Consumers

Consumers may be the source of our industry’s success, but they are also the source of a decent amount of frustration and bewilderment too. The fact is that consumers are an unpredictable bunch; meaning that good games don’t always make money and bad games can sell by the lorry load. Most children don’t end up working in game development, but they do end up being part of a future generation of game consumers. Giving them a basic understanding of game development would allow them to make more informed choices and ultimately create a more discerning audience. This can only be good for innovation and creativity in the development industry, and may even help publishers by creating a more predictable audience that is seeking a quality gameplay experience. Of course there’s no point trying to change consumers, if the people responsible for commissioning and selling the games can’t respond to the change…

Publishers, Marketing Departments and Journalists

It may be more controversial, but I think there is also a strong argument for members of the wider games industry being more literate in game development. It’s important to stress that I’m not trying to say that these groups don’t understand games, but just that they could gain a deeper understanding of games from going through the process of making their own. To be fair, many people in these areas already have development experience, but in an ever-expanding industry a marketing executive is as likely to have made their career selling cheese as computer games. If your marketing department don’t understand what gameplay is then how can they be expected to sell it? All these groups deal with games professionally, so surely an understanding of them is as important to their jobs as knowing how to use MS Project, Excel or Word. So why not have your next staff training day on game development? If teenagers can do it then so can you…

Women

According to the ESA, some 38% of game players are female, but we all know that the proportion of women working in game development is far less than that. In our experience, girls up to about the age of eleven are just as interested in making games as boys, and we get a very even split at the clubs. Unfortunately, by the time they reach their teens the proportion of girls prepared to attend game-making workshops drops off completely. It appears that by this age it is labelled as a boys activity and only the most independently minded girls are willing to go against the flow. Bringing game development into schools would give more girls a chance to try it out, without feeling they were doing something wrong. They would then quickly find that they are just as good as the boys – if not better – because girls usually listen to instructions! In fact, there are already initiatives like CC4G (Computer Clubs for Girls) in the UK that are attempting to introduce game development to girls. Nonetheless its clear that more needs to be done if the games industry wants to make the most of the balance of potential talent that is out there for the future.

Society

The controversy over violent videogames is likely to remain a thorn in the industry’s side for the foreseeable future, but everyone involved in the argument would benefit from a deeper understanding of games. Parents could certainly have a better understanding and awareness of game ratings, and legislators would benefit from a better understanding of what they are arguing about. Making computer games with your child is a great way to interact with them, and the perfect context to discuss issues such as violence and age ratings in a natural way. Making a game with appropriate content for their classmates makes a good pretext for exploring this issue, and you may both learn something from the experience. PEGI in Europe and the ESRB in the US offer information on game ratings.