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.
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.
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.
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 includeAurora Feint’s OpenFeint, Chillingo’s Crystal and Agon. Further proof of the breadth and depth of creativity on the iPhone platform.
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.
