IGDA London restarts with a (socially responsible) bang!

On October 6th, IGDA London had its first event for some time, organised by a new committee and marking the start of a new series of events for the London game development community.

Held in a spacious pub room, near the building site that is Kings Cross station, it was well attended by around 60 people from many different game companies, academics and some looking to break into the industry.

IGDA London Coordinator (and Climax game designer) Emmeline Dobson ably introduced the evening along with fellow event organiser Dean Butcher, thanking everyone for presence and encouraging them to get involved in future events by providing feedback and ideas.

The main event of the evening was a panel discussion on "Violence and Social Responsibility" but first up was a technology demonstration of Climax London's City Editor, presented by environment artist Adam Ecos and operated live on the night by tools programmer Tom Kuhn. The short (but slick) demo showed how to construct a small town quickly and easily by placing road junctions, connecting them with spline-based roads, placing buildings and automatically filling the gaps with customisable 'stitching'. Detail was added by positioning 'street furniture' such as trees and lampposts on a road segment and automatically repeating it along the whole road's length.

Adam explained that a key advantage of the Editor is that roads, buildings and the height of the terrain can be changed at any time, and the Editor automatically adjusts the city to fill gaps, even creating building foundations when required. Lighting and shadows were added to the example town, showing how shadows could be cast across the roads, stitching and even onto other buildings. In the Climax City Editor, lighting is vertex-based rather than using lightmap textures, so precise shadows are created by intelligently adding new vertices to the geometry of the city, allowing detail to be placed exactly where it is needed.

After the demo, questions were taken from the floor - with one very interested attendee asking several questions concerning automatic placement of AI paths along roads and using spline lofting to create terraced housing. Adam and Tom explained that both were possible in the City Editor, showing them on-screen.

Overall, attendees seemed very impressed with the demonstration and Adam and Tom received a warm round of applause at the end, also hearing comments afterwards such as "is that really just an internal tool" and "how can I license it?"

After a short break for refreshment, the main event of the evening started. On the panel were Simon Byron (Director, Barrington Harvey Public Relations), Rob Fahey (Writer / Editor, gamesindustry.biz), Rhianna Pratchett (Freelance Writer), Jon Weinbren (Academic / Writer / Designer, Imaginary Productions) and Wayne Imlach (Game Designer, Climax). The panel was chaired and kept in check by the independent voice of non-game industry Technology Convergence Consultant Stephen Jeffrey-Poulter.

After the panel introduced themselves they were put the question "Would you have banned Manhunt?" No-one advocated censorship of games, with Rob Fahey stating "I don't want David Blunket or the Daily Mail (which is the same thing) telling me what games I can play."

Although Fahey also made the point "Why did the industry 'close ranks' to defend it [Manhunt] when its an aberration compared to most games - do you see Stephen Speilberg defending hardcore porn films?".

Stephen Jeffrey-Poulter, Rhianna Pratchett, Simon Byron, Rob Fahey, Jon Weinbren and Wayne Imlach

A question from the floor was "Would YOU have made Manhunt?" No, said the panel, with the consensus being that it was actually a pretty rubbish game with a crunchy layer of ultra-violence slapped on top. Rob Fahey claimed that Manhunt set out to deliberately be shocking because the game itself wasn't good. Simon Byron disagreed, saying "Remember when the original GTA was publicised by Max Clifford? That set out to be shocking, and succeeded." He argued that if they'd set out to be shocking this time, it would have been much worse. Games PR has moved on from sending around packages of offal to journalists to get their attention, fortunately.

Panellists raised the point that the issue of violent games is more contentious in USA because they don't have 18-rated, legally enforceable ratings. Fahey's view was that "the rating system in the UK is great although it's not actually enforced, has there ever been a single conviction? [for selling games to minors.]" Manhunt was mainly banned in Australia because they didn't have an enforceable rating system and so couldn't restrict it to adults. Rhianna Pratchett pointed out that the voluntary PEGI rating system in Europe was useful but not that accurate - both 'The Sims' and 'Far Cry' have a 'violence' advisory on their PEGI rating, even thought the level of violence in each games are hugely different.

Jon Weinbren argued that Manhunt and other violent games aren't really "adult" because they don't show violence in an adult way - the human reaction/consequences aren't shown. "Manhunt isn't actually realistic at all; it's far too clean..." Also the story telling/writing in Manhunt is not adult at all but "could have been written by a 9 year old". AI was too basic currently to tell an adult story - putting a gun in a game characters hand and attacking the player was "easy, easy" compared to writing more meaningful interactions.

Wayne Imlach highlighted that whilst game designers want to put more meaningful story/interactions in, they can be cut out because of time/budgetary constraints in the production process.

Another question from the audience was "Why did Daily Mail attack Manhunt?" The answer from the panel was mainly that "it was a slow news day", basically and they thought it was an easy target. The Mail was interested just in sales but it shows a common misconception that 'games are just for kids'. The problem is that other media pick up on the story and run with it. For example, next week there is a story on "Tonight with Trevor Macdonald" about violent games - although this is "The Daily Mail of TV" according to Simon Byron.

On the topic of Social Responsibility, a big issue is educating parents about the nature of games, games now span "the gamut of humanity from 3-50" (or do they, argued other panellists). ELSPA and others are looking at how to do this - possibly through schools. Fahey and Byron managed to agree (for once) that the games industry should seek to inform parents that while there are plenty of games appropriate for their kids, some are not, and in the same way that they shouldn't let the kids use the internet unattended/unfiltered, or go to see any film they like at the cinema, they should be aware of what game their kids are playing and not just give them a bundle of cash and pack them off to GAME, then not look at what they've bought. A PS2 is not a substitute for parenting.

Simon Byron brought his stats with him (well, actually he left them on the train but fortunately had committed them to memory) and informed us that only a few percent of the 1200+ games released in the UK each year have an 18 rating, and 17% of games have the 3+rating. Only 8% of game sales in the UK are from 'mature rated' games. Average age of ownership of a PC is 27 and of a console is 22, so a large proportion of the market is over 18.

The panel's discussion of the complex issues of Violence and Social Responsibility were both thought-provoking and entertaining, and after running out of time panel was brought to a close with well deserved applause from the audience.

After the panel many of the attendees and panellists stayed to chat further and enjoy the odd beer as well, before heading into the night and to the dubious care of London Transport. Flyers were also available with directions to the nearby Joystick Junkies club night running in parallel, with free entry for IDGA London attendees.

The opinions expressed by the panellists do not necessarily represent the opinions of their respective companies.
IGDA's position on game censorship can be found at http://www.igda.org/censorship/.