Wonderland: On public service gaming

Alice is talking about public service games, or how the BBC could theoretically embrace games as part of its mandate.

Here in the US, where the notion of “public good” is periodically imperiled, it seems like an odd idea. The NEA-sponsored game seems… unlikely, and no doubt conjures up images of boundary-stretching games involving crucifixes in urine, even though only a tiny tiny fraction of NEA funding goes or went towards such things (most of the money went to stuff like your local commuinity theater, plus Dana Gioia seems to have firm ideas about the sorts of contributions the NEA should make). The PBS game conjures up dry-as-dust games, somehow.

Once upon a time, the BBC over here meant Masterpiece Theater or Theatre (with a dash of Monty Python). Over time, our image of the UK has drifted a bit closer to the reality of earthy “ordinary” Brits. Now the BBC in the US touts shows like Footballers Wives which appears to be the soapiest thing since Dallas, and something even more frightening, what appears to be an entire show about stewardesses having sex in airplane bathrooms called (appropriately) Mile High. Our image of the typical Brit has shifted a bit from someone likely to say “Greetings, sir. May I take your coat?” to someone likely to instead say “Oi!”

But the BBC is pretty pervasive everywhere in the world. (Insert side rant about how much American media effectively put US dwellers in a bubble that ignores most of the world). And “out there” its image isn’t the simplistic Bertie Wooster sort nor is it ll East Enders. As with most huge gigantic media companies (because that’s what it is, aside from its unusual source of funding), it is a complex, multifarious beast.

I’ll tell you what the BBC, and its ilk, could bring to games: reach. It can be a distribution channel for all sorts of games that today don’t get distributed or even talked much about except via channels like, well, this website and Grand Text Auto and Ludology.org.

It isn’t so much funding that many of the smaller indie games require (though I am sure they would like the money). It’s access to an audience. The big challenge of pretty much any medium in days of product glut is “how to get noticed.” For every Food Force fortunate enough to have the backing of the UN, there’s plenty of serious games that simply don’t have a way to get attention, like, say, landing on the BBC’s news site.

In a day when the games media is moving from a few authoritative channels (the shrinking world of print mags) to the over-the-top diversity of web channels, having a few authorities around pushing models other than blockbuster AAA retail titles would be a nice help. The reason authorities develop in a complex media landscape is because there are too many channels for people to watch. We rely on authorities to tell us where to go. Some of these authorities will be children of the new media, but some could be sources like the BBC, which have a backlog of credibility, and the infrastructure to bring eyeballs to the table.

The day when we might see a BBC-published game on the shelf, or a Discovery Channel section at GameStop, is probably never going to come, cool as it would be. But the reason is that the shelves are going away — not because it doesn’t make sense for the industry to develop into a broader, more inclusive media channel. Personally, I would love to see the DIY channel‘s games, for example — Handmade Music the game, given my tastes, sounds rather cool. And leveraging the BBC’s audience to enable something like that — well, that strikes me as a public good.