Video Game Advocacy

Gamasutra is running a feature on Doug Lowenstein's swan song speech for the Entertainment Software Association at the D.I.C.E. summit, in which he criticises game developers for not defending their creative rights.

Personally I think this comment from one of the conference delegates hits the nail on the head,


"While censorship and game content have long been recurring discussions, I see them merely as a distraction to a larger issue. The issue is for game developers to take more control over how their work reaches the public. For two decades, the game development community has continued to allow proprietary hardware manufacturers to dictate the marketplace. The history of this transformation could fill a book. But the fact is that the circumstances that made this arrangement so necessary and successful no longer exist. Today interactive content is far more important than the hardware. But the games industry has continued to allow Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony to call the shots.

The game business is always looking for parallels to Hollywood. As frequently as possible it is pointed out that the video game business grosses more money than Hollywood. But Hollywood never would have become Hollywood if the manufacturers of movie projectors took 40% of the movie business’ revenue. It sounds silly, but there is your parallel. Even sillier, imagine movie projector manufacturers dictated what could be shown on their projectors. That’s censorship!

Anyone can make a video or movie that is easily disseminated to the general public. Any musician can create content for everyone to hear. Certainly writers have no trouble reaching their audience. But the most talented artists in the world have been divided and conquered by a few hardware manufacturers.

Even more important to the development community than their fight against censorship should be the fight to distribute their work on an open platform; a platform that allows developers to be rewarded for their effort, and not destroyed for their failures. This is a realistic goal that everyone in the game development community should be working towards.

-Eli Tomlinson, Gamix"