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Herding Cats Doesn't Begin to Describe It: Reflections on 20 Years of the IGDA
- 1. Herding Cats Doesn’t Begin to Describe It Reflections on 20 Years of the IGDA Ernest W. Adams, founder
- 2. DISCLAIMERS This is a personal view
- 3. ME. (I‘ll try to be brief.)
- 14. Spaghetti Code A sculpture by George W. Hart
- 15. MORAL PANICS THEN AND NOW Fun with Fearmongering!
- 16. For [writing] will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing… will discourage the use of their own memory within them. — Socrates, ~370 B.C. Writing
- 17. The word written on parchment will last a thousand years. The printed book is on paper. How long will it last? — Johannes Trithemius, 1494 The Printing Press
- 18. Novels The free access which many young people have to romances, novels, and plays has poisoned the mind and corrupted the morals of many a promising youth; and prevented others from improving their minds in useful knowledge. — Reverend Enos Hitchcock, 1790
- 19. The Waltz The indecent foreign dance called the Waltz was introduced [at the royal court]. So long as this obscene display was con-fined to prostitutes and adulteresses, we did not think it deserving of notice; but now, we feel it a duty to warn every parent against exposing his daughter to so fatal a contagion. — The Times, 1816
- 20. Photography From today, painting is dead! — Paul Delaroche, 1839
- 21. Movies I unite with all who protest against [vile and unwholesome moving pictures] as a grave menace to youth, to home life, to country and to religion. I condemn… those salacious motion pictures which… are corrupting public morals and promoting a sex mania in our land. — Legion of Decency Pledge, 1933
- 22. Jazz …our people are becoming dangerously demented, confused, distracted or bewildered by jazz music. — State of Washington bill authorizing censorship, 1933
- 23. Television If the television craze continues with the present level of programs, we are destined to have a nation of morons. — Dr. Daniel L. Marsh, 1950
- 24. Comic Books I think Hitler was a beginner compared to the comic- book industry. — Fredric Wertham, 1954
- 26. Role-Playing Games — Jack T. Chick, 1984
- 27. Rap It is not the messenger that is so frightening, it is the perpetuation—almost glorification —of the cruel and violent reality of the ‗streets‘… — Tipper Gore, 1990
- 28. Video Games In [Death Race] a player takes the first step to creating violence. The player is no longer just a spectator. He's an actor in the process… I shudder to think what will come next if this is encouraged. It'll be pretty gory. — Daniel Driessen, National Safety Council, 1976 Video game violence & glorification must be stopped—it is creating monsters!
- 29. Death Race, 1976 First major video game controversy
- 30. River Raid, 1984 First game ever banned for sale to minors in Germany
- 34. — ―Violent Video Games: How Hysteria and Pseudoscience Created a Phantom Public Health Crisis‖, Paradigm, Christopher J. Ferguson, Ph.D. r = -0.95!!!
- 35. Rep. Tom Lantos (D) California Congressional District 11
- 36. A SHORT TIMELINE Birth of the IGDA
- 37. Trip Hawkins Gets Annoyed Electronic Arts Artists‘ Symposiums, 1986-7 (ish)
- 38. Dave Walker (et al) LA Game Developers CEDA 1992 Chris Crawford (et al) CGDC Ernest Adams (et al) Ernest Adams CGDA department IGDN 1988 1994 1995 1997 1998
- 41. Negative Perceptions ―A professional society? Sounds like loads of fun. NOT.‖
- 43. Ignorance ―Game censorship? What‘s that?‖
- 44. Apathy ―I don‘t nap 9 or 10 times a day, I don‘t have enough energy for my main snooze.‖
- 45. Selfishness ―Why should I help other people who compete with me?‖
- 46. Hostility ―Organize to do things together? Are you some kind of a Commie?‖
- 47. Divided Interests ―Die, overpriced AAA game developing scum!‖ ―Die, Skinner box F2P game developing scum!‖
- 48. Overwork ―Can‘t, man, I‘m in crunch right now. And next week. And next month. And forever. ‖
- 49. Funding ―So what‘s the ROI on being a member? Do I get preferred stock? What‘s the value proposition? When can I cash out?‖
- 50. PHILOSOPHY AND GOALS ―So what do you guys actually do?‖
- 54. No Barriers You‘re a game developer if you say you‘re a game developer.
- 55. Approval Voting No spoilers! (I‘m looking at you, Ralph Nader.)
- 56. Political and Legal Activism ―First Amendment, beeyotch.‖ — Brown vs. Entertainment Merchants Association, 2011
- 57. Networking Opportunities Particularly for students, indies, and people in remote places.
- 58. Professional Growth/Continuing Education ―PlayStation Shader Language? But I just got done learning the GL Shader Language!‖
- 59. Improve Diversity ―Brenda Romero said WHAT?‖
- 60. STUFF I DIDN’T ANTICIPATE Awesomeness envisioned by others.
- 61. Curriculum Framework Document Single most influential thing IGDA has ever done.
- 62. IGDA Foundation By game developers, for game developers, supporting students, SIGs, and chapters.
- 63. O-1/H-1B Visa Support Letters Stop and be frisky.
- 64. And a lot more… • Lots of discounts • Many kinds of insurance • Quality of Life White Paper • Game Crediting Guide – Microsoft uses this! • Intellectual Property Rights White Paper • Contract Walk-through for new developers • Several Best Practices reports - finance, HR, etc. • Tons of SIG reports - AI, casual games, etc.
- 65. WHY THE IGDA IS NEEDED MORE THAN EVER The Stupidity from the Black Lagoon
- 66. Here We Go Again… 38 years since Death Race. Don‘t these clowns ever learn?
- 69. Herding Cats Doesn’t Begin to Describe It Reflections on 20 Years of the IGDA Ernest W. Adams, founder
Editor's Notes
- Hello and welcome. I’m Ernest Adams. As this is the 20th anniversary of the founding of the IGDA and I’m the founder, the GDC has kindly given me an opportunity to present a retrospective over it, and particularly its creation and some of the problems we faced (and still face). This will be a somewhat wry, and I hope a bit funny, view of the IGDA.
- I need to add that this is a strictly personal view; my memory is not perfect, and others may remember things differently. I’m going to try to give all the credit where it is due, and if I leave anyone out, I apologize in advance.
- First I’m going to talk a little bit about my own history and how I came to be a game developer, because that has a bearing on how the IGDA was founded. I’ll try to be brief.
- This is the sight and sound of the first machine that I played a game on, in 1970. It was in the basement of the Lawrence Hall of Science, a museum in Berkeley. There was a sign on the desk that said: “Computer Games, $2 an hour.” This was two weeks’ allowance for me, but I decided to try it and I was hooked. Even though I was reading upper-case letters printed out on yellow roll paper at 110 baud -- about 11 characters per second, far slower than anyone can read -- in my mind I was Captain Kirk on the bridge of the Starship Enterprise, controlling the phasers and photon torpedoes and navigational computer and so on. The machine would print out little maps showing where the Klingons were, and I would hunt them down and destroy them. I realize this seems ludicrous nowadays, but I have a vivid imagination and was always a voracious reader, so the fact that I was reading this rather than seeing it didn’t harm the experience at all.I never saw the actual computer.
- A little later I taught myself to program in FORTRAN on punched cards like this one. The first thing I did was make a game. You punched in data cards, put them at the back of the deck, ran the whole thing through the card reader, and then went over to the line printer to see who won.
- After I graduated from high school I bought myself a Commodore PET and made various games on it. This was the first computer I actually owned.
- When I went away to college, however, I gained more-or-less unlimited access to a Digital Equipment Corporation DECSYSTEM 20, although we didn’t have this particular terminal. At that point I sold the PET and used the money to buy something much more essential to survival in California, a car. I wrote games on the DEC-20 as well.
- When I graduated from college, video game machines were too small and weak for me to program on. I was used to Big Iron, so I went into the computer-aided engineering industry, working on Apollo workstations like this one.
- We made logic design and silicon layout tools.
- During this time, as a young software engineer, I joined the Association for Computing Machinery, a professional society whose goal was to advance the craft of software development and the interests of those who do it.
- I also started going to the Design Automation Conference, which is now in its 51st year, although it was about 20 years old at the time. This was the main professional conference for people in my industry, and there were talks on all sorts of useful topics. I came to believe that this was the norm for professionals working in the field.
- But when personal computers reached a certain threshold, I decided that the time was right to get into the game industry. Once we had the 80386 chip, which gave us a full megabyte of RAM to play with, and the VGA card (256 colors!) and the Sound Blaster, which could play recorded sound and not just music, then I felt I was ready to change industries. I became a professional game developer in 1989.
- This was the first console machine I ever owned. That meansthat I was considered a newbie, a Johnny-come-lately, because at that time, if you hadn’t programmed for the Atari 2600or the Mattel Intellivision, you hadn’t been there at the beginning. I was an arriviste.
- So here I was, in the game industry at last, and I started asking questions. What was the professional society that I should join? What was the big international conference of game developers? People looked at me as if I had two heads. Nobody was a member of the ACM or any other society either. There was this little conference that Chris Crawford had started, but my boss was openly contemptuous of the idea – he thought Crawford and his friends were ivory-tower elitists. Then I learned a few other things that startled me. Nobody used E-mail, which I had been using since 1978. Nobody seemed to know what the Internet was. At a job interview I went to, someone sneered at my business card because it said “software engineer,” which they thought was pretentious. Worse yet, there didn’t seem to be any engineering standards. People didn’t comment their code much; a lot of things were still done in assembly language; most people didn’t even know what revision control was. I was pretty shocked. So that was where I was in 1989: an engineer from a mature industry who suddenly found himself in a very immature one.
- So, I’m going to leave that there for the moment, and stop talking about myself for a while. I now want to look at another cultural stream that sort of flowed together with me later one, and was instrumental in the founding of the IGDA. So let’s go back 2,400 years in time or so, and talk about the fear of new media and new art forms.
- This doesn’t exactly qualify as a moral panic, because Socrates didn’t stir up much public sentiment against writing, but he did have his doubts about it. People would lose their power of memorizing things if they began to rely on writing to remember stuff. He said that writing didn’t convey true wisdom, only a sort of fake form of it. True wisdom arises from dialectic and debate, and he said that writing couldn’t convey true wisdom because you couldn’t ask questions of the author.This is kind of ironic, because the only reason that Socrates’s words have survived is because Plato wrote them down (or made them up).
- Moving forward 1800 years or so, we come to the printing press, which threatened to put a lot of professional scribes out of business. This guy was one, and he questioned whether paper would last as long as parchment—again doubts about new media, although not really a moral panic.
- Here we come to a true moral panic, however. People thought that young women, in particular, would fail to learn the womanly duties of cooking and sewing and managing servants if they sat around reading novels all the time. (Nobody had these concerns about working class women; they couldn’t read anyway.)
- The obscene dance called the waltz attracted the attention of The Times in 1816. Again we note the emphasis on the corruption of young women; nobody seems concerned about the corrupting effect of the waltz on young men. I seem to remember similar things being said about the lambada in the 1990s, though the waltz has apparently survived while the lambada has not.
- This turned out not to be quite true; instead, people invented interesting new things to do with painting. The Impressionists redefined what it was about. Of course, they were not the first by any means; Rembrandt had been doing interesting things with light and shadow long before, but Impressionism led on to Cubism and Fauvism and all the other movements of modern art.
- A Supreme Court decision in 1915 determined that movies were not “press” and so notprotected by the First Amendment. They didn’t get First Amendment protection until another landmark decision in 1952.There were a lot of state laws censoring movies in the early part of the 20th century, and in order to forestall any more the movie set up the Hays Code, which later became the MPAA code that we know today. Interestingly, Mr. Hays, for whom it was named, was a devout Catholic, and the early Hays code prohibited among other things disrespectful references to Jesus and the Virgin Mary. This caused some wit to note that the Hays Code amounted to a Jewish industry forcing Catholic values on Protestant America.
- About the same time there was also a great deal of concern about the bewilderment and confusion being caused by syncopated rhythms.
- Now here’s one that actually came true. I still remember the debates about the dangers of television in the late 1960s. I used to come home from school and watch re-runs of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea every afternoon until my parents decided that watching an hour of television a day was not good for me, and from then on I was restricted to watching it three days a week.
- And here of course is the one we all know so well. Fredric Wertham published Seduction of the Innocent and became Congress’s favorite go-to expert for testimony on the damage that comic books were doing, especially to young boys. He was convinced that Batman and Robin were living a sort of homosexual paradise, and that this positive image would cause boys to become gay. As a result the comic book industry instituted the Comics Code Authority, which required that no hero character could ever break a law, and no villain should ever get away with a crime—they all had to be caught and punished. As a result, the comics industry published nothing but preachy pablum for the next thirty years… and this was one thing that I definitely did not want to happen to us.
- And then of course we have rock and roll—Elvis Presley gyrating his hips on the Ed Sullivan Show in such a suggestive manner that the cameras only filmed him from the waist up. Later, Judas Priest was sued for “causing” the suicide of one young person and the attempted suicide of another. Their personal histories in unstable families torn apart by alcoholism, gambling, and domestic violence was played down. Fortunately Judas Priest was found definitively to have First Amendment rights, and the case was dropped.
- Role-playing games, in the 1980s… I’m sure some of us remember the panic over that. More accusations of Satanismand suicide. In fact, statistical analysis shows that role-players have a much LOWER rate of suicide than the general population. If you can summon up the time and energy required to play D&D properly, you can’t be suicidally depressed.
- And here is Tipper Gore, Al Gore’s wife, on rap music…
- And then of course video games. The first flap over video games occurred in 1976, and was about an Exidy arcade game called Death Race. And it’s still going on—here’s Donald Trump giving us the benefit of his opinion, though what he knows about it I can’t imagine.
- Here’s a screen shot from Death Race. The object of the game was to run over “gremlins,” and when you ran over them you got a tombstone, which is represented by all these crosses. I guess gremlins still get buried in consecrated ground.
- This is River Raid, from 1984—an early game created by a female developer, Carol Shaw. This game had to run in 4K of ROM and 128 bytes of RAM. Amazingly enough, it was one of the first games to use procedurally generated terrain, because the landscape was different every time and there wasn’t enough room to store it in the machine, so the game created it. It was also an early game to feature a tactical decision for the player to make: you had to decide whether to blow up the fuel barges for points or fly over them to get more fuel. The German authorities determined that "minors are intended to delve into the role of an uncompromising fighter and agent of annihilation (...). It provides children with a paramilitaristic education (...). With older minors, playing leads (...) to physical cramps, anger, aggressiveness, erratic thinking (...) and headaches."
- And then came Mortal Kombat in 1993, and at this point, Congress completely lost its collective shit.
- We had scenes of blood and gore such as we had never seen before, and there were Senate hearings, as illustrated by the following clip.
- This is Senator Herbert Kohl, opening the hearings on December 9th, 1993. He implicitly threatens to use Congressional power to censor games, despite “today’s announcement,” which refers to the formation of the Entertainment Software Rating Board by the Interactive Digital Software Association, which has since been renamed the Entertainment Software Association.
- As we have seen since, despite Senator Kohl’s accusations, there is a strong negative correlation between video game sales and juvenile violence. In fact, for you statisticians out there, the Pearson product moment correlation coefficient is -0.95, almost perfect negative correlation. Now, correlation is not causality, and I would not want to claim that video games are making you violence go down. But certainly nobody can claim that they are making it go up.
- And here is Representative Tom Lantos, Democrat from San Mateo, not far from here, and this is where I come back in. In 1994, Lantos held what he called a “symposium” on video game violence in San Francisco. I went to see it, interested to hear what would be said, and I discovered that it was a complete setup. An ambush, a cynical and manipulative event designed to make the game industry look bad. He put game executives on the stage in such a way that nobody could see them clearly and he did not allow them to put their case to the audience.Now, I agreed with Lantos on many things. He was a world-famous human rights activist, a women’s rights activist, a Holocaust survivor who had the tattoos to prove it. But when I heard him invoking Nazi Germany in connection with video games, I was thoroughly disgusted. He of all people should have known better. And it was that event, that so-called symposium, that made me want to fight back. I left determined to do something, and that was why I founded the IGDA.A point I need to make here is that the video game violence issue comes from both sides of the aisle. Previous moral panics for the most part have been about sexuality and it is mostly social conservatives who are worried about that. Among those of our opponents who are elected officials, most have been Democrats or independents who lean Democratic: Herb Kohl, Joseph Lieberman, Tom Lantos, and here in California, Leland Yee.
- So now we come to the confluence of events—video games being used as cultural scapegoats yet again, and my sense that we needed a professional society to fight our corner. Now I want to talk a bit about the actual history of setting it up.
- In a way, it sort of begins with Trip Hawkins, the founder, chairman, and CEO of Electronic Arts. In 1986 or so, Trip had gotten all the EA developers together from around the world for series of meetings, which he called an “Artists’ Symposium.” EA had this idea that game developers would be marketed like rock bands, which wasn’t unreasonable when the teams consisted of four or five people. They even made their game packaging look like LP album covers, only the right size for a floppy disk. Anyway, the event was successful, so Trip held another one the next year. Except at that one, the developers started comparing royalty rates, and then haranguing Trip about “why is he getting 15% and I’m only getting 10%?” Trip said that he wasn’t going to pay to bring his developers to California to collude against him, so that was the last of the Artists’ Symposiums.
- But Trip had created a felt need. The EA developers all agreed how useful the meetings were, so they thought it would be a good idea to continue them in public, and not under anyone’s control. That was the point at which Chris Crawford, who was one of EA’s developers, founded the Computer Game Developers’ Conference, which eventually became the GDC. He got a group of people together in his living room and they formed a company to put on the conference.Meanwhile, another developer, Dave Walker, had been holding local get-togethers in Los Angeles for pizza and beer and informal talks by developers. He later moved to the Bay Area and founded CEDA, the Computer Entertainment Developers’ Association.I joined the CGDC in 1990, and four years later I went to Tom Lantos’s so-called symposium. At that point I went to the CGDC board of directors and asked if I could set up a professional society with their support. They agreed to do so as an internal department of the company (initially). Later, we spun it off into a proper 501 (c) 6 member-owned professional society. I asked Dave Walker to join us, and we grandfathered in all the CEDA members, of whom there were about 70—which is why Dave’s member number is actually older than the IGDA itself.Later a splinter group who didn’t like the way I was running things left, but they all came back after I resigned, and the organization was renamed the IGDA.
- Here’s the original tri-fold brochure that we sent out to the whole CGDC mailing list asking them to join what was then called the CGDA. (Don’t try to call this number, and the “suite” mentioned is just a post office box.) It’s funny to think of doing it this way, but you have to remember that in 1994 the World Wide Web barely existed and many game developers still didn’t have E-mail addresses. We had to do things through the mail.It was a big success, though, because we got a response rate of about 1 in 7. Normally you’re doing well with an unsolicited mail shot if you get a two or three percent return rate. We began with about 500 members, I believe.
- But it wasn’t easy. Game developers are not natural joiners. We’re not terribly social people and most of us are somewhere on the autism spectrum. There have been, and remain, a number of obstacles to getting a professional society going in the game industry, and I’m going to illustrate them with cat pictures given the “herding cats” theme in the title of this lecture.
- The first is simply negative perceptions. Games are cool and fun, but professional societies sound boring. I’m going to illustrate this with a video clip…
- In this clip a minor member of the British royal family has come to visit a factory, and is talking to one of the women who works in the cafeteria about how he’s not enjoying life.
- The next is simple ignorance. A lot of developers, especially young ones, simply aren’t aware of the political, legal, and social challenges we face.
- Then there’s apathy. Some people simply don’t care.
- And a degree of selfishness. A few people are so competitive that they see any kind of collective action as interfering with their ability to make money.
- Or outright hostility to the idea. The game industry attracts a fair number of libertarians, who are suspicious of any kind of collective action.
- And divided interests… in the early years it was console developers and PC developers; now it’s AAA developers and free-to-play developers. They may not see that they have enough in common to take part in a joint enterprise.
- Or simple overwork. Many people feel like they’re too busy to volunteer.
- And finally, and perhaps most of all, funding. It’s really hard to build a grass-roots organization without a nest egg. A lot of developers aren’t very well-off and they’re tight-fisted with their money; they want to know what they’re going to get for it.
- So those are some of the difficulties we faced. I now want to talk about some of the policies and goals I established for the IGDA early in its history.
- First, we aren’t a union. That libertarianism again. It didn’t take me long to realize that even the most downtrodden and exploited developer has dreams of someday running his down studio where he can exploit others in turn. People like that are not going to want to deal with a union. And frankly, I didn’t really want us to be a union either, with the whole labor/management dichotomy, and organizing strikes, and all that kind of thing. Furthermore, game development arose out of computer programming, and computer programming was always a white-collar job… though game development has gotten rather less white collar than it used to be. So I never gave becoming a union serious consideration, and I was at pains to reassure people that that’s not what we had planned.
- Secondly, I didn’t want to be a trade association. Trade associations are for companies, and they’re concerned chiefly with money and the business. I wanted us to be about the individual developer, and to be fighting for creative freedom. Besides, the IDSA (later the ESA) already existed for the publishers.At this point I need to admit to a mistake I made at the time; I assumed that the IDSA would only concern itself with money and would kowtow to Congress and give it whatever it wanted. I was actively suspicious of them and their motives, and I thought they would sell us out in order to get Congress off their backs. But in fact, they have fought the good fight against video game censorship right alongside us, and with a great deal more money to boot.
- So my goal really was to imitate the Association for Computing Machinery—a professional society whose function was to advance the craft and the rights and working conditions of individual developers. I even modeled a first draft of the constitution after the ACM’s constitution, until I discovered that it was illegal in California. The ACM is incorporated somewhere else.
- Another critical policy was no barriers to entry. I really hate priesthoods and hierarchies of the anointed few. I don’t like the Hollywood craft guilds that require that you do a certain amount of work before you’re allowed to join. And that’s one of the things that annoys me about the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences, too. I wanted to encourage everyone to join who is interested in the field—and that includes students and startups haven’t published a thing. As far as I’m concerned, you’re a game developer if you say you’re a game developer.
- I also wanted to avoid any voting system that would create factionalism or promote divisiveness. That’s why we use the approval voting system that we do, in which you can vote for as many or as few of the candidates as you like. It tends to elect centrists who are broadly popular, and it prevents spoilers from disrupting an election.
- The first goal, always, of the organization was to be political and legal activism, because that was why I founded it in the first place. And indeed it has paid off. In 2011, the Supreme Court finally granted us First Amendment protection. Of course we haven’t done it alone by any means, but we have been very active, both in writing friend-of-the-court briefs and in speaking to the media. I don’t know if any of you saw the clip in which Fox News cut off Daniel Greenberg’s microphone because he was defending us so eloquently. They thought they were going to make him look like an idiot, and instead he ended up making them look like idiots, so they cut him off.
- Reaching out to other people, and improving connections among developers has always been important; it was a founding goal of the conference and it is for the IGDA as well.
- And providing continuing education, although for the most part this is now handled by other people.
- Finally, it was always an unstated goal of mine to improve diversity in the game industry. Different cats of different colors, to help make different kinds of games. I didn’t mention this in the original call for members, but it’s something that I wanted all along.
- In addition to those things, however, the IGDA has become more than I ever dreamed of. Here are some of the things it has done that I didn’t anticipate.
- The Curriculum Framework Document is the single most influential thing the IGDA has ever done. It’s not a curriculum itself, but it provides a framework for creating one, and institutions of higher education around the world have used the Education Committee’s Curriculum Framework document to help them build their own game education programs.
- The IGDA Foundation is another thing I didn’t envision. (If you don’t get it, this is a picture of a cat and a foundation.) The IGDA Foundation is actually a separate entity for tax reasons, because it’s a charity, but it works closely with the IGDA. Its goal is to be by game developers, for game developers, and it supports students, special interest groups, and IGDA chapters. It also grants the Eric Dybsand Memorial Scholarship for young AI programmers. When I set up the IGDA I never thought we would be doing something like this.
- The IGDA is designated by the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) as the official consulting agency and recognized peer group to be utilized in connection with O-1 extraordinary ability visas and H-1B visas for professionals in the video game industry. For IGDA members seeking jobs in the U.S., the IGDA will provide letters of support in association with these visa applications. I had no idea this even existed until a few days ago.
- And there’s much more, if you go to the web site and look on the member benefits page. Not only a lot of discounts, but a lot of useful research—all done by IGDA volunteers.
- But the battle isn’t over. The moral panic hasn’t died down. It took the National Rifle Association less than a nanosecond to try to divert attention away from guns by blaming video games after the Sandy Hook massacre. I’m not going to get into the gun issue here and now, but it’s clear that video games are everyone’s favorite whipping boy when violence is concerned, and when a scapegoat must be found and attention diverted from the harder questions.
- For example, on the floor of the House of Representatives, right now there’s a bill proposing to prevent the makers of “violent” video games from qualifying for the R&D tax credit. But what’s a violent game? The legislation doesn’t say. When Pokémon fight, they “faint.” I guess their blood pressure drops to the point that they can’t sustain consciousness. Is that violence? Who knows?
- Perhaps someone neglected to mention to Congress that the United States government itself funds a violent video game, America’s Army. Perhaps the Army should be denied the R&D tax credit too. It has been 38 years since Death Race and we’re still fighting this stupidity from the black lagoon. This has to be one of the longest moral panics on record. It flies in the face of all the evidence, and is one of the reasons we need the IGDA more than ever.
- And this is another one. This map shows the active chapters in the IGDA—and doesn’t even include emerging chapters or academic ones. There are chapters in 12% of the world’s countries, and a larger percentage if you think in terms of population. When I founded the IGDA I thought we might have one in the Bay Area, and Los Angeles, and maybe Boston. I never thought I would see anything like this.Game development is spreading all over the world and game-playing is spreading all over the world. If you think the moral panics are bad in the USA, wait until one hits China or Russia. The developers in these countries need our help and support. For some of them, we are their only link to the wider game industry. Can you imagine being a game developer in Nigeria or Senegal at the moment? We need to reach out to these people, let them know they’re not crazy, let them know that what the are doing is worthwhile. And this is why it’s important to go on.
- Thank you very much for your time, and for coming to the very end of the conference to see me.