Here is an article in the latest big issue.
As a new exhibition opens in Manchester celebrating Britain's videogame heritage, has the "unruly stepchild" of the media come of age?
By Dan Whitehead
"Murder, mayhem, robbery, rape, cannibalism, carnage, necrophilia, sex, sadism, masochism, and virtually every other form of crime, degeneracy, bestiality, and horror." Not the response to the latest videogame, but how a 1954 congressional subcommittee in the US described the pernicious influence of comic books.
Of course over a half a century later and comic books are an accepted strand in our entertainment fabric, the source of most blockbuster movies, and the once-juvenile comic strip format itself has even produced critically acclaimed works of literature. Today the glaring spotlight of blame for juvenile delinquency points instead points to the bleep and bloops of videogames, these irresponsible digital distractions which transform our youth into zombified drones, growing doughy and breathless on a constant diet of gruesomely explicit slaughter and rewarded for anti-social behaviour in consequence-free virtual worlds.
The language is much the same as previous moral panic stories, so is gaming getting a fair deal? Not according to Tanya Byron, whose 2008 report on children's gaming and Internet use resisted the popular notion that such entertainments were inherently harmful, and certainly not according to David Crookes, a games journalist whose exhibition Videogame Nation Launches at Urbis this month
"There's this feeling, I think, that gaming is something of a black sheep when it comes to entertainment," he admits. "The exhibition grew out of my desire to showcase the contribution made by gaming to entertainment and to break down the perception that games are purely for geeks by highlighting the people behind the games and the work the have done. It looks at how we have these creative people all over Britain producing these amazing games that are outperforming music and film and gives the medium a chance to step out of the shadows."
Part of the problem with gaming's image is one that also made comic books such an easy scapegoat in the 1950s. It's a creative medium born from commercial soil, initially more dedicated to sales than art, and one that traditionally served and audience of children to boot. It's been almost 40 years since the first widely available videogames saw the light of day, and both industry and audience have matured while their popular perception has remained the same. Thus, when images of adult-themed games like Grand Theft Auto reach the mainstream consciousness, the effect is one of blood and depravity inappropriately inserted into children's entertainment. Few people would be outraged when an 18-rated crime movie includes violence, or assume it was created to ensnare innocent children, yet it seems adult rated games have yet to acquire the same creative licence.
One of the aims of Videogame Nation is to celebrate the creative and cultural impact of this relatively young medium, one perhaps still fumbling it's way to the status of art form. Certainly for the generations born and raised the 1970s, games are no longer a bewildering electronic gimmick.
"It's always struck me as odd when you read newspaper reports which say parents don't understand what their children are playing when you think most parents are in their 20s and 30s and will have played games themselves," Crookes says, though he agrees that the role of gaming in the society is rapidly changing. "As time goes on, gaming will shift ever more into the mainstream. As visitors to Videogame Nation will see, this cultural shift started in the mid-1990s when the PlayStation was launched and today we see people who wouldn't usually play games snapping up Nintendo Wiis and gathering family and friends around. Where once people would play Monopoly and Ludo on Christmas Day, now they're jamming on Guitar Hero. Games are adapting to changing generational shifts and becoming more ingrained in everyday entertainment."
Ellie Gibson, deputy editor of Eurogamer, Britain's most popular videogame website, has seen this change first hand, but cautions that talk of gaming dominating the entertainment landscape is premature. "There's no doubt that more people are playing games than ever before, and it's much more common and socially acceptable hobby than in previous generations. It looks like this trend will continue and games will move towards being as popular as music, movies and TV as a result. But the idea that we're all gamers now is a myth; there are still whole sections of the population who have no interest in it, and there's still a stigma that prevents gaming from being as accepted as other media."
It's especially appropriate that Videogame Nation is making it's début in Manchester. Not only was the city home to Baby, the first modern computer, but the North West has long been one of the most fertile development grounds where gaming is concerned - a trend going back to the advent of the home computing revolution. When the seminal 1983 game Manic Miner was programmed by Matthew Smith in Wallasey
Manchester was home to Ocean, one of the most successful software publishers of the 1980s, while Liverpool can lay claim to pioneering developer Psygnosis, the spirit of which lives on in Sony PlayStation's Wavertree offices.
Cheshire-based developer Traveller's Tales won a BAFTA last year for its wonderful Lego games, and was recently snapped up by Warner Bros, while over in Yorkshire, [Boo - me] Team 17 remains one of the country's most dependable independent games companies, producing the globally successful Worms series. Lara Croft, star of Tomb Raider and arguably the most recognisable icon of 1990s gaming, was created just outside the region by Derby's Core Design Studio. Most of the worlds largest games publishers now have a development studios in the north.
And yet despite this enormous success, drawing lucrative foreign business to our shores, the UK's videogame industry was conspicuously absent from the Government's recent paper on its vision of a digital Britain. Spotting a chance to put the boot into Gordon Brown yet again, the Conservatives set up a rival think-tank and began wooing major UK games talent. The move prompted Ian Livingstone, former head of Eidos, the publisher behind Tomb Raider, to pen an open letter to the games trade press, decrying the way in which gaming is still treated as an "unruly stepchild", with the floundering British film business continually propped up up by grants and subsidies while their peers in the games industry are left to fight through the recession alone.
That the North West's importance in the development of videogames as both industry and creative medium is something of a well kept secret is another of the issues Crookes, born and raised in Bury, hopes the exhibition will address.
"[The region] celebrates its music and television heritage - and quite rightly because both of those together with Football, of course, have given the city worldwide recognition - but Manchester and the North West have had, and still have, a significant gaming scene and yet it barely touches on peoples radars."
It seems that for all their ubiquity and commercial success, videogames still haven't convinced the world at large of their importance. Exhibitions like Videogame Nation may help place them in a more manageable context, but it seems it will be a long time before the tabloids let go of the this useful bete noir.
"Games are still the baddies in the mainstream media a lot of the time, just like video nasties, comic books and Elvis Presley were before them," admits Gibson.
"A bigger, badder social evil may need to come along so the media has something else to blame."
Videogame Nation is at Urbis in Manchester from 14 may to 20 September. Entrance is 3 squid.
I really hope this hasn't been posted before or I'll shoot someone.
A good article but if its a bit too long to read I put in paragraphs.
Should there be any errors then don't blame me but point them out nicely. I have just got back from the Pub.
Maybe in the future I'll pay for the Big Issue.
