Entries from July 2009 ↓

Keith Vaz’s one man crusade against video games continues. This is what happened in Parliament:

Keith Vaz (Leicester, East) (Lab):What recent discussions he has had with pan-European game information on the age classification of video games.

The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport (Mr. Siôn Simon): I have spoken to the Video Standards Council—the current UK agents for the PEGI system—about the classification of video games and have another meeting scheduled with it very soon. I have also had discussions with the British Board of Film Classification. Both organisations are working hard to ensure the success of the new system.

Keith Vaz: I thank the Minister for his answer and welcome the steps that the Government are taking on this issue. However, it is still a matter of concern that a game such as “RapeLay”, which shows extreme violence against women, can be downloaded from the internet. What steps are the Government taking to ensure that such games are not accessed from the internet, so that children and young people are properly protected?

Mr. Simon: We should be clear that the game was not classified, but was briefly available on Amazon and then was banned. The point that my right hon. Friend is making is about games that, like other brutal, unpleasant, illegal content, can be available on the internet. All steps that apply to any other content on the internet will apply to games. Specifically, as part of the Byron review we set up the UK Council for Child Internet Safety to work with content providers, internet service providers and all aspects of Government to make sure that such content cannot be accessed, particularly by children.

Why pick on video games? There is plenty of rape on television, in the theatre, in films and in books. Yet he bursts a blood vessel when rape is in a Japanese language game that was only very briefly available on Amazon. Why not a balanced view from Keith Vaz across all the media that features rape? There is lots of rape in the bible, for instance, so when is Keith Vaz going to seek the ban of this evil book that has no age restriction on it and that is widely available to children?

RapeLay is not a nice game. However if adults are exposed to rape in all the other media then why not in games? Obviously children need to be protected, but that is no excuse for Keith Vaz to be allowed to take our basic human freedoms away from us. What he is doing is exactly the same as burning books.

The Cultural Olympiad is a four year event based around the London Olympic games of 2012.

The aims of the Cultural Olympiad are to:

• encourage and welcome involvement from communities across the UK, including London;
• leave a lasting legacy that improves cultural life;
• showcase excellence in the performing arts and creative industries as well as sport;
• introduce young people to the UK’s many artistic communities and those from around the world;
• promote London as a major cultural capital;
• heighten economic regeneration and encourage tourism in the UK through the work of the creative industries;
• incorporate the Olympic values of ‘excellence, respect and friendship’ and the Paralympic vision to ‘empower, achieve, inspire’.

The Olympiad is “one of the reasons why London won the 2012 Games”, has a budget of £16 million of our money and has a board chaired by Tony Hall, chief executive of the Royal Opera House.

Now it just so happens that video games are art and they are culture. They are popular culture just as opera, theatre, orchestra and ballet are popular cultures. The difference is that video games are in ascendancy, they are the popular culture of our age and they are more popular than all the others I listed put together. So you would expect video games to have a massive presence in the Cultural Olympiad 2012. And you would be wrong.

I have had a good look at the London Olympiad website and I can find no mention of video games. Just about every kind of culture has a project, or sometimes several, but not us. And in this article Tony Hall talks about his board, not a single one of which has anything to do with video games.

Why is this all going so wrong?:

• The metropolitan elite, who have all the power, have no idea what culture in Britain really is.
• There are too many old people who are completely out of touch in charge of politics and the media.
• Video gaming has two trade bodies so is ineffective at presenting a unified face to the world.
• There is no video game council to promote the art of video games. There is an Arts Council, a Music Council and a Film Council. They all get government money, we don’t.
• The failure of the video game industry, especially the publishers, to present video games as art. Which is strange when the video game industry employs such a huge number of artists.
• Video gaming is too new to be entrenched in the establishment. Too often old culture is seen by them as being better than new culture.

I cannot see the 2016 Olympics being so out of touch, four years will make a big difference. And if Tokyo win the bid I can see video games having a massive presence on the cultural side, they would put London to shame.

Earlier this month I wrote an article on here giving Electronic Arts some free consultancy. I have been speaking to a senior Electronic Arts executive since then and he suggested I took a look at ngmoco.

Ngmoco was started last year (June 2008) by a very well known industry veteran, Neil Young. Previously he  had managed Maxis, EA Los Angeles, and EA’s Blueprint division.

Ngmoco publishes quality games on the Apple iPod at the rate of about one a month, the most well known of which is Rolando. They are successful, getting millions of downloads. The company is also very well funded with excellent venture capital connections.

But this is not why ngmoco is the future of game publishing, oh no. The name ngmoco stands for Next Generation Mobile Company, a proud name and one they should justify. And they are doing.

In my free EA consultancy article I said “Developers should think that it is better to come to you to publish their iPhone games than it is to go directly to Apple.“  And this is exactly what ngmoco have done. But they have done it with a method that is not in my article. Just last month they announced the Plus+ network, a social networking, game discovery, and multiplayer platform for the iPhone. A very clever move. Regular readers here we be well aware of the convergence between gaming and social media.

So iPhone game developers, if they have any sense, will be flocking to ngmoco to publish their games. Ngmoco have set up a special external publishing division called the Plus+ Publishing group to handle this. And to run it they have recruited yet another industry veteran, Simon Jeffery, who moved there from being President of Sega America. A good move from old fashioned publishing to the cutting edge.

What every iPhone developer need to know is this, copied from the ngmoco website: We’re commissioning, financing & publishing games with micro-studios & independent developers. If you’re interested in collaborating email us at gamemakers@ngmoco.com

And just to add a little speculation, Plus+ would make a fantastic platform for an MMO.

note: Other social networking solutions on iPhone include Aurora Feint’s OpenFeint, Chillingo’s Crystal and Agon. Further proof of the breadth and depth of creativity on the iPhone platform.

Actually this game has been available since 2002, but only now is gaining notoriety.

Watch out behind you, Hunter, a free to play Flash game, was written by Frenchman Stéphane Aguie and is hosted by the Georgian website Uzinagaz (and lots of other places on the interweb). The aim of the game is to kill homosexuals. And if you fail they rape you.

Jean Christophe Calvet, who owns the website, says that his games are not politically correct and are aimed at the adolescent sense of humour. Watch out behind you, Hunter is supposedly a mockery of rednecks and hunters, not of homosexuals.

Obviously this has a whole lot of liberals complaining loudly. And a whole lot on game forums having a good laugh. Someone should tell Keith Vaz about it, he is just starting 12 weeks holiday so this will give him something to think about.

I have spoken in the past here about the importance of immersion in game playing, the suspension of disbelief, and how 3D gaming gives us a quantum shift in the quality of that immersion. When you try a properly executed 3D game the experience is deeply impressive. It is like going to the theatre for the first time after a life of watching television.

Which brings us to the NVIDIA 3D Vision glasses for the PC. Let’s get over the problems first. The box of equipment you get from NVIDIA costs $199, but you get a lot of technology for your money. It also only works with certain high end televisions and certain high end video cards, but these are technically required as they need to, effectively, display twice as much information.

The glasses work actively by switching off vision alternately in each eye whilst presenting left and right images alternately from the television. There is a full, in depth review here. The effect and level of immersion has met with rave reviews from everyone who has tried them. This really is a big leap forward in the gaming experience. And the really brilliant news is that this system already works with 350 different games.

What will be even more impressive will be when this 3D technology is combined with the Microsoft Natal gesture interface. Then you will have 3D input into a game that you are watching in 3D. A big step towards the holodeck experience.

Brutal Legend from EA is being marketed as the funniest video game ever. A very interesting marketing idea. Here are some videos so you can get a feel for it.

The true importance of Natal to our future is gradually being revealed.

Initially it was presented at E3 ’09 as a gesture interface for the Microsoft Xbox 360 that was technically superior to its competitors and which held a huge amount of intriguing promise for the future of gaming. So it is massively significant.

Then Microsoft said that they would be relaunching the 360 on the back of Natal, as it would be like a new platform generation. Fair enough, this is obviously getting more massively significant.

Then it takes Bill Gates to drop the bombshell in this CNET interview. Natal is not just for Xbox, it is for Windows too. And for far, far more than just gaming: “I’d say a cool example of that, that you’ll see is kind of stunning, in a little over a year, is this (depth-sensing) camera thing… Not just for games, but for media consumption as a whole… If they connect it up to Windows PCs for interacting in terms of meetings, and collaboration, and communication.”

He then goes on: “Well, I think the value is as great for if you’re in the home, as you want to manage your movies, music, home system type stuff, it’s very cool there. And I think there’s incredible value as we use that in the office connected to a Windows PC. So Microsoft research and the product groups have a lot going on there, because you can use the cost reduction that will take place over the years to say, “Why shouldn’t that be in most office environments?” ”

This is big. It is a long time since the mouse was added to the keyboard as the standard PC interface. Now we are going to an altogether higher level. Face, skeletal and voice recognition brought to the PC in one go. The possibilities are limitless and it will allow us humans to do so many things that we couldn’t do before.