Technology | 2009.11.22
MPs, come play a video game with me | Tom Watson
My fellow politicians must stop bleating about videogames and learn to love this lucrative art
British politicians should stop whingeing and learn to love videogames. Whether the political classes like it or not, videogames have changed the cultural landscape of the nation.
The latest Call of Duty game, Modern Warfare 2, has been frowned upon for its nasty content, and generated the now familiar controversy. But tabloid columnists can write as many outraged articles as they like. The British aren\'t listening any more. This new game has smashed all records, selling more than 1.2m copies in the first 24 hours. In the last decade we have bought more than 330m videogames – that\'s five for every house in the land. It is estimated that 26 million of us play.
Up and down the country, the health- conscious are jumping to Wii Fit; families are taking each other on in Super Mario Kart leagues; and, yes, teenagers are shooting bad guys (and a few good ones too). But it has been the way since Manic Miner was first published for the Sinclair ZX Spectrum a quarter of a century ago – and I\'m yet to see the Office of National Statistics report that the trend has bred tribes of psychopathic killers.
The sad truth is that politicians around the world are ahead of us. While MPs bleat on about the dangers to our children, Nicolas Sarkozy recently said videogames had the potential to be the dominant art form of the 21st century. The Canadians, noting that the videogames industry is arguably larger than the music industry, are luring our best designers and coders with the promise of tax breaks and strategic support from government. I\'m still waiting for a reply to the letter I wrote to the Treasury last year urging a similar incentive in the UK. Tax relief for games development would secure jobs and help maintain our reputation as a leading player in the global games market. It\'s worth a staggering £18bn a year, yet we are about to lose our position as the world\'s third largest producer of games.
You might imagine that the failure of parliament to revere our best games designers is down to MPs having busy lives and missing the opportunity to wield a Nintendo nunchuk. Not true. I know of at least three MPs who have a Guitar Hero habit. I know because they have tried to beat me (and failed). Two of them are ministers. Yet industry leaders complain that many universities are not producing graduates skilled enough to make a high-end game.
When I was at school I learnt how to code. But we don\'t teach kids programming any more. We teach them how to use Microsoft Office. So by the time they get to university, teenagers haven\'t had the do-it-yourself coding skills that a generation of early adopters have benfited from. Teaching kids to code wouldn\'t just help the games sector – the whole IT sector would benefit.
And if my economic arguments are falling on deaf ears in tough times, there is a simple political truth for fellow parliamentarians to consider. Gamers are getting organised – not surprising as so many modern games teach them how to collaborate and problem-solve.
This week I set up a group in response to a tabloid story. Gamers\' Voice is a platform for gamers to vent their spleen at the way they are portrayed in the media. More than 12,000 people have already joined. Gamers are sick of being treated like idiots and determined to get heard.
It\'s time to elevate the games industry to the same status as the music and film industries. The government should consider a UK Games Council, along similar lines to the UK Film Council. It will give industry and government a platform to discuss the strategic opportunities that have to be grasped if we\'re to get the export-led growth the chancellor, and the country, so badly needs.
Tom Watson is the Labour MP for West Bromwich East watsont@parliament.uk
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/[...]v/12/mps-come-play-a-videogame
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