Establishing a Perimeter

Well, to be clear, that's not really my area, but that being said, there is a lot of opportunity. We have a lot of examples of governments leveraging games and game technology. Most of the examples I have are American. In the US, the Whitehouse not so long ago had apps for health contest, where they were looking for health related apps and games, that was a big success.

As a counter example, there was a group called A Force More Powerful. This was an activist group which is trying to thwart oppressive regimes around the world. They released a game called A Force More Powerful to help "train" the civilians of countries in, essentially, how to have a coup - to overtake the government in a peaceful way.

The game almost looks like Syndicate, an isometric city with groups of people walking the streets and you have different ways to connect with civilians, having rallies and sit ins, putting posters up, identifying regimes and their centres of power and so on. They released the game online and for free. So that's sort of an anti-government game. There are more and more examples of games being used in these propaganda senses, be it good or bad propaganda.

I've seen other governments using games for their own purposes, I guess the biggest example is America's Army.

It'd be great to have actual numbers to validate that. Where they can track job creation and retention, they can track which games have come out, how many deals have been made over the years at the conference - it'd be great if they had those kind of metrics. They might have some of them, enough to say "the Nordic region invested X number of Euro over that timespan, and here's the effect it had, here's the impact we can calculate." Maybe in some cases very direct, maybe in some cases indirect. I don't have those numbers, so I can't say what the percentage is on ROI.

The assumption is that these kind of support programs generally have a positive impact. I wouldn't be doing what I'm doing if I didn't assume that by default it was a good thing for governments to do. But it's hard to measure. Oftentimes it's hard to put a dollar amount on things. In terms of doing a program that then creates an environment for entrepreneurialism.

You're investing in the people, maybe you're creating an environment where that person can have a failure too. So maybe on paper the first one or two goes don't go so great. But then that individual who you've supported via that program, that's someone who's really learned a lot, the hard way, but now on their third chance for example, they're able to succeed. These things are intangible. Maybe I invest in you, but you inspire some students to stay in the country and not fly off to Australia or Canada or whatever, that has a trickle on effect.

But yeah, this sort of governmental development work, the government assumes by default that poking and incentivising and catalysing has value. I think what's particularly interesting about the game industry is the sense that it's part of this creative industry, digital and knowledge economy - all those buzz words that everybody, particularly government, is interested in. In most cases it's net exports. That's not true for the US or Japan, but in most cases it's new dollars from the outside coming in, that's always nice from an economic point of view.

Generally speaking it's also a low ecological footprint. It's not like we're an oil refinery or a mining operation coming to town, razing your forests or putting stuff out in the ocean. From an eco point of view, it's a couple of guys with laptops in a warehouse.

Also, vis-à-vis the film industry, which many governments do a lot more to support, is something that is often much more transient. So you may have a tax-break or a funding support scheme, but the team will show up for a month to do their shooting, then they pack up and go. Some regions got burned with that. There was no left over. The crew would come, be totally self contained, film in a box. They'd spend money, people had to eat and stay in hotels and whatnot, but there was no spillover, no knock-on. When those teams left there was nothing to start building an endemic industry from.

The game industry, for the most part, means you're all sitting in a room and living in one place. You're not saying, let's do a casual game in Poland, then an iOS game in Australia. You don't have that sort of nomadic, transient nature. That's another reason governments are interested.