E-games - the 'Fury' and the spin

This is utter rubbish. This spin started with various highly enthusiastic submissions to a 2004 Senate Committee examining Australia’s entertainment industry. Budding journalists should use chapter three “Australia’s electronic game industry; size scale and benefits”, as an exercise in debunking dodgy statistics.

According to The Financial Review, Australian Associated Press as well as toy and hobby trade magazines, the total figure of online gamers in Australia is about 200,000 with only 50-70,000 playing at anyone time (higher logons at night). There is a very high attrition rate as the “novelty factor” quickly wears thin, especially among young women. Females make up less than 10 per cent of players. The average age of male players is 19.

That’s not to say that Australian women aren’t playing on-line games. They are, but 90 per cent of them seem to have better things to do. One qualitative survey is particularly bad news for the guys fighting the eternal fight against all things fang-like. Four-hundred young women in the 18-24 age range say guys who play on-line games are “dorks”, “nerds” and “probably need to get a life”.

Women can be so cruel.

The Australian e-games industry claims to be bigger than the Australian film industry. That wouldn’t be hard. The future of our film industry is riding on the back of Baz Luhrmann’s film Australia, made with international backing.

Many online game producers, supported by some large and notable universities of technology (who have especially developed full fee digital games design programs) are lobbying the Federal Government for more money.

Yet as a taxpayer, am I alone in my objections to spending money on projects that should be funded by the private sector? Government funding of online games with their adolescent fascination with slaying monsters or the combat genre, come very low on the agenda after infrastructure development, renewable power generation, massive water conservation projects, building more hospitals and educating school children.

Here’s the legal objection. If the government uses my tax dollars to give the games industry a 30-40 per cent rebate, then the government should seek a share or a dividend from the investment. In short, I would expect the intellectual property to be, in part, owned by the government.

The electronic games industry won’t like to hear that, nor will those universities who have been so vociferous in advocating their games development programs to every kid who has dabbled with Director and/or Flash.

Game Developers Association of Australia president Tom Crago used the launch of Fury to do some pro-games spin.

"We saw it at the last federal budget - a great sweep of initiatives announced for the local film and television industry … We're extremely disappointed that the Federal Government chose not to extend those same initiatives to this other great aspect of our screen culture - video games,” Mr Crago said.

Mr Crago has a point. I’d rather watch wheat grow or read Hansard than watch Australian TV drama (Love My Way being the exception).