Jeff: I’m the Associate Professor of Communication Media at Bond University, I also have the joy of being Head of School at the moment

Jeff: Yeah, it’s a 3 year appointment, a loading on top of what I do. I still teach, I still do my research, but most of my 8 hour days are spent dealing with issues.

Jeff: That’s right, which is why I have a copy that hasn’t been cracked open yet, which is really embarrassing!

Life is about choices though; I have been up on the Wii Fit board, so I guess I shouldn’t really say I don’t have ANY time to play games.

Jeff: Well I just had to get Wii Fit outta my system; it was really just a gateway game to get my wife into it. So here’s the gig – we got her the balance board for mother’s day as I knew it was the gateway drug.

Jeff: It was a bit risky! But I got my 3 sons into it; get her something to play on the Wii, and this was it.

Anyway, I do that and I teach classes in digital media, but more media studies – research methods, which is really boring but students need to know this stuff. I teach classes on games industry, so I have alot of numbers floating up in my head about the industry. I also teach classes on mass media and society, which relates very much to what I do with the government research.

Jeff kicking back in his office

Jeff: The bachelor of computer games is one of the degrees we offer as part of the overall course. We also offer a bachelor of multimedia. They are quite different degrees. We also offer a bachelor of communication, bachelor of communication business ... there’s a whole range of degrees that we offer. We have a total of 200 program enrolments in these courses, but in computer games – this is our 4th semester – we have a total of 16 students in this program, and we have 24 students in the bachelor of multimedia. So between the two we have 40 students.

By comparison our bachelor of communication business has 78 students, and it’s been operating for a decade.

So this is part of a suite of subjects that we offer. The bachelor of computer games is the only degree in Australia that focuses as much on the business side – production and distribution – as it does on production itself – the technical and programming side.

So we’re not coming at this from an I.T. Program perspective – not that that’s a problems – it’s just that this is where our expertise is.

Jeff: If I were break down the games industry, I would break it down into 3 parts.

Development and design, which is 1200 full time jobs today in Australia.

Distribution and Publishing, which is about 900 jobs.

Allied Services – pretty much everything else including government regulation, which is in your low thousands, but there’s no good statistics on that like there are about development and publishing jobs.

So our students are as likely to go into any one of these 3 areas as any of the others. If you take a degree where someone wants to specialise in C++, Flash, or some other programming language – then those students are much more likely to get a job in programming than in gaming. So we will have students who will do an entire major in our degree in advertising if they choose, so they’ll go into that allied area of the games business.

Let me describe my program – think of it as this: basically there are 3 bricks, in addition to a brick that all students in the university have to do. That brick is our 4 core courses – communication skills, management, cultural and ethical values, and basic I.T.

Jeff: That’s right. So then there’s the 3 bricks, the first being Games Industry, Policy, Game Studies. Then there’s Games development design and programming. Finally there’s what we call the Allied major – and that’s where someone will go into advertising or maybe games journalism for example?

Did you know there’s an international games journalist association?

Jeff: Oh c’mon, I thought there was no better journalist that those that cover games!

Jeff: Well there are two types of games journalists right – the reviewers, and the people that cover the industry. Then there are two types of reviewers...

Jeff: That’s right! And we teach that here funny enough! And that shows you the kind of authenticity we have with understanding all of the subtlety of the games industry. Of course, journalism is a huge part of this industry.

Jeff: Both. For example, we review all of the developers and publishers, where they exist, who the key players are at the moment in Australia in our games industry class – one of the classes they do in the 2nd year hopefully.

Jeff: Very often, but the core concepts don’t. For example, all of our students read annual reports of the publishers. You take all of the major publishers as well as the console manufactures and they have to download and read annual reports. Why do they have to do that? Well they have to understand what a balance sheet is, how funding operates in the business ... I mean, if you ask people on a panel about the games industry – how do developers get their money, they’ll say 70-80% in Australia get their income from milestone payments or side projects. So this whole idea of ‘where does the money come’, well it comes from publishers, ‘how does it come from publishers’, well through these milestone payments, ‘well how does that work’, well you’re doing your own I.P. or someone else’s I.P. etc etc

Jeff: Well me too! I’ve spent literally the last half a decade getting my head around this, and the reason I’ve done this is so that I can go into the classroom and stay to students – this is how it works. So we go to Game Connect and so on to find out what’s happening in the industry, making all these connections, we’re trying to build these relationships.

We talk to other people like EA just down the road here in Southport, and ask them questions about how marketing works, what their daily jobs are like. So although things do change very rapidly, getting students to get into the skills of checking the stock prices of, say, Take 2 Interactive ... and also linking the stock price of a company like Take 2 with a takeover bid from say EA. Or when there are court cases, then they have to make these connections because they’re important for understanding the industry.

Jeff: I think so! By sticking to just design production, graphic arts, or code, you’re missing some of the nuances of this industry. Today, you could say the global games industry is worth $45 billion Australian dollars.

Jeff: In Australia alone, the industry in terms of retail value – and this is hardware and software – is worth $1.3 billion dollars.

Jeff: No! And it’s to the credit of the GDAA and IEAA who have been working together to educate the government that this is not a toy industry, this is not a fad, this is a rapidly maturing, global media industry.

"Today, you could say the global games industry is worth
$45 billion Australian dollars."

Jeff: First of all, we’ve had a very conservative government in power, but the way the parliamentary system is setup is fairly conservative anyway. It’s setup to be fairly slow moving, and unfortunately the industry is changing – partly because of technology, partly because of social change, partly because of economic clout – very quickly, and governments can’t keep up. Which is why, parental controls on things like current generation consoles is so critical, because it shows that the industry itself is aware of some of the social issues that the government can’t respond to quickly enough.

Jeff: Well for example, our classification system in Australia is an act of parliament. It’s the Classification Act 1995, amended from time to time, but it’s a massive – over 100 page – document that sets out how things work, including how games are advertised.

Jeff: It gets amended, so it does keep pace to some degree with changes for example: online advertising, but it isn’t really keeping pace. We know that production cycles and timelines are so tight in the industry right now that the game master comes off the presses, and you have your AAA title pushed into boxes the day after to get to market!

And that’s the way the industry works, they’ve got to get that product out there, so they get the income from that product, so they can fund the new product, because there’s alot of competition and there’s alot of demand, and they’ve got to move quickly.

Timelines have tightened in the industry, although bigger projects are taking more time.

Our degree could be criticised as being a ‘master of none’ degree, but I disagree. I think it’s creating somebody who masters a clear picture of all the little pores that exist in this industry.

Students hard at work!

Jeff: I could be wrong, but you talk to the guys in the studios and ask them – which is the more valuable employee: The one who knows a specific set of skills, or the one who can absorb new skills quickly.

Jeff: Bingo. And so how things work is about having that picture.

Jeff: Because it takes alot of time to train somebody up.

Jeff: Because we need senior talent to train junior talent. And it’s true in the education sector too. Griffith offers a bachelor of computer games and interactive media through their film school – so it’s more an animation, art and design program. QUT offer a bachelor of computer games and interactive media though their I.T. program – so you have your two extremes right away. And we straddle that quite a bit, we have a film and television area but we’re also coming at this from a business area. Our students take I.T. subjects although we don’t offer them in this school. In fact, to be perfectly honest with you there are only 3 I.T. subjects that they’re really doing. Our multimedia subjects have programming in them, but it’s not really writing hardcore code.

We devised this degree on the IDGA curriculum framework.

Jeff: Well it’s a big document, which has the overview that is quite vague and then it gets much more specific. So Specific in fact, that it says you should offer a subject in Game Form Narrative and Style where you should be taking about genre, failed games, successful games, principals of film like lighting, shadows, colour that is used in games to create certain effects ... in fact, from my own research that Scott (Knight) and I did found that 85% of computer games have a narrative. The idea that games are chasing dots on the screen with a half pizza is so last century.

Jeff: Well you can go deeper than that, go beyond the cheese! Games are so much more complicated, and the IGDA framework says you need to get people to relate to this and see what’s happening with the major changes over time. You also need to review the different generations, so that someone who’s going to be in the games industry has to understand the history behind it.

So we have all these ideas, and we have our own take on all these classes, but we took those suggestions from IGDA and ran with them.

Jeff: The multimedia learning centre is a huge corridor which is tucked in to what used to be an art gallery on the side of one of our buildings. In this room is fully T100 networked high spec PC’s, amazing lighting, multimedia projection on 3 screens, and then we have these collaborative workspace booths – which have fast Dell machines, 42” Plasma screens, document cameras, and Playstation 3’s. The whole reason for that was we were taking a bet that Blu-ray would win – our library has a collection of computer games along side with the books, recordings, alot of DVDs, and now Blu-ray discs.

It’s really sexy too; it’s got what I call Xbox green all over the booth. It’s an over 3 million dollar project.

The Multimedia Learning Centre

Jeff: Well let’s play devil’s advocate here for a minute and say that they weren’t working at all ... we all know that a very successful games studio lets its employees play. And my argument is a very successful university lets its students play!

Jeff: I bet they will! What happens when the examination board meets to confirm marks at the end of this semester will be another story, but I suspect it will be an inspirational space. We’re doing things like teaching staff in this space how to podcast.

Jeff: That’s right! And then we have the Shared Learning Classrooms with PC machines along with each of the consoles, Bose surround sound, video conferencing facilities, projection and it’s a space where we’re doing alot of experimental teaching and learning activities.

Then we have the Level Up lab which has lounge chairs, mood lighting, posters of games – famous and not so – table chairs, a wall painted with chalkboard paint that the students can put up ideas. In the cabinet in that room we have over 600 games for both PC and consoles, from SNES games to current generation and handhelds. And the purpose of this space is it’s an inspirational space where our multimedia and games students will work in development teams to make small games.

Jeff: That’s interesting. Usually 4 to 6 hours each day of the week we have a lab attendant in there and students can go in and do a bit of code, a bit of design, and of course play games as well.

Jeff: We have an open campus that’s open to the public, anyone’s welcome to come down anytime and have a look around – and that’s the first thing I recommend anybody does.

Jeff: Well, they’ll need a student idea to use the equipment! And that’s where we close the deal!

Of course, check out our website (www.bond.edu.au) where we even have subject outlines on the website publically available. We have links to all of the courses, along with information about what’s in the course, learning more about staff, interviews with some of the students. And if they’re really interested in coming down for a more format event, we do have open days when we open up the lab.

"We have an open campus that’s open to the public, anyone’s welcome to come down anytime and have a look around."

Jeff: Well, sure it’s a leisure pastime, but they don’t realise that Australia exports $136 million dollars of gaming product each year! 38% of all gamers are parents, and it won’t be long until most gamers are parents!

Jeff: It’s astounding, and all we did was ask the question ‘Are you aware that there is no R18+ classification for computer games in Australia’ in this national study, and it turned out that only 25% were aware that there was no 18+. Then we asked the question ‘Should computer games have an R18+ classification for computer games’. 88% said yes. Of the 12% said no, a third of those said ‘No, there shouldn’t be an R18+ because there should be NO classification because the government shouldn’t be in the business of telling us what we should or shouldn’t play’.

So only 8% thinks an R rating would be bad because it’s going to harm children or allow content in the country that would harm our society. The fact of the matter is it’s a head in the sand approach, because by not having an R what we’re really saying is we don’t want to know that 8% of all gamers are over the age of 60 in Australia, that the average age of gamers in Australia – according to our study – at the beginning of 2007 was 28!

The average age in Europe is 32; the average age in the US is 33/34.

Jeff: The whole issue of media violence and its effects on society is not a new issue, I mean that’s what my background is, and it’s why I got interested in the media and computer games in particular. There were studies back in the 1980’s about games like Pitfall, and how that is a violent game – compared to something like Manhunt 2.

Jeff: You’re forgetting about the scorpions! This issue though goes right back to the 1950’s when television came out, and before that it was an issue with comics, and before that it was an issue with jazz music, and before that it was issue with cheap novels. I’ve got a quote from the 1850’s when reading started to become popular: ‘these kids bent in an unnatural fashion engaging in idle nonsense reading these books’.

Today, computer games are the bad boys of the media, even though everybody’s doing it.

Jeff: Exactly! The school shootings in America, every time some wacko crazy nut goes into a school – and how awful – but they do it, they shoot their mates and they shoot their teachers ... then someone says ‘oh, they played counter strike’. Well never mind that ALL boys that age play counter strike. They say the games cause it!

Back in the early 90’s when this was a big problem, President Clinton asked the Secret Service – whose job it is to profile criminals and potential crimes ahead of crime – to put some resources into this, a staff of about 40, did all these analysis through all the school shootings and found that there were really only a couple of key variables. Every single perpetrator is male, they were all adolescent or early 20’s with the exception of a very few, and they all communicated what they were planning to do with someone else, and they all come from broken homes.

Other than there, there media behaviour was all different. So the Secret Service said if we scapegoat and blame media, we’ll be blaming the problem on the wrong cause, we won’t get anywhere. So that’s one.

Researchers who are backed by the administration, not so much the doctors but the political arm of the AMA (American Paediatrics Association) have done a series of laboratory studies, and they’ve concluded that violent video games do adversely affect behaviour. But just to give you an example of one of these studies, the researchers put one group of gamers in a room playing mist, the other group in a room playing counter strike, and they had them do a thing where they sit across the desk from somebody where they could put a loud noise to them.

Basically, what they found is people that people who played the violent video games were statistically more likely to give a longer noise blast to a person sitting opposite them when a person got a wrong answer on a test, than people who played a non-violent game.

Do you know what the difference was? 1/10th of a second. That was their measure of aggression.

Jeff: According to the researchers that proves that computer games leads to violent behaviour in society.

Then there’s the P300 response where researchers asked violent gamers and non-gamers to look to a bunch of images, and hooked them up to an EEG and asked them to look at these images – and of course the people that played violent video games recognised violent images more readily. And they said that means they’re primed for violence.

Well no, it means they recognise those images because they have a more sophisticated and nuanced understanding of violent images.

Jeff: A P300 is designed to measure dementia, not whether or not you’re going to go kill people after playing GTA IV

Jeff: No, it was the same problem as television. Unless you have this island where you isolate all the other factors and you let them grow up on let’s say Call of Duty and GTA and that’s all they do, you’re not going to really work out what the contributing factor for games is to violence in society.

It’s interesting that the international crime victimisation survey, which is this very large multinational study, looks at not only police reports but also do a survey asking people if they’ve been victimised, robbed, sexually assaulted, etc. What they’ve seen is that since the mid 1980’s in developed countries, violent crimes have declined. And I’m not going to make this correlation, but I simply want to point out that since the arrival of Nintendo in the 1980’s and the mass production of video and computer games, crime has subsided a bit.

In the age when games have really taken off, crime hasn’t.

The laboratory studies are all artificial, and deal with trivial factors, and that’s my major argument against them.

Jeff: Well my take is if the AMA and the AAP in the US believe – and there are a couple of psychologists that the effect of computer games are greater than the effect of nicotine in cigarettes – that it’s creating this public health crisis.

My take is that if we really really believe that, then we should start psychological trials of games. So before a game is released, we have to spend the 40 to 80 thousand dollars for every game, to test it to see what its effects are. And I don’t think anyone in society really believes there is a drug parallel between exposure to a cultural product and behaviour with a drug you ingest.

Jeff: Mark Griffiths who is a professor of psychology at Nottingham Trent University in the UK years ago went into internet and games addiction as a question and started studying it, and quickly came to the conclusion that the internet and computer games are not more addictive than other things in life that is enjoyable.

He divided addictions into two groups – stimulus addictions, and behavioural addictions. So you can be addicted to work, sex, exercise, computer games ... but the proportion of people that are likely to be addicted to video games is not any more than those who are addicted to work.

And my statistics according to Interactive Australia 2007 shows the average computer game player plays twice a week, and for 1 to 2 hours a go. Now if you’re playing 1 or 2 hours a week, on average twice a week – that’s 4 hours. That is so far from addiction, only 4% of our sample said they play every say for 4 to 6 hours a day. And even playing every day for 4 hours isn’t an addiction – ask anyone how much time a day they spend watching television.