Keeping Them in the Nest

So if you listen to the papers, it would seem that last week it was announced that Scotland's games industry would be getting a multi-million pound investment - to the delightful tune of £2.5m.  Really what most of us here in Dundee hear when there's talk of tax breaks or cash injections from the Scottish government, ostensibly for Scotland, is "for Dundee".  Being at the epicentre of everything games in Scotland, and in some ways the UK, does have its perks.

However, perhaps that is not strictly the case.  This money is to go towards a prototyping centre at the University of Abertay Dundee - hoping to assist local companies in creating and developing new gaming content and methods as well as encourage hands on learning for Dundee's many games oriented students.  This is, of course, no bad thing.  We are better educating our own workforce and local companies are being given the chance to develop new content in state of the art surroundings.  However, there is one downside and it comes in the form of three words:

No tax breaks.

We have been hoping and praying that Alistair Darling's pre-budget report would include some mention of the tax breaks the industry has been begging for, but to no avail.  Currently it is estimated that the games industry contributes circa £1bn every year to the UK's GDP, of which £420m ends up directly in the Exchequer's coffers.  Despite this, the Chancellor has deemed that the industry should not receive tax breaks, allegedly because it does not contribute enough to the advancement of the UK's cultural values in the same way that the film industry does (which currently receives £104m in tax relief from the UK government annually - a figure UK trade body TIGA said is much in excess of what the games industry would need.)

So what does this have to do with the £2.5m figure mentioned earlier?  What does it have to do with our students?  Though the UK does not offer tax breaks or incentives to developing studios, countries like Canada currently offer generous awards which are drawing companies, and subsequently talent, into the country in droves.  Their industries continue to grow and flourish and will as long as these rewards remain.  The main issue for the UK is, therefore, that our excellent Universities are training up our talent, nurturing them and then, once they have the degree and mortar board, that talent is being sucked out of the country.  Our studios simply cannot compete with the incentives tax relieved companies in other countries can offer.

This, however, is looking at things in a cold and harsh light, but you would imagine that this is the view that the government would take - why would we want to spend money training a workforce if we're not going to see a return on that investment?

Those with softer hearts might see it as essentially like bringing up a child, spending hundreds of thousands of pounds getting them ready for the world only to see them leave, set up home with someone else and take all of our "investment" in time and money with them.  Like a child though, we will see them from time to time; we will hear from them and we will receive some of the benefit of our investment a few times a year.  This is not totally unlike our workforce, who leave the nest with all their knowledge and experience, take it elsewhere and use it to develop new content there - we will see a return on our investment in that this advancement might effect what we ourselves are able to produce or we may be able to build on the idea, but we certainly won't receive the direct benefit that our "child" did.

It comes down to whether you can look at things with the view of an egoist or a utilitarian - should we share the wealth, share the talent and our know-how safe in the knowledge that, somehow and in some small way, it will come back to us?  Or should we not be looking to keep all that for ourselves and leading the charge development wise?

As much as I'm sure some people would like to take the warm and fuzzy approach to this, the truth is we, as an industry, cannot afford to keep hemorrhaging talent in the way we are presently or we will bleed out and die, or at the very least remain crippled.  We definitely cannot afford to keep pouring money into students if we can't keep them in our workforce afterwards.  I'm not suggesting we stop diverting cash to education - far from it as the UK only gives 5.3% of its total GDP back to education (Canada gives 5.2%.  We've got you beat there, suckers!)  What I am suggesting is that if we do want to better educate and prepare those in higher education to become part of our workforce then maybe, just maybe, we should actually be finding ways to ensure they do become part of it.

From Little Acorns Mighty Oaks Do Grow

On 11 December, GfK-ChartTrack released new data indicating that the Nintendo DS was the biggest selling games console in the UK ever.  Weighing in at 10.05 million lifetime sales against its predecessor the PS2's 10.02 million, this seems all the more impressive when you take into account that the PS2 was released over nine years ago and the DS has been on the market for a meagre five.

It is now estimated that one in six people in the UK own a DS, some of them owning more than one.  This is a remarkable figure even taking that into account and even more so if we cast our glance back to 2004 when the DS arrived on the scene.

The DS' arrival was not heralded to great fanfare by the gaming community.  It was hailed as clunky - cheap looking, plastic and ugly.  Its use of dual viewing screens and a stylus, by then seen as the outmoded peripheral of yore for PDAs only, was subject to huge criticism.  It's safe to say that no one imagined that five years later it would be dominating the console market, but it has, and this is due in no small part to its user friendly hardware.  Those of us brought up on a diet of games find this concept difficult to understand, but most non-gamers are immediately turned off of consoles and handhelds because of the controls.  A traditional controller set up, particularly in handhelds, is not intuitive or welcoming which causes a barrier when a company looks to attract new customers - a revelation we have recently heard repeated at E3 with the introduction of Project Natal.

The DS made gaming simple by breaking it into three simple steps: pick up the stylus, touch the screen with it, play.  No learning fiddly controls - no bumpers, no triggers, no joypads, no analog sticks and most importantly no confusing and frightening button combinations.  You have one peripheral and one input device, the screen, and that's it.  This painted a much more approachable picture to the casual and non- gamers and, most importantly, young children who make up a large part of Nintendo's target market with the DS.  The cheap and plastic look that was mocked by the gaming community to begin with seemed playful and fun to others.

It wasn't just the hardware that proved attractive - Nintendo came out with a slew of different titles that seemed to bridge every gap and fill every niché market imaginable.  These titles challenged everything we knew about handheld gaming, with titles such as Brain Training and Cooking Mama designed to educate as well as entertain.  The DS could be use as an e-book reader and a study aid as well as play fun and interesting gaming titles such as the Professor Layton series and The Sims.  This opened the device up to a market that its competitors just couldn't access by becoming an acceptable and often encouraged part of people's every day lives.

This device broke apart the very definition of "game" and as such our characterization of what a "gamer" is.  Hardcore gamers, who grew up on a regimen of Quake and Wolfenstein may scoff, scowl and mock, spitting venom at the casual gamers who dare liken themselves to what they perceive a gamer to be without realising times have changed.  In most people's eyes there is no difference between a man who plays Professor Layton for three hours a day on his commute home from work and one who spends the same amount of time on World of Warcraft in the evenings.  The growth in uptake of the DS, along with that of the Nintendo Wii, should highlight to gamers that the gap between "us" and "them" is ever shrinking.  We were wrong to laugh at the DS - we were out of touch with the way our world was changing then and if we continue to box ourselves in then this is the way it will stay.  More than ever, we need to accept that we are no longer a minority unless we make ourselves one - we need to face that are just another niche in an ever expanding and changing market and find common ground.

Game of Peggle anyone?