The hearing at the State House was a bit confusing. There were a number of bills up for consideration, and a couple of hundred people who were there to support and/or protest one or another bill. After about an hour and a half of presentations on other laws, I was suddenly called as part of a panel of speakers; we had someone there from the ESA, the ESRB, a local company who rents video games, someone representing game sales, and me representing the local game creation industry. The entire panel had 8 minutes to present.
My prepared remarks are after the break — but they were intended to take 3 minutes to present. I tried to keep the entire presentation under 2, so I skipped large sections of it. My best recollection of the parts I left out is highlighted in blue.
Thank you for having me here today.
My name is Kent Quirk, from Acton, MA. I make games. I’ve been a software engineer and entrepreneur in Massachusetts for the past 25 years, and I’ve been making educational and computer games since about 1995.
The Massachusetts digital game business is not a new industry. During the 1980s, one of the top computer game companies in the world was Infocom, based in Cambridge. In the 1990s, Massachusetts grew a variety of powerhouse game developers like Looking Glass and Papyrus. Many of those former leaders are today running other game companies in Massachusetts.
During those early years, however, one of the things missing from the Massachusetts game industry was a sense of cohesion — an economy where individuals could move between different companies as their skills and the companies changed. Many developers and graduating students left Massachusetts in search of friendlier climates for game development — places like California and Texas.
Some of us wanted to change this. In 1997, a few Massachusetts game developers and I started meeting on a monthly basis. The organization that we named Boston Post Mortem has grown into a leading chapter of the International Game Developer’s Association, and we believe it to be the largest regular meeting of any local game industry group in the world. Our monthly meetings in Waltham draw between 100 and 150 local game developers and students.
We have more than 70 local game companies on our list of Boston-area game developers, from large to small. Harmonix, based in Cambridge, created two of the hottest games in recent memory — Guitar Hero and Rock Band, which together have earned more than $1 Billion in revenue.
Other companies are small but still significant. Glymetrix, based on the North Shore, is working on “serious” games to help people to manage their diabetes. Conduit Labs in Cambridge just raised $5.5 million in venture capital for casual multiplayer social games. I work for the Massachusetts office of Linden Lab, and we’ve grown from 3 people to 15 people in the last 9 months.
Worcester Polytechnic Institute has probably the best undergraduate game development program in the country — offering a multidisciplinary program that blends computer science with art, sound, music, and storytelling. Several other universities in the area are also providing graduate or undergraduate degree programs related to computer games. It’s a valid and growing area of academic research, and Massachusetts is leading the way.
The overall impact of the digital game business to the Massachusetts economy is currently estimated at more than $300 million annually, with somewhere between 1500 and 2000 employees. That’s about 4 times the size of the film production industry in Massachusetts.
And they’re good jobs — the average salary in the game business is over $77,000 a year. We’re quiet, and we don’t pollute. We take the best, the brightest, and the most creative art, music, and technology students from Massachusetts universities and give them reasons to stay in Massachusetts. Someone I hired as an intern in 1999 is now the CEO of a Massachusetts game company with 32 employees.
Game development is a significant, creative business that we really should promote in this state. This very committee is considering ways to encourage creative technical industries in Massachusetts.
Ten years of concerted effort by a lot of people has begun to create the perception that Massachusetts is a great place to make games — but it’s a recent change, and still tentative.
A bill like H.1423 sends a strongly negative message to a growing but fragile economy that Massachusetts does not want to be a friendly place to run a digital game business. This is exactly the wrong message to send. Please, I urge you to reject this bill and instead, send the message that Massachusetts not only cares about the game industry, but wants to promote it.
Thank you for your time.
Overall, I was pleased; the committee seemed attentive and interested in all 5 presentations. The ESA representative did a good job of presenting the legal issues related to such laws, along with the fiscal implications.
If you haven’t had time yet to contact your representative, there’s still time.
Kent
March 31st, 2008 at 1:07 am
[…] <p>Next up was a panel of entertainment industry folks. Gail Markels opened the panel by laying out the industry’s self-regulation associating, the ESRB. Since the ESRB had its own representative present, she didn’t go into detail, but quickly moved on to mention that nine similar laws that passed in other states were struck down as unconstitutional, as video games had been time and again declared ‘protected speech’, and therefore covered under usual First Amendment protections. This, although may seem common-sense, is apparently not. Markels’ suggestion was that the combination of parental ‘lockout’ controls and retailer restraint are both constitutionally viable as well as sufficient to protect kids from access to harmful content. The next speaker, a representative from the ESRB, spoke about the rating system itself, saying that it was an effective tool for parents to judge game content. They pointed to the existence of both the general age-range ratings as well as the labeling of individual content issues, which they argue provide more information than, say, the music industry’s labeling of “EXPLICIT LYRICS” for music. Statistics came into play here, as the speaker suggested that 87% of parents with kids who play, know about the rating system and its levels content. The third panel member was the owner of a video retail store in the Dorchester area, who argued that the ESRB system in effect in his store was more than enough; they carded everyone and no child was allowed to purchase content rated ‘M’; they offered something like like 67% ‘denial of sales’ rate. I’m not sure exactly what that means (67% of total sale attempts are stopped because they’d be in violation of ESRB guidelines? 67% of violations are caught? google doesn’t help here!); I’ll break chronology to say that the 5th panel member was from the <a href=”http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/23/AR2008032301990_pf.html”>Entertainment Merchant’s Association </a>, and continued this line of argument, saying that retailers don’t <em> want</em> kids to get hold of these games and work hard to keep everyone appraised and informed about the existing ratings, and again reminded the Committee of earlier laws with much the same word.</p> The fourth panel member, Kent Quirk, is a Boston-area developer and organizer of Boston Post-Mortem, who wrote about his words <a href=”http://bostonpostmortem.org/2008/03/18/what-i-said/#more-71″> here</a>. In brief, he presented an economic argument about the strength of video games in the Massachusetts economy. He mentioned developer luminaries like Harmonix and Linden Labs, academic programs at WPI (not <a href=”http://gambit.mit.edu”> others</a>, but I digress). Games are big, they are growing, Massachusetts is home to some big names who soak a lot of money in the state, and that all goes away if the state puffs up its chest at them.</p> […]
April 7th, 2008 at 2:52 pm
[…] I was surprised (to put it mildly) to see an article in Entertainment Weekly written by Stephen King, decrying the HR 1423 bill that Kent Quirk (along with the ESA and IEMA) testified against. King’s article mostly takes a common sense, “shouldn’t the parents be protecting their kids?” standpoint. You can read the full article here. […]