How to play The Choicer Voicer

A round takes about as long as the clip does. Everything hard about this game is in the performing, not in the operating.

What you need first

• The game

  A Windows or Linux machine and the download from itch.io. It installs like any other desktop game; there is nothing to sign into and no account to make.

• At least one scene

  The game gives you something to start with, but the reason people keep playing is dub packs — community-made scenes you download separately. Two or three good ones is an evening.

• People, in the room

  It is a local game. Two is enough to be funny; five or six is where it gets properly loud. Everybody needs to be able to see the screen, which is the real constraint on how many can play.

• Somewhere to sit that is not silent

  Nobody performs well whispering. The game asks you to be ridiculous out loud, and a room where that feels allowed is worth more than any setting in the menu.

A round, start to finish

1. 1

   Pick a scene

   From what is installed. A first scene should be short and have two people arguing in it — an argument gives every performer something to push against, and a monologue gives them nothing.

2. 2

   Read what you have been given

   The lines are on screen with their timings. Read them once before the picture starts, because the one thing that reliably ruins a take is discovering the joke at the moment you are supposed to deliver it.

3. 3

   Decide who the character is

   Before the first frame, not during it. Pick something specific — a nervous estate agent, somebody's dad, a newsreader who has had enough — and commit to it. A voice decided in advance survives a mistake; a voice invented on the fly collapses at the first line that does not fit it.

4. 4

   Perform it against the picture

   The scene plays and you speak the lines as their moments arrive. You are not being scored by a machine on accuracy — the picture is the metronome and the room is the audience.

5. 5

   Watch it back, then swap

   The performance is worth more the second time, when everybody can watch the faces instead of reading. Then the next person takes the same scene, or a new one, and does it entirely differently — which is the actual game.

How to be better at it

The gap between a round that is quietly amusing and one people talk about afterwards is almost entirely craft, and it is a short list.

• Commit harder than feels sensible

  The single biggest difference. A voice performed at eighty per cent reads as somebody who is embarrassed; the same voice at a hundred and ten reads as a choice. Nobody has ever regretted going too far in this game.

• Match the rhythm, not the words

  Landing on the same beats as the mouths matters far more than saying the line exactly. If you are behind, cut a word rather than speeding up — a rushed line sounds wrong in a way a shorter one does not.

• Use the silences

  Beginners talk continuously. The funniest thing in most scenes is a character who says nothing for four seconds while their face does the work, and a performer who lets that happen is the one people remember.

• Pitch down, not up

  Almost everyone reaches for a squeaky voice first, and almost every squeaky voice is the same squeaky voice. Going low, slow and serious against a ridiculous picture is funnier and, unhelpfully for the nervous, easier to sustain.

• Give two characters different speeds

  If you are performing both halves of an argument, separate them by pace rather than by pitch. Two voices at the same tempo blur together however different they sound; one fast and one unbearably slow never do.

When something does not work

• The scene has audio but no picture

  The video is in a format the game cannot decode. Its player wants Ogg Theora; a pack carrying an MP4 will sound right and show nothing. Re-encoding the video fixes it and the lines are untouched — the dub packs guide covers how.

• A pack you installed does not appear

  Usually a folder too deep. A pack that unzips into a folder containing another folder needs the inner one moved up, so the game finds the scene where it expects it rather than one level down.

• The lines are ahead of or behind the picture

  The timings were written against a different cut of the video. This is a pack problem rather than a settings problem, and it is fixed by retiming the pack — which is a job for an editor, not for the player.