Culture Politick

Last week Ed appeared with Tom Chatfield, writer and commentator on video games, and author of the recently published Fun Inc. at a discussion forum on video games at the Royal Society of Arts, you can listen to the audio file from the event HERE.

As a follow up, Ed’s Chief of Staff Helen Burrows posed a question to Tom on the engagement between the games sector and the wider cultural world.

Helen to Tom:

It seems to me that one of the things that distinguishes videos games from other cultural forms is that the barriers to entry for new participants are currently high. Both in terms of monetary investment – you need to buy a console and so on before you can get into serious games, and in terms of time investment – to really understand what Grand Theft Auto or World of Warcraft are about you need to spend significant amounts of time playing.

Therefore at the moment, it is much more difficult to maintain a passing interest in the gaming world than it is in literature, music, opera, dance etc. Knowing a lot about one of these art forms before I read a book or watch a performance may help my enjoyment of it, but can I read this year’s Booker winner Wolf Hall, or see Avatar without any background knowledge, and enjoy it, or form an opinion on it. The same isn’t true of Grand Theft Auto.

So my question has two parts: 1) Do you agree that this may be one of the reasons games currently struggle to be acknowledged by the wider cultural world?

And if so 2) Do you think that a next logical step for games could be developing sophisticated games that are enjoyable to play, but also to watch, similar to watching a football match, or stage performance?

I am fascinated by the gaming world, and would like to know more about the significant titles in it. However, my personal participation has not made it beyond Singstar:  The one time I tried Grand Theft Auto I rapidly got frustrated and then bored by crashing the car into everything and nothing that crossed my path. At the moment I have neither a console, the time, nor the inclination to invest in playing it enough to really experience it myself. However, this is also true of tennis, but I love watching Wimbledon and have a sense of what tennis is about.

Tom to Helen:

No medium begins its life as an art-form. Painting, writing, film – only through gradual human usage did any of these develop the conventions, context, expectations and, above all, audience that are the conditions of culture. Video games, the youngest of all creative media – with less than half a century on their commercial clock so far – are yet to become fully mainstream, even while they increasingly dominate both the leisure and the spending habits of the 21^st century’s youngest generation of consumers. Yet their cultural role is becoming increasingly hard to ignore. This, for those on the far side of the generational firebreak that still defines gaming, is a troubling business. How to engage with a medium that can seem dauntingly strange, crude, frantic and trivial from the outside?

Start online. Long-gone are the days when adolescent males dominated the market: gaming is now as much a family as a teenage pursuit, and one whose greatest single driver is social and collaborative. If you have a Facebook account, or a presence on a social network like MySpace, look up leading companies like Zynga and Playfish and see what they’re offering: casual, accessible distractions where you can challenge friends at a geography quiz, play word games, run a virtual farm, play mini-golf, or manage a virtual restaurant. This is one face of modern gaming: instant, mobile satisfactions to be shared with friends, much as cards and board games have been for thousands of years. And as any fan of Scrabble or Chess will know, the online arena is bristling with ports of every classic game imaginable, from Mahjong to Othello. To be online, today, is to have play at your fingertips, together with its offer of momentary escape from the world of work into an altogether more mercurial set of relations.

This is culture, but not art; and to find that it’s necessary to turn to the other face of games – the big-budget end, where populism increasingly meets cinema-quality production values and the odd, astonishing leap into the avant garde. Watch a trailer on YouTube of one recent hit, Assassin’s Creed II, and you’ll find a loving recreation of Renaissance Florence and Venice providing the backdrop for a time-travelling tale of ancestry and global conspiracy. It’s somewhere between Dan Brown and Robert Harris – but the secret is the beauty and integrity of the other world being conjured for you freely to explore, and for you to watch others exploring. These are games as enjoyably experienced from over a player’s shoulder as from in the driving seat, and celebrate the power of technology above all to transport us and to reify the work of artists, architects, writers and directors in a field that has only just begun to demonstrate its potential.

So. Play a casual game. Watch an epic console adventure unfold in front of you. And ask other people what this means to them, and what else you should be playing. You’ll be taking part in a piece of the future: and it’s this participation, this shared construction of experience, that’s the most important contribution any game has to offer.

We are wondering if Ben Bradshaw needs a holiday, or at least a lie down in a darkened room, to re-gain a sense of perspective after he warned this week that under a Conservative government culture, arts and sport would be condemned to ‘savage cuts combined with philistinism and political interference.’ Which is both wrong, and not very nice. Join in our fisking (explained here ) of his speech below:

Ben Bradshaw: When Labour we came into government in 1997, what did we inherit in the cultural, artistic and sporting fields?

A demoralised landscape starved of resources.

Ed: Really?  What about the National Lottery, created by the Conservatives, which at that point was pumping around £800 million a year in additional funds into the arts and heritage?

18 years of a Tory government that had considered culture and sport as luxuries rather than central to our well-being and pride as a nation. What the Conservatives called my department told us all we needed to know about how they viewed our cultural and creative sectors: the Department of National Heritage – the past, old buildings, monuments rather than the present let alone the future and the importance of having a much broader view of the creative sector if we are to fulfil our potential as a country.

At last a Labour Culture Secretary has come clean about Labour’s hostility to heritage – “the past, old buildings, monuments”.  Interesting point. No doubt this hostility to heritage explains why Labour has cut heritage funding by £100 million in the last decade and refuses to bring forward a Heritage Protection Bill which has cross-party support.

1997 was a cultural as well as a political new beginning. You felt it at the time.

We certainly did.  We don’t feel it now though, do we?

It was summed up by that famous Newsweek cover ‘Cool Britannia’. Mocked by reactionaries then and now in a similar way as ‘political correctness’, ‘Cool Britannia’ was journalistic shorthand that now sounds clichéd but described what was and remains a serious endeavour.

To encourage and tap the talents of a creative nation; to shake off the cobwebs of a past that made us backward looking, like some grumpy old man sitting in the corner of the pub harping on about the good old days and ranting about the present; to ensure creative and sporting opportunities were no longer just the preserve of the few and to end Britain’s dismal performance in sport. It had become part of our national self image that Brits weren’t psychologically programmed to win – but we were good sports as in good, regular losers.

Oh Please.  Euro 96 anyone?

Chris Smith set about his task with passion. It’s often forgotten in those first two years we had stuck with the Tories’ spending plans. In spite of that, Chris managed to negotiate the biggest percentage increase in any department’s budget. The pattern has been repeated in subsequent spending reviews with DCMS vying with DfID for the departments that have done best.

The budget may have increased, but Lottery cuts mean that you are spending less on the arts and heritage than we were.  Will you commit, as we have, to restoring the National Lottery to its four good causes, which would mean an extra £50 million a year for the arts?

Investment in the arts, sport and our creative sectors has risen several fold. It is not an exaggeration to say that over the last 12 years Britain has enjoyed a cultural and sporting renaissance.

No it hasn’t.  You are using cash figures, and only referring to grant-in-aid.  In real terms, it has now fallen to below 1997 levels.

We are now in the top three in absolute terms in all the cultural and creative sectors. As a proportion of our GDP we are number one in the world. The creative industries employ twice as many people as our financial services and have been growing at twice the rate of the economy as a whole. And that’s just their raw economic value – it disregards their wider social and cultural value and their value in terms of Britain’s image in the world. Our films, music, theatre, museums and galleries are widely recognised as among the best in the world. The BBC beats all the international competition for the quality and range of its programmes. In Beijing we had our best Olympics since 1912 and we won the games for Britain in 2012.

The London 2012 Olympics were principally won by Seb Coe, a Conservative Peer, and, given that the average age of an Olympic medallist is 27, the Beijing medals were won by athletes who spent their formative sporting years at school under The Conservatives and who were supported by National Lottery money.

No mention of video games, neglected by Labour despite being the bigger than music or film.  No mention of numerous changes to the film tax break, which created endless confusion, resulting in embarrassing veto from Brussels at first attempt.

None of this has happened by accident. We’ve revived sport and music in schools. School sport was virtually dead under the Tories – with just one pupil in four being doing two hours of quality PE or sport a week. Today 95% of pupils do and we are on course to meet our commitment of five hours for all pupils 16 and under by 2012. We are also now doing the same for culture and the arts. A pilot scheme called Find Your Talent has been offering pupils across the country five hours of quality artistic, musical or other cultural activity a week. It has been a huge success and if we’re re-elected we’ll extend the same opportunities to children everywhere. We’ve supported young talent in sport and the arts so they can succeed. We’ve recognised the life changing potential of culture and sport in the most challenging communities, providing youngsters with the chance of unlocking potential they had no idea they had. We’ve invested in infrastructure at both community and elite levels.

If school sport was ‘virtually dead’ under the Tories, how come the athletes who medalled in Beijing were overwhelmingly at school exactly over that period – as were, incidentally, the so called ’golden generation’ of footballers, the 2003 Rugby World Cup winners and the 2005 Ashes winners.

New museums, galleries, sports centres, community sports and arts facilities.

Most of them made possible by the National Lottery

We’ve made them free, so that to quote Britain’s first ever Arts Minister, Jenny Lee in 1964 – ‘everyone can enjoy the best’.

You did, but it took you four years to persuade Gordon Brown at the Treasury

This has all reflected Labour’s fundamental belief that everybody has a gift or a talent and they should have the chance to realise it. That failure to do this holds us all back as a nation. And that the enriching qualities of culture and sport should not only be available to the few who can afford to pay, but to everyone.

This government has also buried that decades old lie that you can either have access or excellence but you can’t have both. We’ve shown you can’t have one without the other. British films, music, theatre, art, museums and even now some of our sporting teams are the best in the world because we have created a system and committed the investment to ensure that whatever background, however well off you are – you can find your talent and we’ll support you to get to the top.

This is one of the fundamental differences between us and the Conservatives. Free market dogma – to which the Tories have reverted in their wrongheaded response to the global recession – can’t and won’t deliver cultural and sporting excellence and certainly won’t ensure access for all. Before 1979 Mrs Thatcher promised she wouldn’t cut arts funding. A promise immediately broken once the Tories took power. They would do exactly the same now. David Cameron and his inter circle have shown no interest in culture, except that of the Bullingdon Club.

Hmm, George Osborne and Michael Gove are regular attendees at cultural events

The model Tory council, Barnet, boasted recently: ‘we don’t do culture in Barnet’.

And when Labour controlled Wirral they tried to close all its libraries.

The Conservatives have noticeably excluded DCMS from their very short list of departments that will escape their savage cuts.

Are you saying that under Labour arts funding would be ring-fenced?  No.

All departments are of course going to have to manage without the big increases we’ve enjoyed in recent years. But the idea that it makes sense to take an axe to spending on culture and sport is madness. My department spends less than 1% of the NHS budget, for every pound we invest we get £5 back, this is one area of our economy that has continued to grow through the recent downturn and will help provide the skilled jobs of the future. The big cuts the Tories propose would have a minimal impact on the fiscal deficit but a devastating impact on our culture, arts and sport.

What big cuts have we proposed, specifically?  Err none.  You have started to cut the arts – the National Lottery has halved, a 0.5% cut to national museums, £100 million from heritage, and a cash cut for the Arts Council

Britain also has some of the best television and radio in the world. This hasn’t happened by accident either, but thanks to the right creative environment and sound regulation and competition rules. Anyone who has experienced what America or continental Europe have to offer can only feel extremely grateful for our public service broadcasting and for the BBC in particular. Both would be in grave danger under a Conservative government.

Really?  Aren’t you proposing to cut the BBC Licence fee by 3 per cent, Ben?  And abolish the BBC Trust?  Any one remember the Hutton report…?

The biggest story for the media of the Labour party conference was the Sun switching sides. But wasn’t it amazing that a media that loves nothing more than talking about itself, missed the real story behind the Sun’s shift in allegiance: naked commercial interest. The independent broadcasting regulator, Ofcom, is currently looking at a complaint from a number of companies about Sky’s dominance of sports and films on pay TV. David Cameron says he wants to abolish or dismember Ofcom. What a co-incidence! The Tories have also said they would lift the legal requirement on broadcasters to be politically impartial. Impartiality is one of things the public value most about British broadcasting and the reason TV and radio news are more trusted than newspapers. But of course if broadcasters were no longer required to be impartial, that would pave the way for a UK version of Fox News.

Two points here – are you saying that Ofcom should find in favour of the complainants?  In which case you are exceeding your powers as Secretary of State! This is a decision for Ofcom.  And our plans to remove Ofcom’s policy making powers wouldn’t impact on their economic regulation role.  We have never said we would remove impartiality of news from public service broadcasters.  But what about Telegraph TV?  Or the Guardian, as the internet and TV converge?

The Tories have also launched an unprecedented assault on the BBC’s independence. Their culture spokesman has said they would tear up the multi-annual charter and licence fee settlements. No previous government, not even Mrs Thatcher’s have contemplated doing that. Respect for the BBC’s multi-annual settlements have until now been seen by all political parties as essential for its independence. We should be hearing much more noise from the BBC’s supporters about these brazen threats to its independence.

No, you have – see above, your proposal to cut the licence fee by 3 per cent and to abolish the BBC Trust, which you created only 3 years ago

It was the great Jennie Lee again who said that the job of government in culture and the arts is to create the climate for them to flourish and to secure the funds and then to step back and let them get on with it. That important arms length principle is one of the reasons our cultural and artistic life is so vibrant. Covent Garden’s principle ballerina Tamara Rojo wrote in the Observer last week that the arms length principle is why she dances here rather than in her home country, Spain. She said:

‘The British should be proud of their belief in the arm’s-length principle. Between the government and the artists is an arts council. Big artistic companies, like ballet companies, require support from the state. On the other hand, artists need to be free to be creative. This requires objectivity and transparency in decision-making, the intrinsic values of the current British model’.

But just as the Tories are threatening the BBC’s independence, they are also threatening the independence of our cultural and artistic institutions.

Really?  Your Government imposed the McMaster report on the Arts Council, and the free theatre tickets initiative.

Boris Johnson has recently tried to appoint as chair of the London Arts Council none other than Veronica Wadley, the former editor of the Evening Standard, a newspaper that you may remember was not unhelpful to Johnson in his quest for power. That wouldn’t matter so much if the majority independent members of the appointments panel hadn’t declined even to shortlist Ms Wadley because as one put it she was ‘manifestly less qualified’ than the other candidates. Johnson tried to appoint her anyway, in clear breach of the Nolan rules, introduced under John Major to avoid cronyism. I’ve blocked the appointment. But both Johnson and Cameron’s team seem intent on waiting until an election victory they arrogantly assume is theirs before shoehorning her in anyway.

It’s you being arrogant Ben, it’s Boris’s appointment.  You didn’t complain when Gerry Robinson, a Labour donor, became chairman of the arts council.

This is a taste of what things would be like under a Tory government. Savage cuts combined with philistinism and political interference.

Evidence, please?

Our cultural, creative and sports worlds and all those who love and value them need to wake up to this. There are too many people sleepwalking towards the election, too many people thinking lazily it might be time for a change without realising you can’t have change to the Conservatives without negative consequences.

By contrast, we must remind people of our strong record and reassure them that as progressives we will never see these areas as optional extras that can be ditched when times are tough, but as central to our national well being and future prosperity.

We recently faced the very bleak prospect of having to cancel three of the country’s major cultural projects

Why? Because of Labour spending cuts and poor administration

-          the new UK Film Centre – which will be the first of its kind in the world,

- a major expansion of the Tate Modern – which is receiving three-times more visitors than it was designed for

- and an extension to the British Museum, to provide it with much needed space for temporary exhibitions, which it currently doesn’t have.

The problem arose because of the impact of the economic downturn on private donations combined with an over-commitment on the DCMS capital budget.

… oh yes, and as we said above – Labour spending cuts and poor administration

But Gordon Brown personally intervened to ensure these schemes will go ahead. This is a massive political vote of confidence in our cultural sector. And we will continue to have that confidence in the years ahead. Maintaining investment, widening access and opportunity, not retreating or retrenching. Building on Britain’s leading position in the creative industries, not undermining them or selling them out to rapacious foreign media magnates. Ensuring the infrastructure is there so everyone can benefit from the digital revolution rather than only those who live in areas the market will serve. Supporting grass roots and school sport and having the confidence to deliver a successful outward-looking Olympics. Defending our creative talents and their funding bodies’ freedom to be edgy and innovate rather than smothering them with political interference.

Our country has to choose between two very different visions for Britain’s future. The one optimistic, broadminded, outward looking, progressive prepared to commit political and financial support. The other pessimistic, narrow-minded, inward looking and, well conservative, that would withdraw that support. We should have the confidence in our vision because it’s of a confident, progressive and improving nation. If we can communicate that choice both in the election and for our next decade as a country – we should have every chance of being in government to deliver it.

To sum up – I’ve nothing better to do than attack the Tories.  I must be really worried.