Gary,
there is a good quote from Stuart Cunningham in this post on Propagating Media

What does it say about us when the closure of a footwear factory in Tasmania is an occasion for great lament over the loss of real jobs by ’salt of the earth’ people but 60 layoffs in a games company in Queensland is greeted with a gloating ‘I told you so’?

Cunningham is referring to Auran Games (a Brisbane based games company).The digital economy is not seen as real. Only old style blue collar manufacturing is real. It's the old global/national stuff again.

Pam,
in this symposium abstract of John Banks' The Creative Destruction of Consumer Co-Creation: Auran Games and Fury – A Case Study it is stated that:

Commercial success for Fury relied on harnessing the support of a group of hard-core and passionate gamer consumers. These gamers played Fury as consumers, and they also worked to design the game as producers. Auran Pty. Ltd., a regular company trading for regular profit was at the locus of these co-creative relations as a core part of its business model. Yet it failed.

The symposium was entitled Computer Games, Law, Regulation and Policy and it was hosted by The ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation. I would still argue that far from being “economy lite”, our creative industries should be seen as “economy central”.

My unease with the information economy (Knowledge or information is central to the "new economy") is that in the eighties and nineties information society theory largely became entangled with deregulated capitalism, and that those who resisted were luddites and would be superseded.

Gary,
and we have the reestablishment of restrictions on the flow of information in science and in art through copyright.The current dominant corporations have moved to protect the prices charged and their profit margin, by creating information scarcity, or by hindering information exchange or reproduction via patenting or copyright.

Gary,
I've been watching the list comments through the day and thinking about how kids (because they're more technologically immersed than me), the end users of stuff like Fury, actually operate in the world. The creators of these things have valuable skills, but the users also develop skills that go way beyond the creative industries. And skills they learn voluntarily as opposed to ones they have to learn in formal settings.

The naysayers must be from the same school that says kids should be learning Shakespeare when science fiction would probably be more useful.

Lyn,
I know zilch about gaming culture or the gaming industry even though academics see it as complex---four vectors - the increasing interconnectedness of games, games as a site of interaction between the global and the local, play as a cultural practice, and games as an apparatus of a technological subjectivity.

I play games with my kids as a way of connecting with them in their space. I do ban games occasionally like the ones where you drive around in a car,jump out and assault people and steal their money. I see no value in them. Surprisingly most games do teach kids to persevere and try to do things in different ways to achieve the goal. Reaching levels is highly regarded.
We have been gaming from Play station 1 to 2 and about to upgrade to Play station 3 and I can report no psychological damage has been done.

We dont play on-line games though. Some of the ones that require you to pay on going fees are a bit of a grab.

This is not my area of expertise but it's related.

Pam,
Radiohead weren't the first bunch of artists to do it, but they're big enough to have shown that copyright restrictions are becoming a handicap. They offered their last album online for whatever price takers chose to pay. Including nothing. Don't know what the result was profit-wise but they've challenged the status quo. Copyright protects the profits of record companies more than artists anyway and everybody knows it. Plenty of artists have starved in the process of enriching record companies. There's an appropriate comparison to be made. Also, Napster was instantly replaced by similar others that managed to get around the rules. The dominant corporations are moving in the wrong directions, working with old formulae that just don't work in the new environment.

Gary,
Gaming culture is complex, granted. And it intersects with a multitude of other cultural practices in some unexpected ways. Take games as an apparatus of a technological subjectivity and work backwards from there and you have an irresistable force that will eventually change everything about the way we do things, from the sacred economy on down.

Les' experience is common and I suspect contains the seeds of where we're headed. The life space is different and like Les, I use games or game talk to connect with it. I don't ban games because we use them as a way of talking through a variety of issues, but we could be talking about different age groups. But the other life skills gains to be had are as Les describes them. Gamers, like music pirates, will do anything to achieve their goals. The more obstacles the better. They learn to manipulate to their advantage while gathering other skills on the side. Creative thinking wins.

No psychological damage to report here either, just healthy frustration with freezing servers, limited bandwidth and technology that still means a smear of peanut butter on a cd can wreck your whole day. At least that much hasn't changed since a similar smear could see the stylus skating over a whole half of Jethro Tull's Thick as a Brick.

My son has moved onto online games, though only free ones. They have the odd tournament when players around the world log on all at once and melt the whole thing down. The one he's fixed on at the moment has instant messaging and he's forever looking up the atlas to see where he's talking to. He's had to learn about gear ratios to get an edge. They're learning a lot more than the best way to kill a zombie.

Lyn,
Though what we are doing here blogging is less visual and instant it probably is much the same.

Les +Lyn,
my guess is that the gaming industry is going though a period of transformation, judging from the King article in the Brisbane Courier-Mail. There have been high expectations for the industry and some small independent companies are providing the home market with some good games, mostly edutainment.

As the game industry becomes mainstream, and university masters and degrees in computer games design and culture come on the market, the small independent companies disappear. All production is increasingly outsourced by Warner Bros or Sony.It is the usual trajectory.

What games are being played in your household? Australian ones? Or is it just any game that comes of the market? Does Australian culture matter? Or is it just product in a global market place?

Les,
the gameplay creates a form of subjectivity where the player accepts the
ideology – and rules – of the game as given eg., Civilization. Is there a potential in the games for developing in the player a skeptical,critical attitude---ie the game can be used to expose the distortions of the ideologies of nation and culture?

Lyn,
you write:

Take games as an apparatus of a technological subjectivity and work backwards from there and you have an irresistable force that will eventually change everything about the way we do things, from the sacred economy on down.

Do the video/computer games enable the fans to develop multiple and alternative views? Do they open up a space for the fan/player to explore different possibilities in their own personal and social realities?

I'm working off a paper by Tom Apperley given at CSAA in 2006, Virtual Unaustralia. I cannot make it publicly accessible from the Fibreculture email list.

Gary,
There's no simple answer to your questions. Yes, the big corporations dominate the market. Games are part of vertical integration, although game spinoffs from movies tend to be crap.

Console games do get played online, but they're different domains of the culture, if it can even be considered a single culture. The different consoles are incompatible, which is a headache the various corporations seem reluctant to address.

Small, independent companies do disappear, but they'll keep popping up the same as indie labels in the music industry. There are freeware games all over the internet and piracy is rampant. Kids come to view parts of their lives as a series of technologically assisted possibilities.

I couldn't tell you whether we have any Australian games and boy child isn't home to ask.

Multiple and alternative views, possible realities is what they're all about. In Final Fantasy characters have to work cooperatively, same sex couples are possible in The Sims, a lot of games have make-your-own-scenario features, communities of shared interest develop between players around the world, language permitting.

Gaming culture is not culturally specific in the nation sense. Japanese animation, culturally Japanese narratives and dialogue translated into American English have a dedicated fan base of their own.

I think Les is talking about Grand Theft Auto, an American game that combines violence with virtual driving. American accents hurling American abusive dialogue is part of it. Everyone wanted it when it came out because so many kids weren't allowed to have it, but it's old hat now.

Edutainment that looks even vaguely educational arouses instant suspicion.

Gary,
I just read the Apperley paper. Wow. The possibilities for education are mind boggling.

Lyn,
what I found interesting in the Apperley paper is the side projects:

Both games also have large collective projects made up of individuals who share
a collective vision for the improvement of the game....the project has two purposes, to represent
historic events more realistically, by modifying events already in the game, and to generate new events that occurred historically in individual nations, but were notincluded in the game.

What was disappointing was that this was not being done with the representation of aboriginal culture as homogenous natives to be assimilated or killed as
the player sees fit in order to further the European colonization of Australia.

Australian gamers have yet to become enlightened about their own colonial history.

Gary,
I recently met a PhD person who's putting her research into her own family history into digital format. It's a good family story with lots of unsolved mystery. One of the mysteries revolves around what appears to be the erasure of an Aboriginal connection in a white, rural family. You know, the kind that produces inconvenient offspring.

I don't know the techno language to desribe it properly but she's reproduced the confusion of time lines when events which occurred sequentially are researched and discovered non-sequentially. The result is that it is possible for the end user to discover bits of evidence in a different order and reach different conclusions about what actually happened. It's also possible to reach dead ends by pursuing the wrong lines of enquiry and winding up stuck with a relative who knows something but won't say.

She hadn't envisioned it as a game or educational tool, but the suggestion was raised and enthusiastically discussed by people in a position to get the collective weight of arts, education and IT behind a bigger project.

The possibilities for this kind of thing come from all sorts of domains that could potentially feed into gaming. I wouldn't write the kind of enlightenment you're taking about out of the picture just yet. There's bound to be a historian/game geek out there somewhere.

Gary,
Games are market driven so they do as products take on the law of the land. They are a bi product of society like anything.Their value diminishes as trend moves on.
Culture is contained within what is interesting and no more.