He took his headphones off and so the audio was being normally played through the television speakers. This created a situation where I would either hear my female character first, followed a second later by his male character, or vice versa. In that situation, I began to pick up on some strange differences between the two, and I considering that I had no emotional investment in either portrayal going in, I began to think of it as a unique experiment that I somehow stumbled upon as we played.

His male character was very "gung ho" and I felt like he was loud and proud when he talked. If anything, he seemed to be a typical male action hero, like Jai Courtney or Sam Worthington in almost any film that I've seen them star in. It was a typical sounding voice that would appear in a military shooter and it was familiar to me as someone who plays games and watches movies and television shows. At the same time, my female character was speaking the same lines, but her tenor seemed to be more measured, there was definitely a feeling that she was more subdued, even though she was saying the same words and performing the same actions as her male counterpart. To compare the two as we played on the fly was very strange. I found myself wanting to listen again to portions of dialogue to compare inflection, tone and the way the lines were delivered by both voice actors. I came away feeling that the male voice was more enthusiastic and energetic, but that the female voice seemed to be more slow, thoughtful and perhaps even detached.

I wonder, upon reflection, if this is indicative of the actors themselves and what they brought to the recording sessions and that the direction was virtually the same for both as they recorded, or whether each voice actor was directed to read their lines differently? It opens up an interesting thought experiment, at least to me, about whether the female voice was purposefully made to be more subdued and less emotional than the male counterpart. If the lines are the same, and the characters are doing the same things, and if they are intrinsically the same person, why would things like tone and inflection change so drastically? Would it just be an accident and completely unintentional, or would it point to the developers molding a character is such a way that the personality of the character vastly changes from male to female?

In the end, I have no good idea about why this is the case. I could attempt to discern motives of the developers and try to suss out why the voice actors and their performances appear to sound so different, but I think that that would be presumptuous of me. I actually quite enjoy the female line readings in comparison to the more gruff and action hero-type voice that the male voice actor uses in his line readings. If anything, I feel like the female protagonist carries the weight of the narrative, as silly as it is, a bit more in her voice. To have to do horrible things and then explain why is handled, I think, more tactfully if you play the female character because of the more subdued line reading. It's an interesting comparison to make, and it was especially odd to be making it as I listened to both at the same time.

Of course, there is a third option. It may just be that the voice actor for the male lead just isn't that good. After some amount of my own research, I found some reviews that criticize the performances in comparison to other Black Ops games, making special note of how poor the male protagonist is. I don't know whether it may just be a case of one performer just being that much better. It's something to consider.

Still, even as I had this back and forth discussion with myself about the male voice versus the female voice in the campaign, I also realized that the game isn't some deep work of art. It's a story that doesn't make a whole lot of sense when viewed away from the action. However, the co-op is very fun, and makes the bigger, more bombastic missions memorable. There's something very rewarding when you're trying to help your teammate by hacking an enemy robot and laying down cover fire as they try to run across a courtyard or shoot a giant robot with a rocket launcher. It's silly, goofy and dumb, but sometimes that is more than enough to make for a good night of gaming. If anything, the experience of listening to both of the main characters at the same time was something that I think was worth my time. It will certainly make me think, in the future, about how developers approach a campaign where there is an ability to choose the gender of the main character, and what that means when the voice actors sound so different in the finished product.