Too Cool for School?

2008 is National Year of Reading in the UK. At the press-packed launch earlier this month, Prime Minister Gordon Brown and Children's Secretary Ed Balls were baring teeth for the cameras, bleating about the brilliance of books as if this were some stunning new discovery. On the benefit of reading, Brown said: "It's probably one of the best anti-poverty, anti-deprivation, anti-crime, anti-vandalism policies you can think of." Astonishing. All those billions frittered away on public services and trousered by management consultants, when all along Utopia was just down the road next to Waterstones.

Balls added: "Out of school, children are using the internet and computers, but too often they are playing games and not reading." And here's where it gets worrying for the games industry. New Labour swept to power in 1997 on a promise that — in Tony Blair's infamous rallying cry - "education, education, education" was Priority Number One. Over a decade later, and despite the best attempts of the contentious rise in GCSE and A-level grades to cover it up, Britain's schools appear to be churning out more and more dribbling idiots by the day.

Since 1997, class sizes have fallen, new schools have been built with 35,000 more teachers (and 172,000 more assistants) employed, and investment per pupil has risen massively. Nevertheless, last year 40 per cent of 7-11 year-olds in UK schools fell short of the most basic standards expected for reading, writing and maths. Meanwhile, the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study reported last November that the UK had plummeted from third place to 19th out of 40 countries in its five-yearly survey. And the Programme for International Student Assessment (which tracks 400,000 spotty 15 year-olds from OECD countries, in case you were wondering) revealed that Brit kids' performance in reading, maths and science has nosedived since 2000.

As you might imagine, it's created an awkward situation for a government with increasingly less room for manoeuvre. After an unprecedented ten-year spending spree that would put Victoria Beckham to shame (the biggest rise since 2000 of any western nation as a share of GDP), ministers still seem amazed when problems they've thrown money at mysteriously remain unfixed. And with the economy stalling after years of prosperity, public spending is now being reined in, leaving two options on the education issue: admit that policy has been a staggeringly expensive failure; or pass the buck. The buck (what else?) in this case being passed on to parents (who are not reading enough to children — 15 per cent are never read to, according to Balls) — and on to the ever-malevolent influence of the Satan-worshipping games industry.

No-one's arguing against the importance of encouraging kids to read (even if most wouldn't go quite as far as the daydreaming PM in their praise). But the insinuation is, of course, grotesquely unfair. When not performing its primary function of — ah, I remember — providing escapist amusement, gaming has huge potential as a tool for improvement, as we've seen this month with the release of Buzz! The Schools Quiz and news of a government-supported trial of Wiis used in PE lessons. More on those, later.

A sorry state

The problem, as ever, is ignorance. As it happens, the Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families — from a staunchly socialist, working class family — attended the same school I did. Nottingham High School is an independent, fee-paying boys' secondary. Ed Balls would have first attended during Callaghan's doomed Labour government of the late '70s, and presumably his family faced the same problem as mine did at the fag end of Thatcher's Conservative reign in the late '80s: the local government-run alternatives were just bloody awful. The difference being that while I was at home going square-eyed over imported Japanese Mega Drive games, Balls was, I speculate, swotting up on post-neoclassical endogenous growth theory.

We were both lucky. Many of those forced to attend the worst state schools (standards vary wildly by region) are not. Despite mild parental disapproval, I was allowed to spend obscene amounts of time playing games during my school years. Nevertheless — and while miraculously fighting off clinical obesity and wild, murderous impulses — I went on to study English literature at university and now write this rubbish for a living (who's laughing now, Mum?). Forgive me for stating the bleeding obvious, but literacy has sod all to do with sneakily playing Ghouls 'n' Ghosts until 3am on a school night and considerably more to do with the quality of education (parental included) a child receives. It's not rocket science. It's not even GCSE science, for that matter.

It ought only to require a small step for the debate to shift from vilification to appreciation. But the pervasive ignorance that persists amongst people of a certain age and upbringing means it remains a giant leap. That's why Times columnist and Dummy Mummy Janice Turner, in an article last week entitled 'Xbox is crack for kids', can gleefully write: "I refuse to buy [my children] portable gaming consoles, Xboxes, GameCubes, PS2s. These are Satan's Sudoku, crack cocaine of the brain. Even the crappiest cartoon or lamest soap teaches a child about character, plot, drama, humour, life. Playing videogames, children are mentally imprisoned, wired into their evil creators' brains."

That's why "psychology specialist" (huh?) and author, Cooper Lawrence, can go on Fox News to spout misinformation and psycho-babble on the sexual content of Xbox 360 adventure Mass Effect (watch the full, mesmerising exchange here. Lawrence later confessed to the New York Times that she "misspoke" and, having actually seen the game, admitted "I've seen episodes of Lost that are more sexually explicit."

That's why the Daily Telegraph can reheat a hatchet job on Rockstar's Bully (now back to its original title for the 360 and Wii SKUs, after Rockstar buckled first time around and renamed it Canis Canem Edit). Shamefully, PC World and Currys are refusing to stock it.

And that's also why, going back to where we started, the British Prime Minister can tell Britain's biggest-selling daily tabloid, in an article on youth violence: "I am very worried about video and computer games."

While this is a similar equation to New Labour's buck-passing on literacy, what Brown is really saying here, along with Ed Balls, Fox, Lawrence, the Telegraph and all those other assorted 'experts', is: "We don't understand videogames." Ignorance, with little prompting, quickly becomes fear of the unknown. A throwaway remark from one of the Fox News panellists says it all: "What happened to Atari, and pinball and Pac-Man?"

Censors and sensibility

To its credit, last September the government commissioned the Byron Report to examine in detail violent and sexual content in videogames in part as a result of this institutionalised ignorance. Dr Tanya Byron is due to reveal her findings in March. Meanwhile Rockstar and the BBFC continue to lock antlers over Manhunt 2.

The history of creative media is a history of struggles against censorship and ignorance. Take books, Gordon Brown's great, utilitarian saviour of mankind. The great 20th Century novelist D.H. Lawrence (and another Nottingham High School alumnus) was worm-food long before Lady Chatterley's Lover was published in its original, unexpurgated form in 1960. Its deliberately coarse, sexually explicit language was simply unpublishable in the puritanical US and Britain of 1928. In the wake of the high profile obscenity trial of 1959-60, the publishing industry was liberated. Nowadays it's a set text for students and has been adapted for TV, complete with effing-and-blinding and simulated buggery.

TV, as a technology-driven visual medium, has fought its battles more recently. That a chastened Lawrence (Cooper, not David Herbert) can compare the rant-inducing Mass Effect to Lost speaks volumes. It's a scrap TV has already won. Amusingly, in Fox's haste to clamber onto the soap box it completely missed the 'scandalous' detail of Bioware's title that you can choose to be either a man or a woman. So the sexual encounter can also be a lesbian one. This point was predictably seized upon with relish by the specialist gaming press.

British readers may recall the press hysteria in 1993 surrounding the 'lesbian snog' in ex-soap Brookside — the first time one had been shown before the 9pm watershed, and which helped pave the way for the likes of Queer as Folk, The 'L' Word and, yes, even the dehumanising freak show that is Big Brother. Now even ultra-wholesome Aussie drama Neighbours writes gay tonsil tennis into its scripts (I'm sure it's pure coincidence that pretty young girls are used in both cases). It's a non-issue. Indeed, before it was axed, Brookside's producers even went as far as to tackle incest. I've had my suspicions about Mario and Luigi, but I figure we can live without that for now.

As a relatively young medium whose creative limits have often been determined by the representational limits of technology, then, these issues become front page news now because sex and violence are being depicted 'realistically'.

The path to enlightenment

Assuming the Byron Report goes to plan (a rather large assumption given the current administration's track record with public enquiries), it should establish an authoritative, clear-headed text which can be called upon to defend our industry from the worst excesses of tabloid hysteria, and to educate non-gaming politicians, journalists and parents so that gaming is as easily explicable, comprehensible and manageable a concept as TV, film or literature.

Nintendo has already made great strides in this direction with DS and Wii. If that Fox 'expert' wants to know what happened to Pong, she'd do well to go and watch a family playing Wii Sports tennis. There are few things more easily explicable, comprehensible and manageable than waving a controller around like a tennis racquet.

It's a classic example of governmental joined-up thinking when, on the one hand, the Department of Health backs a scheme in Worcestershire where Wii is being used as a fitness aid in schools for indolent, lard-arsed teenagers, while on the other, the Schools Minister slams games for turning our children into slack-jawed morons. Meanwhile, Buzz! The Schools Quiz, produced in association with the Department for Education and Skills, is helping that offending 40 per cent of educationally sub-normal 7-11 year-olds get through Key Stage 2 in a fun, engaging and interactive way.

Games as part of the curriculum are nothing new. British primary school children from the late '60s onwards have been routinely exposed to the BBC's cheesy Look and Read series, designed to improve child literacy. With the advent of the BBC Micro computer in the '80s, simplistic tie-in software was developed to supplement dramas like Geordie Racer (for an arresting dose of nostalgia, compare the original show intro with the game. And we practically fought to get on the machine to play it.

The BBC Micro was created as an educational tool for schools (it was also my first ever games system — my parents, bless them, thought it would be more edifying than a Spectrum or C64). It now works the other way, and innovations in gaming are being adopted by clued-up teachers. The devices used for Buzz! and Wii are so simple even the most tremulous Luddite will feel in control in seconds. And PSPs, again with government backing, are being rolled out into secondary schools for teachers to harness their multimedia capabilities to improve lessons. Critically, kids are already enjoying these devices at home, with each other and, often for the first time, with their parents. Think of the impact WiiFit could have when it comes out later this year.

The goal of these initiatives, from our side of the fence at least, is simply to normalise gaming as part of the daily routine of the average family. Only then can we start to expect saner, more responsible views from our politicians.

To link gaming with falling standards in literacy is absurd, disingenuous and damaging. Gaming fuelled my imagination as a child, exposing me to the creative riches of different cultures, its fantastical worlds even serving as a springboard to pre-pubescent creative writing (although the less said about my teenage Street Fighter fan fiction the better). And it never stopped me reading. Moreover, who's to say games based on books don't send consumers in the other direction as well? Surely games based on Harry Potter, The Chronicles of Narnia and His Dark Materials are also driving children to pick up the books on which they are based?

Parents don't need official guidance on timetabling their kids' precious extra-curricular hours. They need good schools and inspirational teachers to supplement their own nurturing. And as for the bad parents, call me a cynic, but a few harebrained, patronising schemes are unlikely, I suspect, to effect a Damascene conversion the length and breadth of society.

It's time to let children be children, Mr Brown. You could learn a lot from them.