Well, if the Chinese gold farmers can make one free MMO scam with Evony, then they can make another one. Or even a whole string of them.
Empire Craft looks very much like the next one out of the production line. Everything about it has the same look and feel. They have an identical Terms of Use agreement. And there is the same lack of transparency about who is behind it.
So brace yourself for a second torrent of spam and dubious advertising. As more of these games are published, and they will be, the internet will clog up with their activity.
It looks like the face of gaming has changed forever.
“A grieving couple retreats to their cabin in the woods, hoping to repair their broken hearts and troubled marriage. But nature takes its course and things go from bad to worse.” Worse includes genital mutilation and ejaculating blood and far more. In fact in a world that is blase about film violence Antichrist is causing a bit of a stir.
And no-one can complain. Because if the violence is OK for the film it must be OK for the game. Let’s see how the Daily Mail/Fox News get round this one.
Firstly let’s set out the playing field. Video gaming is really, really important. Economically it is almost certainly a £100 billion a year industry already and a single game can gross half a billion dollars in a week. But we are still at the very beginning and it will grow to be perhaps the biggest industry on earth. Video gaming is not just about home entertainment, the fundamental mechanisms that it offers are so powerful that it will take over education and become a major and integral part of everyday commerce and the military.
So you would think that any government would put video gaming pretty high in its list of priorities. And many countries do, Canada, Korea and France, for instance. Yet in Britain the current execrable Labour maladministration has been positively anti gaming. So the industry has suffered. For a long time we were third in the world pecking order, behind Japan and America. Now we have been overtaken by Canada, almost certainly by Korea and probably by China. So we are almost certainly now sixth and sinking.
The crux of the problem is sheer ignorance, far too many politicians and journalists do not have the faintest idea about what gaming is. But this does not stop them exerting massive influence on the subject. So here is a quick education. Gaming is just a form of medium, like television, radio, books, the theatre or film. So, like all these mediums it can be used to carry an enormously wide range of content. The advantage gaming has comes from technology, which gives gaming three unique characteristics, these are interactivity, non linearity and connectivity. These are used to create a highly compelling mechanism whereby the player is given skills or powers which are applied to problems and then rewarded upon success.
One major problem that politicians and journalists have is violence in games. This is pretty stupid. There is far, far more violence in the older mediums. The Bible, East Enders and the Archers contain violence without anyone murmuring a whisper on the matter. In fact video gaming actually reduces youth crime and violence, because it acts as a catharsis. This is easily proven as the country by country uptake of video gaming has resulted in a corresponding drop in youth crime and violence. The statistics are there to prove it. And violence in games is psychologically less traumatic than violence in the older media because the player can do something about it, it isn’t just imposed on them. Anyone who wants to comment on this subject should read Grand Theft Childhood first, it is the culmination of much research and explodes the myths that industry critics hold dear.
But this fixation with violence by the ignorant and uninformed has led to them damaging the entire industry. We have had a whole pile of anti gaming rhetoric from Keith Vaz and even Gordon Brown has had a go. On the other side of the house David Cameron and Boris Johnson have also said silly things. Yet in education alone gaming promises immense riches. The classroom method of teaching is incredibly inefficient, chugging along at the speed well below the average capabilities of the class and with as much as 30% of time wasted by disruptive elements. Gaming provides one on one education with constant reward and reinforcement. It is the perfect mechanism for transferring knowledge.
Of course the industry hasn’t helped itself. Having two trade organisations, ELSPA and TIGA is plain silly and very, very counter productive. The industry needs to be able to speak with one voice to politicians and to the media. With the current system we just send out muddied messages.
And we need a QUANGO to support and promote gaming. We have the Arts Council, the Film Council and the Music Council, but no Games Council. Why is this when gaming is more important than the other three put together for the future of the country?
Gaming did have a spokesman in the Cabinet, but he resigned. Tom Watson was very plausible and good at mouthing platitudes but the very simple fact is that the government, of which he was a senior member, did not even give the game industry the same benefits that it gives the film industry.
On the other side of the house we have a lot more to cheer about. Ed Vaizey is the shadow Arts and Culture Minister and he actually understands the industry well, has contributed to the debate and has promised that things will improve when the current load of idiots are kicked out. He produces a weekly Arts and Culture newsletter that nearly always has a section on gaming in it, which shows that he has his finger on the pulse. Here is an interview with him.
And more good news, there is now an All Party Parliamentary Video Games Group chaired by Bill Olner MP, with Lord Puttnam, Philip Davies and John Whittingdale MP as vice-chairs. This is a beginning and it shows that not all politicians are ignorant of the subject.
And finally some very good new for us Brits, when it comes to the video game industry our old adversary, the Germans, are doing far worse.
At Codemasters, just a few year ago, most successful games contained some sort of license: MTV Music, Colin McRae Rally, LMA Manager, DTM and TOCA Racing, Micro Machines, American/Pop Idol, Pete Sampras Tennis, World Championship Snooker, Brian Lara Cricket etc etc. It was a formula and it worked but Codemasters was not building much equity in its own brands whilst it was paying a lot to build other people’s brands.
Jim Darling, the company chairman, had an interesting take on this, he thought that all these brands should have been paying us for the exposure they were receiving. And he had a point, more people worldwide probably knew of Colin McRae from the games than they did from his rallying (which is actually a niche motorsport).
So it is interesting that Codemasters (with the exception of the high risk F1 game) have moved away from these licenses. Colin McRae is morphing into Dirt and TOCA into Grid, for instance, brands that Codemasters owns/will own and can build equity in.
And it is not just Codemasters that has done this. It is a massive industry trend. Electronic Arts for instance was once license central with Harry Potter, James Bond, Lords of the Rings and a whole raft of other licenses as their bread and butter. Now they have moved to publishing their own IP and making their own brands. This is industry wide as any examination of the charts, compared with just a few years ago, will tell you.
Now some of this is the big global film companies getting into gaming and so pulling back the licenses for their own use. Some of it is conscious decisions by managers to build equity in their businesses by owning and building brands. And some of it is the fact that the game industry is big and strong enough now not to need to ride on anyones coat-tails. Especially the coat-tails of old media which is in rapid decline.
The big problem for the industry is that this switch really is a different business model and there is much to learn about building and managing brands. So marketing becomes a lot more sophisticated with the need to communicate core brand values to the consuming public. This business model transition has caught some publishers out, which is one of the main reasons we are seeing publisher losses at the peak of the cycle. But in the long term it confers massive advantages to the whole industry. We are growing up.
As an industry we either show too much respect for our heritage bringing out core games for core gamers. Or we flip to the opposite extreme bringing out often condescending casual fodder for any random person that happens along. We need to take a lesson from other IP entertainment such as films and books. They make much of their money by being firmly in the middle ground. By bringing quality narrative, content and production values to large audiences. By doing this they can often be challenging yet still be commercially successful with large audiences. Schindler’s List and Ghandi are two of just many examples of this.
Tim Kretschmer, who committed the shootings, was a very keen table tennis player who wanted to turn professional. If you take a simple view of cause and effect, which the Germans obviously do, then there should be an immediate ban on table tennis.
Video gaming is just another medium, like film, books , the opera or the theatre. Why ban violence in just one of these? It makes no sense whatsoever.
The book Grand Theft Childhood, financed by a $1.5 million US government grant to pay for original and proper scientific research, comes to the exact opposite conclusions to what the stupid German legislators think: “Boys who don’t regularly play video games were more likely than even the boys who played M-rated (adult) games to get into fights, steal from a store, or have problems at school.” Every politician or journalist who wants to pass comment on video gaming should read this book first so as not to look like a complete idiot.
Video gaming is still at its very beginning. The technology it uses of interaction, connectivity and non linearity make all previous media instantly obsolete. Because of this it will become all pervading, not just in recreation but also in education, business, government and the military. It will become one of the biggest businesses on earth. And the Germans are cutting themselves off from it. The future economic harm they are doing themselves is immense.
These school shootings are committed by people who are mentally ill, not by people who play video games. Also the shootings are done with guns. If the mentally ill people couldn’t get their hands on guns then there would be no school shootings. The politicians should be looking at mental illness and gun control before (metaphorically speaking) burning books.
The German legislation on video games is already suppressive. So Germans buy their games by mail order from other countries. This happens on a massive scale and cannot be stopped, because of European Union free trade rules. Also game distribution is moving away from physical media to online, using the internet. So the German legislators will never prevent the purchase, distribution and playing of violent games within Germany. Their laws will have no effect.
The German legislators are acting out of ignorance and fear. They do not understand video games. The good news is that the younger generations do understand video games. And when these people become journalists and politicians we will see some sense brought to the subject.
