My name is dr. Tom Phillips I’m a lecturer in humanities at UVA and what I’m going to be talking to you today is not so much about games themselves we taught Dean’s really interesting talk earlier where he talked about a blood-borne and who’s very specifically Looking at the game text and and how the game works and how you go about playing the game I’m not going to do that what I’m interested in is it’s not so much talking about games but it’s about talking about how games are talked about I’m interested in what it means when we Say we value games and I’m interested in what that value is so the things I’m going to look at today in this in this short talk is well what is valued in games what kind of things do we value in games how is that value articulated and What does such notions of value mean for how people make games because a lot of the work I do involves talking to developers and seeing how games actually get made and the kinds of the kinds of issues that people have to deal with and so what I’m going to dealing with first Of all I’m going to talk a little bit about Minecraft and talk about how it can be exemplary of many of the kinds of value that that we see going on within the contemporary contemporary games industry following on from that I’m then going to talk about the the British Games industry as a whole when thinking about the kinds of issues that people have to think about when they’re getting their games made I’m going to think about quick there we are how are games valued so thinking about the different kinds of ways in which people think about games and talk about their Inherent value and finally I’m going to kind of associate these notions of value with a sense of kind of Britishness or British identity how valuable are games the hell valuable are they to a notion of British culture so the first of all kind of talk about Minecraft I mean what Am I going to say about but that kind of hasn’t already said I’m just going to go here’s my quick let’s not working so I’m pretty confident that a lot of people in here no of Minecraft what does anybody want to dare to raise their hands if they’d never heard of Minecraft no okay I think we’re all safe um and so some of these P facts that I’ve got here this is stuff we already know you know it was released five years ago you can get it on pretty much any system and I think most most kind of Importantly its sales figures kind of very much illustrate how important it is to everyday culture it is the third biggest selling game of all time as all the last June I think what the figures that’s published uh the to the Peter L the best Ellingham Hall times have you Know the best thing going all time no nobody sports is the second and that’s cheating as well because we Sports is the second biggest selling going all time and it was packaged with the week so hungry camp and in Tetris is the number one um I’m not had a 30-year your Head son on minecraft so we’re ready to kind of get up there in that sort and it’s it’s it’s probably going to overtake certainly at least when sports in the next in a kind of the next few months I’d imagine but it’s very very kind of its kind of hitting our culture Quite quite strikingly and as a result um academics have started to take an interest in it so again kind of in Dean’s talk this morning he very much looked at kind of academic ways of thinking and talking about games and minecraft is no exception this is a book that was released last year Understanding minecraft as a whole book full of different essays on the minecraft phenomenon and on the first page make ours who wrote the book of all get edited the book so that my craft has engaged the popular imagination so profoundly that it has transformed video game culture now that’s not an idle Statement to say that it’s completely trans or a culture I’m not just going to give you a sense of the ways in which minecraft are taught there it is talked about that it’s had such a wide reaching impact that it is something which we should be thinking about and thinking About the ways in which it’s talked about so I’m just going to pro talk through a few different examples relating to the game in this first part of the talk and just to show you how different kinds of value can be attributed to the games so first of all We’ve got educational value so minecraft is something which is being used in classrooms to the point where it’s being used so prevalently the minecraft edu a kind of officially supported educational version of the game has been licensed and it’s being available to schools soma sudden you have this sense that ok we Can bring games into the classroom now we can use them to learn we can do all these sorts of interesting things with them and you know you want to do it as well which i think is the interesting point it’s not something that’s being forced upon them it’s something which is Naturally a fein embraced and a dog did in classrooms so one of a sudden we can see my own minecraft being used to kind of illustrate this kind of educational value let me have a sense of economic value as well in 2014 September 2014 Microsoft quite famously called mojang The developers of Minecraft two and a half billion dollars inordinate sums of money you know this is it’s a mind-bogglingly a large amount and yes they bought mojang they bought the studio and everything but it was based on that one property was based on the profitability of minecraft that you had This one guy notch who developed the game from scratch it was his baby and he kind of made everything and he had this one idea for this game and all of a sudden a few years later is translated into two and a half billion dollars solver some people said all hang on Games today he can make us a lot of money as well so they can be educational and they can also make us lots of money which those two things aren’t this has ever seen as being paid focus we have an idea of culture value as well so this is maybe recognize This building at all from London you recognize it it is it’s the British Museum in London absolutely right and so there’s been projects to kind of recreate spaces such as the British Museum there’s also been at the Tate craft project which is actually taking works of art from the taped and building Them in Minecraft so you can kind of explore the I’ll work itself and then there’s a sense that actually minecraft itself is a form of art so in that understanding minecraft book Michael Sinclair says oh it works as a radical gesture in sculpture performance installation art so minecraft itself is This kind of artistic products all of a sudden has these kind of high cultural values that we can associate it with museums and art galleries and things that video games aren’t typically associated with on a grand scale we also think about conical wide-reaching cultural impact that minecraft has I Mean you see the merchandise absolutely everywhere and then imagine most people walk around the Gator Fest all you would have seen my chosen one crafty shirt right there you know merchandise it’s absolutely everywhere Minecon is their kind of the big convention you got intertextuality do mention that word Into text reality of texts referring to other text so you can get Simpsons minecraft skins you can get Skyrim my pants games Marvel superheroes the list goes on and on and on minecraft and let go and so it’s just so kind of cultural you big quetta seeeeee that we see it Kind of absolutely everywhere and because of this so we’ve got cultural value economic value educational value cultural ubiquity as a result we start to see it used in very different ways we start to see mine craft itself used as a kind of a unmarked a team to a short Hand tool just to reference all these types of value in other spheres so we’ve got here this is Boris Johnson the Mayor of London um and he announced or he was part of the announcement the London Games Festival which has happen in a few days time actually and As part of the kind of the launch video for that he appeared as a minecraft yeah and kind of walked around a little minecraft London world and talked all about things to do with games he clearly didn’t have a clue what he was saying he was cleaning just kind of reading off The script um but it was interesting that they chose minecraft to to illustrate the games festival in this way because it has all these connotations that all of a sudden we can see okay well Boris Johnson in Minecraft there a minecraft is good right where’s our educational value it’s got cultural Value but then other people can see well all the investors and said watching minecraft makes a lot of money as well so there might be sought ways to make money at the London Games Festival Oh so we see which fun of a game like minecraft which is pretty I’m not going To say it’s completely unique but it’s pretty striking the fact that it ticks all those different boxes and it can we can ascribe all these different kinds of value to it but it’s pretty telling that they decided to use minecraft all that um yeah as a political tool what’s being Used in a kind of a political way that Boris Johnson can take this and use it for his own kind of is agricultural cultural cachet if you were um so why is this important then why are we thinking about the the ways in which kind of Games can be valued I’m going to go there in a what is initially going to seem like a really boring direction and all I ask is that you bear with me on this um I’m gonna talk about tax breaks now i am a film and media studies Scholar I my fun of my background and my training is in watching films and analyzing films and thinking about and talk about them I never thought I would be here talking about tax relief but here I am and when we’re in this together now so you’re just gonna have To bear with you and it will all make sense in a little while so in 2014 the government managed to push through tax relief for games developers and basically what that means is that British games companies could claim back some money that they’ve spent so for example for Every million pounds that was spent on a game they could claim back twenty percent of us so they would get 200,000 pounds back in their pocket so it can be kind of applied in all sorts of ways i’ll talk a little bit about how that gets applied but basically it’s the idea That if people are making games in this country and fulfilling certain criteria then all of a sudden they can get money back so it pays to make games here in britain and why that’s important is because when politicians and trade bodies were trying to push the room this Tax relief they started talking about the games industry and they started using particular kinds of language particular ways of describing working practices to try and get this tax relief put through and i thought it was really interesting starting to look at some of these things and see well why is it that Ed Vaizey the Minister for culture talks about games in this way and so he talked about but it’s encouraging to see that companies benefit from the tax relief represent a mix of organizations from across the UK furthering the creation of jobs and skills development in the industry so he’s talking about kind of Creating jobs and getting people working which is kind of interesting cuz that’s not necessarily the thing we instantly think about when we think about we then have different trade bodies and advisory groups people who have kind of a stake in the games industry being successful so people who want to see the games Industry thrive and so we talk about a tiger who are the independent games developers association talk about employment in the sector falling and they want to kind of create more jobs Nestor there’s a chance or body talk about making net returns and bringing in foreign investors to to the country Yuki Who are the trader than up on trade body in the UK talk about describing yourself a deck tree full of history a nation for the history quirks and loveliness and being something about kind of a British now creating games have a particular kind of British feel to them and then we have The people who make the games themselves so we’ve got a merge la from bata who talks about on a cultural heritage in storytelling and gameplay and Harvey Ellen and elliot from marmalade talks about British people creating exciting and innovative content Giselle Stewart talked about kind of culturally unique Content and so we’ve got here politicians trade bodies game developers all talking about the same industry they’re all talking about the same thing and they’re all talking in relation to this tax break idea but they were talking about kind of different ideas so we’ve got ideas about kind of creating Jobs regardez our skills development boosting the economy being competitive on an international scale and then also something about cultural specificities of creating something particularly British and that’s kind of interesting to me because what if we were to think about just kind of the games themselves We might be able to kind of I analyze different narrative forms in the game or different ways of playing games or what they need to us now should we start to look outside the game starts look at the context in which the games are produced or spoken about we start to see actually The games industry isn’t just about creating games it’s about kind of being something more being something bigger than just an industry it’s about being something kind of globally competitive it’s about something saying something about Britain and what it means to be British and what British content actually means and I think that’s kind Of interesting just to kind of take that step back and have a look at the way which people talk about the industry so back to tax breaks my clicker works earlier um how do people get tax breaks so there’s different kind of criteria that people that people can use to get These tax rate so they have to have content that is supposedly done by that features kind of people it features British characters features British locations features something within the game that is notably British it was asked to have a cultural contribution so it has to say something about our culture can almost Get back to culture in some way it has to be made in particular places it has to be made fifty percent in Britain itself and has to be made by British people as well so there’s all these different criteria that people have to fulfill and so when people are Submitting their game to be able to get money to put their tax breaks they have to kind of go through this big form and say yeah I do this I do this I do this and there’s a total of 31 points and I need to get 16 out of those 31 to be Eligible for the tax breaks and so we’ve got then we’ve got the what the game is we’ve got where it is made we’ve got who made it but something is a little bit of this one cultural contribution and what does that actually mean what does that actually mean for something to Contribute back to culture that’s its kind of nebulous we what do we actually mean when something kind of has cultural value how do we said that something is valuable to culture or not what criteria do be used and part of the problem is that the people who make the decisions On this haven’t actually told us so when we think about what it means to be British or what does a British game have to involve will have to feature to be able to kind of contribute to culture we’re not sure we’re not sure what that actually means um so there’s a couple of Issues wrong that I kind of see with with kind of assessing value for a particular game so firstly that there’s there’s no sense that a game has to contribute in every category so it only has to get 16 points so it could not make a cultural contribution at all and still be deemed As British or it could not actually be made in Britain but if it qualifies through these other things then it would get the points um and so secondly the idea is that all of this is all the decisions about this are made by somebody so there is no kind of strict Checklist that says okay to be British you have to do this this this this and this it’s the decision is made by somebody you know in a room and they they look at the form and they look at the application and they say oh yeah okay I agree with that I don’t agree With that and that’s kind of a problem when you it’s all up to one person there’s no kind of strict guidelines as to what constitutes Britishness or British content within a particular game um so that makes it difficult when we start to think about kind of cultural Specificity when we start to think about kind of games giving back to British culture in some way so you keep said this so this was in an interview when the tax break scrub God got released this is Joe twist who’s the CEO of UK say well actually no you don’t need to Fill games with cliches use of Brittany no cups of tea and Spitfires and anything else you know that’s kind of quirky British actually the cultural test has we designed to be kind of flexible to recognize a broader sense and what it needs to be British and perhaps actually European we can think About kind of games kind of fulfilling some kind of European criteria as well and so what we can kind of recognize from this is that cultural value kind of the engagement and impact of arts and culture reflecting something bad about Britishness it’s not necessarily prioritized it starts to suggest Although we can kind of think about the meaning of culture it’s used as a bargaining chip is kind of called into question and we see the way in which kind of ideas of culture are being sold to us so oh look okay well we make British stuff we’ve got Some kind of traditionally British iconography here so we’ve got a bowler hat we’ve got the flag we’ve got you know a royal worm we’ve got a soldier as well and so there’s all these kind of competing ideas going around so on the one hand yeah we want to celebrate kind Of Britishness and explicit Britishness but on the other hand we don’t wanna venture too far into there because then that kind of kitchen holds us and that someone um and we can see this when we start to think about the games that do actually qualify as British um so again Like GTA 5 for example qualifies based on the fact that it was made in scotland by rockstar north so a number so it was made in scotland a number of the people are from there are from the UK it is in the english language but we might argue That GTA 5 is not necessarily reflective of British culture we might more readily associate it with American culture for example the same with batman arkham city made by rocksteady studios in cambridge i think again it qualifies as a British game because it was made in the UK and It was done by UK star but yeah how many of us think about Batman as being a British text and so it’s it’s all of a sudden we can start to see this kind of disparate if your time between wanting to kind of promote people making games In this country and also what does it actually mean to be British what does our culture actually mean in the report kind of commissioned by yuki last year they said that games like Grand Theft Auto there’s an unambiguous significant engagement with British cultural produce around the world um I would argue Against though so it is kind of ambiguous because do we can we actually play GTA as British and it happens like there’s similar kind of arguments are because there’s a similar attacks break initiative with films and Harry Potter qualifies as British because of a lot of those criteria it was filmed here British Actors based on the british salt tax but where does the money come from the money comes from America so then can we really say is a British production and so again once you start to kind of look beyond the text itself and look at who’s making The game and why they’re making the game and where they’re making it all these other kinds of issues start to come to the fore um and so I think one last thing I just want to kind of touch on is well who is who does this affect does it Affect the people kind of making the games so I did some interviews with some developers talking about various different issues and one of the things that came up with this idea of a kind of business versus art games developers want to make art they want to create Things whereas on the other hand you’ve got this sense that you need to kind of have a good sense of business management if you want to make money you want to make your two and a half billion dollars you need to kind of have a sharp sharp Mind on your shoulders so one developer said birth art is about creative expression business is about making money another developer said but really creative people people who really love games are sometimes the people who are the most uninterested in the business side and I think we see this tension Throughout particularly when it comes to valuing games on the one hand we have a sense that games are really important to our culture because they create jobs and they created skills and they make us money but on the other hand what do they actually say as an artistic product and There’s these kind of business versus art is competing this course is going on all the time and I think it raises some interesting questions I think the first question is well how should we decide what is valuable about games what do we actually mean when a game is valuable to Us secondly what does a cultural contribution actually consist of what does it mean for a game a book a film a TV show too to culture in some way and finally who was actually responsible for leading the direction of a creative sector is it the People that make the games or is it the people that make the policy or make the money and I think that kind of raises interesting questions um so yeah I just think I wanted to show you with this talk just what happens when you just kind of pull back the curtain a little Bit and look at the the the context around how your favorite games get made so yes it’s really important and valuable to look at the game tapes themselves and what games can do but i think it’s equally as important to look at who makes games why they make them And what kind of environment is all those games released into so that’s it thank you very much yeah Liam the tax rates over the games industry in Britain reflects a very 20th century view of nations and cultural identity as national body that’s perhaps not reflective of the you of the 21st Century in the Internet age okay I’ll just repeat the question just for them for my so is about whether this idea of tax relief and an idea of what the nation is is a kind of a twentieth-century idea as opposed to kind of a more globalized view the 21st Century um and yes I think it is and I think that’s kind of where the tension comes from because the tax breaks do favor and they’re heavily weighted in favor of where the game is made who is making it and kind of what’s inside the game and that kind of cultural Contribution is less waited I think and it kind of goes to demonstrate actually you know people can do move around and people can you know don’t have to necessarily live where they bought up and things cane things can change and so I think the idea of a game being British I think this actually kind of does compensate for that I think it’s I think the structure of tax breaks is kind of a and what it means to be kind of British is kind of antiquated but I think it does allow for a more flexible definition of what Britishness actually Means on that note on the idea of the flexibility of the nation construct I think it’s really interesting actually I guess how that how’s the viewing position because it’s part of the whiteness course I guess to the commodification of a culture or how culture secretaries will want to say Things like ah intrinsic value versus market value and stuff like this and stuff which think I’m going to be prom with where it’s trying to create the nebulous thing written which doesn’t exist which never existed which is just a place or an idea it’s a national community and they’re trying to frame it Into something that is also saleable commodity in the commodity forum is what they’re using to try and patch these things together the quarry form is a fairly flexible material then now max payne is british and then now we have this idea or via live games games are Great now a game game is like gave to the army like because they’re the commercially simple commercially realizable kind of art form as opposed to so they’re doing a great cultural gesture they’re great installation I accept the fact that they’re not thankfully gestures performance art or installation art which is hard to modify And harder to sell because it’s it’s impairment structures and it’s hard to relocate so I think yeah it’s kind of just they seemed like a great sort of illustration of the way in which culture is being reduced to to change changeable commodity for and the way that it’s like Being used as kind of a poster child for the current government is so it took me greatly concerned and silicon roundabout a little like himself yeah this very much like oh we can stop at all so the way they talk about like sort of job creation the focusing only kind of Concrete generative potential in games is interesting where it’s got we’re is like we’re currently cutting excising all the kind of armature of the states and getting rid of the physical infrastructure in this country in relocating that elsewhere but we are creating this ethereal superimpose virtual set of structures and industries Which will keep written great and we’re going to use that word great because because we’re nationalists a normal but yeah it’s a so the question about kind of government involvement in and they’re kind of commodification their packaging of this idea yeah actually right I think the interesting thing about kind of Government governmental involvement in this is that larger gestures that they make like a daisy coming in and kind of talking about these fun things it happens after the success of game so it happens after kind of games has been proven to be to be kind of a commodity That can be sold and can be exploited a lack of a better term and so I think yeah we need to talk about kind of political involvement it is a very canny political move for them to kind of back this winning horse because games is gains archive only going to grow its the Bubble it’s not gonna burst anytime soon so they’re kind of kind of pitching their pitching a hitch into this wagon rather than necessarily its kind of saying well actually there’s a set there’s an interesting sector that’s not being talked about let’s go and help these people here now actually saying oh Look that’s on the rise let’s let’s kind of piggyback on that and kind of you know and then we look better because we are producing jobs and we’re bringing in money and we’re making the country look better on a grander global scale it’s also interesting that firm of anybody Had seen the Boris Johnson video that accompany this image talking back under the London Games Festival if you to watch it if you were just kind of you know and everyday consumer a fan of games that video is super boring because all these talking about is money and Money money’s you know there’s made these big valuations of billions out of how the blocks within the kind of minecraft london and it’s all about well if you come here look at how much money you can make good how much money using this industry look how look how Prosperous it can make you and I think that’s where it kind of the danger between this kind of business versus art comes in because all of us I think there’s maybe a fear on the part of some developers who think that well actually if people going to start to see this as A cash cow to be exploited other people who you know we’re going to start to see kind of more clones of games for example we’re going to see the people getting their IP ripped off whereas actually what we want to do is just make the games with being making but wellness and You see people wanting to kind of inject money in there and that kind of sounds the pot some was so there is I think a fear a bit of attention from the from the attention that kind of the games industry has been getting interesting is I think it’s kind of honest from my talk to your talk two different ends of the spectrum and then we’ve got the end which one is about preservation and at some point in that mary says they lose interest and i wondered if it came back to that the First of your conclusions where that value judgment changes with you value changes and why i mean i think it ought to come back to the thing i was just saying to merlin about pitching pitching sister riding the coattails of something that’s successful because it seems that The way and I mean using minecraft as a great example for kind of Big Dipper this talk is that they’re using it to say that games can do all these great things but they’re using minecraft specifically because it has that educational value that cultural value that economic value but it’s not British In any way shape or form so they’re talking about the kind of the British a brand British cultural identity but using a property that there isn’t necessarily British and so I think it’s about that kind of beginning stage backing the things that backing winning horses and backing the things that are Going to do well and then yeah they may lose interest once it stops making money once it stops being important if we ever get to a time where kids stop playing Minecraft or anything like that I don’t think it’s gonna happen anytime soon but the government i’m going to use Minecraft to promote themselves anymore they’re going to use whatever the new trend is and so yeah I honestly think it’s just about kind of picking the properties that are off properties and kind of riding the coattails there more questions or won’t be good alright yeah thank you very much you Video Information
This video, titled ‘UEA Presents: How Minecraft Shows Us Games Are Important, Dr Tom Phillips’, was uploaded by Norwich Games Festival on 2016-05-24 16:03:02. It has garnered 348 views and 5 likes. The duration of the video is 00:33:07 or 1987 seconds.
What value do games have to everyday life? Can they tell us something about culture, politics, or the economy? Focusing on Minecraft, this talk will look at how one game can be used to start making sense of the world in which we live.
From the billion-dollar purchase of Mojang, to the display of Minecraft-inspired art in art galleries, this talk will examine the way the game has crept into our culture, and how the Minecraft phenomenon demonstrates the importance of games to everyday life.
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