Browsing my RSS feed earlier this week, a story from Kotaku caught my eye - Faith Fighter Pulled By Creators After “Manufactured Controversy”. I first encountered Faith Fighter about 18 months ago, when my friend Judith showed me the creators’ website while preparing an essay on one of their other games. Why were people kicking off about it now, when it was released so long ago? If internet rumours are to be believed, someone at the Metro stumbled upon the game, asked a few religious figures for condemning quotes, and had an instant story on their hands. Normally in this situation I would just take a few deep breaths and get on with my life, but I quite liked Faith Fighter, and the Metro has seen me through many years of long commutes to and from school and work, and I didn’t like to see one doing a hatchet job on the other. And so I furrowed my brown, devised a new pseudonym, and wrote an angry letter to the editor.

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They edited my letter a little, removing much of my criticism of their original article and replacing it with some reference to the subsequent poll, which almost makes it sound like I approve of their handling of the story. But what really frustrated me was the headline they used - “Far more than just a game”. Faith Fighter isn’t ‘more’ than a game at all… it won’t defrag your hard-drive while you play, it can’t help you bring your unmanageable hair under control and there’s no feature-length ending movie starring Steven Seagal (sadly). It’s just a game! A game that happens to be thoughtfully designed, instead of slapped together from popular film clichés.

The underlying story here isn’t about Faith Fighter, or even (as Molleindustria believe) “the media-assisted narrative ‘Islamic world vs freedom of speech‘”, but about Metro’s preconceptions that games are just silly, frivolrous fun. They mistook Faith Fighter for a childish attack on religion because it didn’t cross their mind that it might have deeper meanings. Then when I write in to point out their oversight, they reframe it as a freak curiosity - ‘more’ than a game, because games are so inherently childish, right?

Well, I’m pretty much done with that story for now… someone replied in today’s issue to disagree with me, buy only by missing my point and disagreeing with things I hadn’t said, so it doesn’t really count. But this whole episode is indicitive of a wider problem - one of those BIG ISSUES that the whole industry needs to put some effort into if it’s going to advance.

Why don’t people take games seriously? It’s a question that everyone within the games industry asks themselves at some time or another. On a personal scale, most young students hoping to make a career in games still face parental disapproval at their ambition to work in a highly skilled, highly creative, multi-million dollar worldwide industry. On a national scale, Tiga recently threw a hissy fit because the government won’t give them tax breaks comparable to countries like Canada or France. I think it would be a bit crass of me to start preaching that the government should introduce massive tax breaks that would directly benefit me, but I can’t really argue that the UK has one of the best pools of talent in the global games industry (not that game development is a tremendously global industry). It does therefore seem a little silly for the government to sit back and watch UK studios fall like dominos while foreign companies thrive in their tax havens, and I can’t help but wonder whether the government have quite realised just what a serious boon the games industry is for the UK.

This single question permeates the industry at all levels, but what is the answer? I’m afraid I don’t really know - it’s the kind of problem that an academic could spend a lifetime writing books about. But something I realised this week - while watching Peter Stringfellow give Kirsten O’Brien lapdancing tips during a recent documentary - is that the general public will never take games seriously unless the industry, including players, take them seriously too.

And that’s why it really gets on my nerves when I hear gamers trying to play games down. It happens more often than you might think! Feminist Gamers has a whole page that addresses this precise problem - when (typically young, male) gamers are confronted with an angry feminist ranting about an excess of fleshy curves in their latest favourite game, one of the most common responses is to say “It’s just a game!“, running with the idea that games are just silly entertainment, and shouldn’t be taken so seriously (so shut up!) Without going into the feminism angle, I think this whole line of argument is just plain stupid - it’s totally disingenuous, and hugely disrespectful to the very games that these kids like so much.

As for those working in the industry, I think the best way to measure the respect they have for games is by looking at the games they produce. Shigeru Miyamoto - as is often the case - can be held up as an example of a good designer in this regard. While Nintendo often spin his creations out into an uninventive series of sequels and remakes, the man himself continues to create a wide range of innovative titles, each with their own hidden depths and poetic narratives. At the opposite end of the scale, you have the guys who made Limbo of the Lost, who directly ripped off large chunks of other games in order to cobble together a generic point-and-click adventure and (in theory) make an easy profit. It would be easy to sit back and pour scorn on these people, but I realised recently that I often do similar things myself.

During the last few months, I’ve been quite saddened by the number of people in the games industry who have heard me talk about my game studies degree, and dismissed it as irrelevant, academic guff - I’ve been in a number of interviews where potential employers have asked me about it, and seemed a bit disappointed when I explained that it didn’t involve writing LUA scripts or building levels in UnrealEd. My usual response is to make a mental note to avoid having business with these people in the future, but reconciling this with my need for a job is a little trickier.

The important thing I’ve come to realise is that, a lot of the time, I’ve been quite sheepish when explaining the course to other people, including those in the industry - I can’t really blame people for not taking my qualifications seriously, when I keep making jokes about them. One lead designer even went so far as to say that I didn’t seem passionate about games, which - I think this website shows - is a pretty ridiculous accusation. So from now on, I’m going to try to be a lot more po-faced in job interviews and suchlike. I expect a lot of people will think I’m nuts, but hopefully some of them will recognise me as the real deal.