Video game performances are never the work of just one person. Behind every beloved character stands a small army of voice actors, motion capture artists, animators, writers, and designers who collectively breathe life into digital personas. Yet when awards season rolls around, only one name gets called to the stage. Maxence Cazorla, the motion capture performer who brought Clair Obscur: Expedition 33’s Gustave to life, thinks it’s time the industry recognizes this reality with a fundamental change to how performance awards work.
In a recent interview with Eurogamer, Cazorla made his case for replacing traditional Best Performance categories with a Best Character award. His argument is simple but profound: celebrating individual performers in modern game development often means making other contributors invisible. When Charlie Cox received a nomination for Best Performance at The Game Awards 2025 for voicing Gustave, he was quick to credit Cazorla’s motion capture work. But the nomination structure itself created an impossible situation where only one person could be recognized for what was fundamentally a collaborative achievement.
The Problem With Isolating Single Performers
Cazorla’s central argument is that modern game characters are too complex to credit to any single performer. In Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, most major characters involved multiple actors working at different stages of development. Gustave combined Cox’s voice with Cazorla’s physical performance. Maelle brought together Charlotte Hoepffner’s motion capture with Jennifer English’s voice acting. Lune featured Estelle Darnault’s mocap alongside Kirsty Rider’s vocal work. Each character emerged from what Cazorla describes as “the combination of these two performances, along with the incredible writing and development work.”
The current awards structure forces a choice that shouldn’t exist. When Cox was nominated, Cazorla wasn’t. When English won Best Performance for Maelle, Hoepffner received no recognition. The system treats voice acting as the definitive performance while rendering motion capture artists largely invisible to the public. This invisibility extends beyond awards ceremonies into how players think about and discuss their favorite characters. Everyone knows Doug Cockle voiced Geralt of Rivia, but far fewer people could name Maciej Kwiatkowski, who performed his motion capture across The Witcher games.
Cazorla emphasized that the issue becomes even more complicated when you factor in games with different production pipelines. Some games feature single actors performing both voice and motion capture, like Troy Baker’s complete performance as Indiana Jones in Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. Other productions might involve voice actors, mocap performers, and separate stunt coordinators all contributing to a single character. There’s no one-size-fits-all solution, which is exactly why Cazorla believes the focus should shift from performers to characters.
The DICE Awards Already Does This
Cazorla isn’t proposing something unprecedented. The DICE Awards have already implemented a character-focused approach that he calls “a very intelligent strategy.” Instead of singling out individual performers, the DICE Awards recognize outstanding character achievement as a holistic category. This allows credit to flow to everyone involved in bringing a character to life, from the voice actor to the motion capture artist to the writers who crafted the personality to the character artists who designed the appearance.
For the most recent DICE Awards, Indiana Jones from Indiana Jones and the Great Circle won the character award. In that case, Troy Baker performed both voice and motion capture, making the recognition straightforward. But the category structure remains flexible enough to honor collaborative characters like Gustave, where multiple artists contributed essential elements. By rewarding the character rather than isolating a performer, the DICE Awards acknowledge the collaborative nature of game development without creating artificial hierarchies between different types of performance work.
This approach aligns with how players actually experience games. When someone talks about loving Gustave, they’re not separately evaluating Cox’s voice against Cazorla’s physicality. They’re responding to the complete character as a unified whole. The writing informs the performance, the performance shapes the animation, and the animation enhances the writing in an iterative creative process. Pulling out individual threads to award separately misrepresents how the creative magic actually happens.
Charlie Cox’s Generous Recognition
To his credit, Charlie Cox has been remarkably consistent in directing praise toward Cazorla. At a panel during Conve64 in Mexico, Cox stated that “any nomination or any credit I get, I really have to give to him, because I really believe that the performance of that character is down to him, and my voice was just part of that process.” He reiterated similar sentiments multiple times throughout the promotional cycle for Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, even going so far as to say he felt “like a total fraud” receiving attention for a role where he only spent about four hours in the vocal booth.
Cox’s humility reveals his understanding of the collaborative process, but it also highlights the awkwardness of the current system. He shouldn’t need to use his platform to redirect credit that the awards structure itself should be distributing more equitably. Cazorla acknowledged Cox’s generosity, saying “it was an incredible honor that Charlie publicly recognized and valued my work. I was deeply moved by his humility and generosity.” But gratitude for individual kindness shouldn’t substitute for systemic change that properly acknowledges collaborative creative work.
The situation created an unusual dynamic where Cazorla found himself credited by his collaborator but invisible to the broader industry recognition apparatus. His work brought Gustave’s physicality to life, capturing the subtle movements, gestures, and body language that made the character feel real. Yet without Cox’s voluntary efforts to share the spotlight, that contribution would have remained largely unknown outside industry circles.
Why Video Games Are Different
Cazorla’s argument gains weight when you consider how fundamentally different video game performances are from traditional acting. In film and television, the actor you see on screen is performing the complete role. Body language, facial expressions, and voice all come from the same person in the same moment. There might be stunt doubles for dangerous sequences, but the core performance is unified.
Video games regularly split these elements across multiple performers working at different times. Cazorla explained the process for Clair Obscur: “We began by conducting performance capture without any specific restrictions, treating it like a film, memorizing lines, acting out scenes, and following Guillaume’s direction. Once the shooting concluded and the scenes were incorporated into the game engine by the cinematic team, the voice actors then recorded their performances.” The physical performance came first, establishing the character’s movement vocabulary and emotional physicality. Then voice actors recorded dialogue months later, responding to what the mocap performers had already created.
This separated workflow means neither performer experiences the complete character during their work. Cazorla didn’t hear Cox’s final voice performance until months after completing the motion capture when he saw the finished game. Cox recorded his lines without physically embodying Gustave’s movements and gestures. The character that players experience emerged from the synthesis of these separate contributions, combined with animation polish, facial rigging, character design, and countless other technical and artistic elements.
The Broader Industry Context
This conversation is happening against a backdrop of increasing awareness about invisible labor in game development. Motion capture performers, in particular, have long operated in a strange professional limbo where their work is essential but rarely credited or celebrated publicly. The rise of performance capture technology that combines facial expressions, body movement, and voice in single recording sessions has started changing this dynamic, but plenty of games still use the split-performer model that Clair Obscur employed.
The timing is especially interesting given the recent controversy around Clair Obscur itself. The game was stripped of its Indie Game Awards honors after it was revealed that generative AI assets were used during development, even though those assets were removed before launch. That controversy sparked intense debates about proper attribution, creative authenticity, and what counts as legitimate artistic work. Cazorla’s push for better recognition of collaborative human performances adds another layer to discussions about how the industry values and credits different types of creative contribution.
The motion capture recognition issue also connects to broader labor concerns in the gaming industry. Voice actors have SAG-AFTRA union protections that have helped establish minimum rates, working conditions, and residuals for their work. Motion capture performers often lack similar protections, especially when they’re not also doing voice work. Creating formal recognition through awards categories could help raise the profile of this work and potentially strengthen the case for better compensation and working conditions.
What a Best Character Category Would Look Like
Implementing Cazorla’s vision would require rethinking how awards are structured from the ground up. Instead of nominating individual performers, awards shows would nominate characters. The award wouldn’t go to a single person walking across a stage but would recognize the collaborative team that brought that character to life. Acceptance speeches could include voice actors, motion capture performers, writers, character designers, and animation leads all sharing the moment together.
This approach would more accurately reflect how game credits actually work. When you scroll through the credits of a modern AAA game, you don’t see a single name next to each character. You see voice actors, mocap performers, facial performers, character artists, concept artists, technical artists, riggers, and animators all contributing specialized skills to the final result. A Best Character award would acknowledge this reality instead of artificially elevating one type of contribution above others.
The change would also give awards shows more flexibility to recognize different types of games. Indies with small teams where one person might write, voice, and animate a character would compete on equal footing with AAA productions involving dozens of specialists per character. The focus would shift to the quality and impact of the character as players experience it, rather than getting tangled in questions about who deserves credit for which specific element.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who is Maxence Cazorla?
Maxence Cazorla is a French motion capture performer who worked on Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. He performed the motion capture for multiple characters including Gustave, Verso, and Renoir, and also provided voice acting for Esquie in both English and French. Remarkably, Clair Obscur is his first video game credit.
What is the difference between voice acting and motion capture in games?
Voice acting involves recording dialogue and vocal performances in a sound booth, while motion capture involves physically performing a character’s movements, gestures, and body language while wearing sensors that translate those movements into digital animation. Many modern games split these roles between different performers who work at different stages of development.
Do any game awards currently recognize motion capture work?
The DICE Awards already use a character-focused approach that recognizes collaborative contributions rather than isolating individual performers. However, most major awards like The Game Awards still use a Best Performance category that typically highlights voice actors while motion capture performers receive little public recognition.
Who won Best Performance at The Game Awards 2025?
Jennifer English won Best Performance at The Game Awards 2025 for her role as Maelle in Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. Notably, Maelle’s motion capture was performed by Charlotte Hoepffner, illustrating exactly the collaborative dynamic that Cazorla’s proposal aims to better recognize.
Did Charlie Cox acknowledge the motion capture performer for his character?
Yes, Charlie Cox repeatedly and publicly credited Maxence Cazorla for the motion capture work that brought Gustave to life. Cox stated that any nomination or credit he receives should really go to Cazorla, and that he believed the performance of the character was primarily down to Cazorla’s physical work with his voice being just one part of the process.
Why does Cazorla think a Best Character category is better than a Best Performance category?
Cazorla argues that modern game characters are collaborative creations involving voice actors, motion capture performers, writers, character artists, and many others. A Best Character category would recognize this collaborative reality rather than isolating a single performer and potentially making other contributors invisible to players and the industry.
What other games use split voice acting and motion capture performers?
Many games use this approach. The Witcher series famously features Doug Cockle’s voice work combined with Maciej Kwiatkowski’s motion capture for Geralt. In contrast, some games like Indiana Jones and the Great Circle have single performers like Troy Baker handling both voice and motion capture for a unified performance.
Conclusion
Maxence Cazorla’s call for a Best Character award category represents more than just a technical adjustment to how game awards operate. It’s a fundamental recognition that video game performances are collaborative achievements that can’t be fairly credited to any single person. The current system of isolating individual performers creates impossible situations where essential contributors like motion capture artists remain invisible while voice actors receive disproportionate recognition for what are genuinely team efforts. The DICE Awards have already shown that character-focused recognition can work effectively, and as games continue evolving toward more complex performance pipelines involving multiple specialists per character, the industry needs awards structures that reflect this reality. Charlie Cox’s generous efforts to credit Cazorla demonstrate the goodwill that exists among performers themselves, but systemic change shouldn’t depend on individual kindness. Characters like Gustave deserve recognition that honors everyone who contributed to making them memorable, not just the voice that happened to come out of their mouths.