Games in Australia Feature Story
By Iamthemonkeyhead
(Written for Murdoch University. Print News II)
Hands up if you believe games are for children. Hands up if you think games are mindless wastes of time. Hands up if you think video games are dangerous and will create more criminals. Did you put your hand up?
The fact is that, like any new form of media, gaming and the culture surrounding technology has long been stigmatized: “Games are for nerds.” “Games are dangerous.” “Only children play games.” “Games are pointless and will fry your brain.” Are the most commonly regurgitated ideas you might hear on a regular basis from the average observer. The truth is that none of these common beliefs about games are real.
Games these days are reaching a very broad audience and casual gaming is something that is drawing grandparents and parents to the gaming scene more than ever. Nintendo has broken records with their Wii console and DS handheld that play games that teach you mathematics or help you get fitter. According to the Entertainment Software Association website the average North American gamer is “33 years old and has been playing games for 12 years”. Now you might think that’s just one of those “only in America” anomalies but Dr Jeffrey Brand, Associate Professor at the Bond University Centre for New Media Research and Education reports that the average gamer’s age in Australia, 2007 was 28 years old.
On top of this, games are also frequently seen as threats to learning, causing hours of distraction, obsession and even addiction in some. The fact is that games have always had the capacity to educate, and with more technology are greater possibilities for creativity such as Spore’s animal creator that lets you create any animal you desire to evolve from a single cell to interplanetary conquest. The ability to educate in areas outside of academia go as far back as the late eighty’s and early ninety’s with Lucasarts and Sierra creating adventure/puzzle games that required mind-boggling logic and lateral thinking to succeed in. The Incredible Machine and Bejeweled are puzzle games that exercise your logic while still creating an entertaining experience.
Most importantly though, games are being considered a new form of art, in the same way literature or cinema are. A game like Grim Fandango that has you traversing The Land of the Dead had a plot to rival the current cinema industry. Smaller games like Passage that have you do nothing but take steps through a series of labyrinths as you age and eventually die, having found a partner to go on the journey with or not. These games are only a few bits of evidence to support the idea that ‘gaming’ is no longer the realm of children playing, but has rather become a way of interacting with an art form.
But the biggest problem the industry faces is not that the misinformation exists. It’s that it has created beliefs so popular that the people in charge of making decisions about the industry are influenced by them and, as a result, don’t understand their own industry. The games industry has a huge lack of funding in Australia. There are little job incentives and even smaller chances of getting published on a low budget. Moreover there is a serious misunderstanding about the impact of games on players. The fact that this new media is interactive has many believing that the product could be having adverse effects on its users. Yet, after many studies, none have found any quantifiable evidence that can be applied to support this theory. The reason for this paranoia is that media and criminals alike continue to use gaming as an unfortunate scapegoat. And waves of unscientific allegations for gaming, movies and music wash over audiences when popular news programs cover crime.
As a result games are feared and unfairly stigmatized to the point that Australia has no R+18 rating for games. If a game becomes too violent for an MA rating, it simply cannot be published in Australia, despite the OFLC making its first task to allow “adults to see and hear what they want”. This hinders not only overseas publishers making games according to their own creative and artistic beliefs but similarly affects Australian software developers and publishers. If their game is intended for adults alone then the product has no chance of ever seeing release in Australia. Adults do not, in fact, have the right to see and hear what they want as has been claimed in the National Classification
Code (“adults should be able to read, hear and see what they want”). Jim McGinty, Attorney General for Western Australia, was contacted for a take on the issue, as the Governors General will need to vote unanimously for the adult rating to be made available for games. Neither he, nor his media representatives were available to comment and have not answered my questions at the time of publishing.
As a result, funding remains alarmingly low for such an important market. Australia is missing a massive global market that is expanding every year. As a result, we are falling quickly behind in nationally developed interactive software. In turn, we are losing the income that accompanies that growth. Local games artist Martin Malek provides some perspective on the issue. “The competition from countries such as Canada or Singapore is quite heavy…since those countries have tax rebates for the gaming industry, just as the film industry has here in Australia. When a country introduces such a rebate it lures the game developers into forming studios, creating job opportunities for a lot of skilled and passionate gamers. If memory serves me right, the 40% tax rebate suggested [by the Game Developers Association of Australia] would expand the gaming job market in the Australian industry from around five thousand to eighteen thousand! Now that is a lot of job opportunities!” A lot of job opportunities in an industry whose revenue now surpasses Hollywood’s.
The reality is that gaming is not only an important asset to the Australian economy, but as a recreational activity and, more importantly, as a culturally-enriching, modern art form. So what can be done to stem the stigma and animosity aimed at the industry? The first possibility is for audiences to educate themselves by playing the games being demonized and to find out where the information they are receiving is coming from. Parents should also be aware that it is their job to prepare their children for inevitable exposure to illicit elements and should not resort to blaming music, movies or games so easily.
Parents are the most important part of a child’s understanding of the media. The biggest flaw in protecting children is the omission of the information they will be surprised by almost inevitably. What can take place is having parents better educated by the government. Adverts that say they need to take the time to explain to their children what they are seeing or should avoid exposure to. After all, children are not idiots, they simply need to understand the reasoning behind the rules they’ve been given. Conservatives in the government have pushed a scaremongering, rumour-spreading agenda about games for too long. As for fears that games will disintegrate common decency and spread crime, criminals are not criminals because of a single source of media and we should stop pretending that the answers to those cases are so simple.
In regards to the R+18 ratings issue, game purchases can be enforced just like alcohol and cigarettes are, with a small amount of government monitoring. Games are not that easy for children to acquire, especially as they have no source of income. It borders on irrational to believe that a responsible parent would purchase an adult game unwillingly for their child. If they so much as glances at the box of a game they will see the rating in nice big letters, and store clerks can certainly refuse the right to purchase a game if a child attempts to buy it.
Ultimately it is a tough battle for the industry in Australia to overcome the fear that comes with all new mediums of communication. But once parents take control over their child’s education, the government stops babysitting Australia, and instead, allowing an important industry to flourish, gaming will finally take its place away from “child’s play” or “Geek stuff”. It will, instead, become an important social and cultural asset for all of Australia to enjoy. So hands up, those who want to see change for the benefit of Australia. Did you put your hand up?
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