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MIDLANDS FOCUS | BETA
table and asked, in three years time where should we put our resources? What game should we make? No one would know. So if I’m a venture capitalist guy, and someone asks me for £50,000-to-£1 million, it’s like ‘I don’t know’ and I live and breathe computer games. It’s so hard for them because they just haven’t got the level of expertise and level of knowledge that we’ve got, and we don’t even know.
MacDonald: The thing we don’t want to be like is the UK film industry. They have got used to the idea of huge public subsidy, and to what effect? I saw a stat the other day where around a hundred films made by the UK film industry last year weren’t released theatrically. You think, why is it put there? Basically it’s a big job creation scheme for that industry. Why do we put up with it? I guess its because MPs like to go to film premieres and hang about that crowd.
Rich Eddy, Codemasters: And gaming still isn’t referenced as a cultural item. Music, films and books are all cultural items; that’s why anyone can go and plug any TV show, and music as well, which is still a commercial product, and that’s why they can promote on the BBC. Games are just a basic commercial white goods product you cannot be seen to be promoting.
Oliver: The cultural tax breaks, they obviously got approved for about a week before the new Government came in, and then got taken away. But they weren’t saying it wasn’t cultural, but saying we need to save some money. Which is a bit short sighted because I think it would have made them more money in the long run. Part of that was because somebody – a big known publisher which I’m not going to name here – didn’t want games to be culturally classified, and went in at the highest levels of government to have that undone.
DEVELOP-ONLINE.NET
As for the skills and the talent available in the Midlands, do you feel particularly well supported? Or is it the same everywhere? Oliver: It’s the same as everywhere in the UK. I know that there is the Livingstone- Hope report, and their number one thing is to get programming back into the national curriculum and I so want that to happen because I do think that is the biggest problem of our industry. And in fact its not just our industry. It’s
going to affect the whole bloody country because everybody needs people to be able to work on computers, and not just work on them, but work under the hood as well.
The thing we don’t want to be like is the
UK film industry. They have got used to the idea of huge public subsidy, and to what effect?
Jamie Macdonald, Codemasters We’re just going to end up not being able
to because we’ve lost it for 15 years and now we can’t even hire the teachers to teach it. Everything’s just broken down so badly now that it’s going to take a hell of a lot to put it back again. There’s a shortage of supply in the UK in general of programmers. I think when it comes to universities,
they’re keen and they want to because they know they’ve got the courses, but they just can’t get the students in and filter out the good ones. People have applied because it’s a games course but they can’t show their talent. There’s no tools for them to, and no starting point. In some ways the Midlands is actually
quite good because you can actually pretty much recruit from anywhere in the country. I
would imagine there are certain parts in the country with extremities that are going to find their catchment area smaller. But the Midlands catchment area is pretty much the whole country.
MacDonald: GamerCamp is a great idea because of the fact that it’s post-graduate only and it teaches some real skills to be used in the industry. It has been a scandal really the amount of money that’s been wasted on undergraduate courses on kids that will never get a job in the industry. In the console world –maybe I’m old fashioned – I like people to have really good first degrees from good universities in computer science, then they can do a gaming course. Let’s not forget that we are competing in a global industry so we have to compete with the best in the world. We can’t do that with people who are not up to it.
Oliver: I was at a talk that Frontier’s David Braben gave and he was saying that he recommends everybody who wants to get into game programming go into a computer science course because you’ll get enough skills and be respected by the games industry. But more than that, you’ll be respected by every other industry. The problem is if you go on a games
programming course, if you get into the games industry well done, but actually your odds probably aren’t that good, and if you don’t, you’re screwed. It’s worth nothing, which is a problem.
MacDonald: But just as a counterpoint, because I know that David and Phillip were talking about this before, let’s not forget that there are other much needed skills in the games industry.
Oliver: Yes, there are, but what I was going to say was that programming is always the
DECEMBER 2011 / JANUARY 2012 | 47
GamerCamp’s Iain Harrison (far left), Birmingham Science Park’s Matthew Hidderley (centre) and Rich Eddy (above) of Codies fame
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