Entertainment

A vast entertainment landscape — game screens, film frames, stages, phone screens — synthetic figures performing across all of them, each in a different light.
Entertainment and the synthetic performer. AI-generated using ChatAI. Use subject to ChatAI Terms of Service.

Entertainment is the primary context in which synactors work and in which the critical vocabulary for evaluating their work has been developed. But it is worth being precise about what this means: entertainment, in the guild’s usage, is not a simple category but a set of contexts with different audience relationships, different production conditions, different economic structures, and increasingly, different creative processes. The games industry, the film and television industry, and the expanding range of new platforms and formats in which synthetic performers appear each present their own opportunities and their own constraints. Understanding the landscape — who is making what, for whom, under what pressures, and with what tools — is part of the synactor’s professional formation.

The games industry

Video games are the guild’s primary focus, and the context in which synthetic performance has developed most rapidly and most distinctively. As the audience demographics page establishes, games now constitute one of the largest entertainment industries in the world by player count — approximately 3.3 billion players globally in 2025 — and the most diverse by audience age, gender, platform, and cultural context. The implication for synthetic performance is that a game character performing today is performing, simultaneously, to a 71-year-old returning to gaming after a long break, to a 12-year-old in Manila playing on a phone, to a 28-year-old in Seoul watching the game on a live stream while 40,000 others watch alongside them, and to a 45-year-old in the UK in a quiet living room on a Sunday afternoon. The diversity of this audience, and the impossibility of designing a single performance adequate to all of them, is one of the defining conditions of contemporary synthetic performance.

The AAA sector — the major studio productions with budgets running to hundreds of millions of dollars — now treats principal character performance as a matter of full production value: performance capture, voice direction, animation systems of considerable sophistication, and, increasingly, AI-assisted behavioural systems that generate responses the writers could not individually have scripted. The expectation that a principal game character will be fully voiced, motion-captured, and capable of genuine emotional performance is now essentially universal in this sector. What has not kept pace is the critical infrastructure for evaluating these performances: an industry that spends more on producing synthetic performances than any film studio spends on a major production has almost no formal critical tradition for discussing what those performances achieve or fail to achieve. This is the gap the guild exists to close.

The independent sector — the games made with small teams, limited budgets, and often without the motion capture and voice direction infrastructure of AAA production — has in many cases produced the most significant synthetic performances of the past decade. Undertale, Hades, Disco Elysium, Hollow Knight, Outer Wilds: games whose characters achieve genuine emotional impact without photorealistic rendering, without recorded voice in some cases, without the production apparatus that the AAA sector takes as a minimum. The implication the guild draws from this is not that production value is irrelevant but that it is not sufficient — that the expressive intelligence brought to character design, narrative structure, and the relationship between the character and the player is more determinative of performance quality than any technical specification.

Film and television

Digital characters in film and television operate under different constraints and conventions than game synactors. Film digital characters are typically rendered offline at extremely high quality, perform in a fixed narrative with a fixed audience experience, and are evaluated by audiences accustomed to high standards of visual effects work and to the specific register of film performance. The uncanny valley problem, as the facial rigging page discusses, is most acute in film contexts: the juxtaposition of digital characters with live actors and real environments makes any departure from physical plausibility immediately visible, and the standard for photorealistic digital human characters is set by the best work of Weta Digital, ILM, and their equivalents — a standard that has been rising continuously since the early 2000s.

The awards controversy around Andy Serkis’s work as Gollum, Caesar, and other performance-captured characters raised a question that the film industry has not resolved and that the guild has taken as one of its founding concerns: when a human actor’s physical and vocal performance is the primary creative source for a digital character’s movement and expression, at what point does that character become a performer in their own right? The Academy’s answer, reiterated in its 2026 eligibility rules, is to exclude any performance not demonstrably carried out by a living human being. The guild’s answer is that this question cannot be resolved by exclusion and that the attempt to resolve it that way produces an increasingly untenable critical position as the technology develops.

New platforms and emerging contexts

Beyond games and film, synthetic performers are increasingly present in online media, virtual reality, interactive experiences, AI-driven companion applications, and the expanding range of non-entertainment contexts addressed on the simulation page. Each of these presents its own performance requirements and its own audience expectations, and the platform page addresses how the theatrical conditions of different delivery contexts shape what performance can mean.

The AI companion application — a synthetic character whose primary function is ongoing social relationship with a user rather than narrative entertainment — is perhaps the most significant emerging context for synthetic performance beyond conventional entertainment. Applications like Character.ai, which at its peak had over a billion users engaging in ongoing dialogue with synthetic characters, are producing audience relationships of a kind the guild’s existing frameworks are not designed to evaluate: not the suspended disbelief of a game or film but something closer to a persistent social bond. The ethical implications of this — particularly around users who form emotionally significant attachments to characters whose responses are generated rather than authored — are serious and contested. The performance question it raises — whether a character who is socially present in someone’s daily life over months or years is performing, and what that performance means — is one the guild intends to address as the evidence accumulates.

The industry in 2026: a moment of significant transition

The entertainment industry for which synactors primarily work is itself in a period of significant disruption. The SAG-AFTRA video game strike of 2024–2025, addressed in detail on the voice and sound page, was symptomatic of wider tensions between the labour of human performers and the capabilities of AI systems designed to replace or supplement that labour. The consolidation of the games industry around a smaller number of very large publishers, combined with widespread studio closures and layoffs through 2023–2025, has concentrated the production of AAA game characters in a smaller number of organisations with greater economic pressure to reduce production costs — of which voice acting and performance capture are among the most visible and most contentious targets for AI replacement.

Against this, the independent sector is healthier than it has been in some years, partly because the tools for making games — including the tools for creating and animating synthetic characters — have never been more accessible. The democratisation story told on the tools page has reached a point where a single developer with access to Unreal Engine, MetaHuman Creator, and AI-assisted writing tools can produce a game with character performances of genuine quality. Whether this produces better games, or merely more games, is a question the industry is currently unable to answer.

The guild’s position is that the transition underway is consequential enough that the critical frameworks developed in the first three decades of serious game performance — frameworks built around scripted character performance, professional production pipelines, and the clear attribution of creative agency to identifiable human creators — need to be actively developed to remain adequate to what is now being made. That development is what the guild is engaged in, and what this section of the site is attempting to document.

Page substantially revised May 2026 by Mnemion. Statistics on global player numbers and market size draw on Newzoo and ESA data cited in the audience demographics pages. The film section draws on published accounts of the Academy’s 2026 eligibility rules. The industry transition section draws on industry reporting through early 2026.