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UK Tax Breaks For "Culturally British" Games
An anonymous reader writes with news of a proposal in the recent Digital Britain report to set up tax breaks for developing video games that are "culturally British." Quoting the report (PDF): "In film a system of cultural tax credits has long helped to sustain a wide range of films that speak to a British narrative, rather than the cultural perspectives of Hollywood or multinational collaborations. Other countries such as Canada, for similar reasons, extend the model of cultural tax relief beyond the film industry to the interactive and online worlds. CGI, electronic games and simulation also have a significant role in Britain's digital content ecology and in our international competitiveness. Each of these has the same capability as the more traditional sectors, such as film, to engage us and reflect our cultural particularism. They may in future have a cultural relevance to rival that of film." Conservative Shadow Arts and Culture Minister Ed Vaizey said the government has ignored the games industry, and he seeks to set up a government council to promote it. The report also outlined a number of changes to how games are rated.
To qualify, games must be written in Python.
Tea & Crumpets: The Game!
Coming soon: Dodging Dentists 2
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
what's culturally british? ruling at the barrel of a gun for a century, poaching wildlife to extinction, or collapsing stable democracies so that you can rape a country of its natural resources?
Just curious.
Ni!
I think it's interesting that the tax breaks are for games with a British cultural setting, rather than simply being for British game development companies. I'm sure that a predominantly British development team will by its very nature develop games with a bit of a British bent to them.
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
Pub Brawl
Use you Wii-remote as either a beer glass or chair and attack as many fellow pub drinkers, as possible...
Or
Soccer riots:
The worlds first multiplayer FPR (First person rioting) game....
Laters Sol "Have you found the secrets of the universe? Asked Zebade "I'm sure I left them here somewhere"
I dunno, I can see how it could be done. Say, have the next The Sims expansion pack have tea and crumpets as a food, and have the sim run for the House Of Commons at the end of the politics career track :p
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
It's a bit difficult to make an entertaining game based on bad porn, worse teeth and warm beer.
How about a game where you get to go around the streets of Britain shooting video cameras and avoiding the thought police?
Ask me about repetitive DNA
So making a map for a FPS where you trash the London subways instead of some other town's might qualify? Just curious...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Oh good! I am glad that Ingsoc is finally instituting rewards for goodthink. How else are we going to protect our precious culture from such harmful influences as freedom of expression, creativity, and uncensored foreign broadcasts?
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
I may well get modded to hell for this, but...
With xenophobic/nationalist ways of looking at society like this - that $YOUR_NATIONAL_IDENTITY is under attack, threatened of being diluted into oblivion - being mainstream, it's a lot easier to understand how the rhetoric of the fascist British National Party - and its analogues elsewhere in Europe - could have appealed to so many voters in recent elections.
Property is theft.
Expense fiddling - the game
If he's the Walrus then can I be a penguin please?
proposal in the recent Digital Britain report to set up tax breaks for developing video games that are culturally British.
The Sims - Football Hooligans
EA Sports Cricket 09
Age Of Former Empires
Tom Clancy's Surveillance Society
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
becoming more Brit bashing by the day?
Cool. 'nuff said.
Bertie & Wooster: The Game. Go on a policeman helmet stealing rampage, do whatever your servant tells you to do while avoiding getting married.
Battlefield: British Colonies. Take control of Africa and East Asia before France does! Beware of the native warriors, some throw very sharp slices of mango!
Okay that's all I've got, help me out guys!
You just got troll'd!
This would be the best use of the wii controller ever: http://www.freewebs.com/wiiwantcricket/
As well as attempting to give the major record companies whatever they want until the end of time, Lord Carter's Digital Britain report includes tax breaks for "culturally British" computer game development.
Planned games include Couch Warrior ("the goal is to sit playing a game. The graphics are truly horrifying and needed us to go to 3.5-dimensional to fit the player's avatar on the screen"), CCTV Panopticon ("take pictures of the CCTV cameras in your high street until arrested under the Terrorism Act for having your own camera in public"), Bottled Tan Snorter ("get into celebrity magazines and shag footballers, lose points for any sign of intelligence or words of two syllables") and Cynical Apathist ("write outraged blog comments with amusing satires of events of the day while working a job directly keeping the hideous machinery alive and running"). A committee will also form a group to do a study concerning a team to write a ZX Spectrum emulator for the iPhone.
The games industry has warned in the past that developers are being lured away to other countries by the prospect of being paid more than shit. Conservative Shadow Arts Minister, Ed Vaizey, has leapt upon the opportunity, with promises of incentives for talented developers to stay in Britain and not be lured away by better pay in America. "We'll keep their passports from them until they reach 'Achievement Unlocked.'"
Having finally released Digital Britain, Lord Carter has resigned from the government and is returning to private industry. "Of course, Digital Britain remains a completely objective assessment of the way forward for the nation in the twenty-first century, and should in no way be thought of as my CV for a series of lucrative consultancies with the large media companies I've just given everything they've ever asked for. And a pony."
http://rocknerd.co.uk
Coming this year:
* Asbo of the Colossus
* Big Brain City Academy
* Turning Point: Fall of (civil) Liberties
* Nintendogs (poodle edition)
* Mario & Sonic in "Olympic overspend"
* House Of The Red (-handed)
(that's enough British games- ed)
Matthew @ Bytemark Hosting
Wii binge drinking? Wii pint lifting?
Bagpipe Hero?
Or was the plan to play Wii Cricket (probably already exists?)?
Also cool with new motion sensors: Ministry of Funny Walks - the game.
Pokemon snap is the most British game of all.
Will any culturally British games get support, or just the ones they're proud of? Here's some more ideas following "Some Ideas" by 4D6963 (933028) above:
Jallianwala Bagh: 1st person/team shoot-em-up. Can you improve on the score reported in history books? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jallianwala_Bagh_massacre
Thanksgiving: Fighting For Your Holiday. An edutainment/historic recreation. Carry out the plan of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, extra points for recovering and eating roasted corn from the site. "In 1637, the Pequot tribe of Connecticut gathered for the annual Green Corn Dance ceremony. Mercenaries of the English and Dutch attacked and surrounded the village; burning down everything and shooting whomever try to escape. The next day, Newell notes, the Governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony declared: "A day of Thanksgiving, thanking God that they had eliminated over 700 men, women and children." It was signed into law that, "This day forth shall be a day of celebration and thanksgiving for subduing the Pequots."
How about a multi-game framework called Global Domination, with specific scenario files such as "East India Company" and "Hudson's Bay Company"? Invade, subdue and colonize. Impose a colonial government in the form of a commercial enterprise. Try to come up with improvements on some of the quintessentially British techniques and tactics from history, such as slavery, sanctioned if not imposed drug addiction, and requiring proof of indigenous people killed in the form of strips of scalp with hair ripped from their skulls. See how long you can maintain control before the inevitable collapse of the Empire eventually leads to nostalgic recreations in the form of "culturally British" computer games.
Flamebait? This? No, this is response. The original is flamebait. One person's "cultural" is another's "racist". The "British" aspect just happens to make it very easy to flip that conceptual card.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Now the world can experience sitting around sipping tea, losing cricket and whining about the shitty weather.
.
But would you use Trumpington's Rule Variations or the more accepted Tudor Court Rules?
i.e. propaganda
and right wing mongering.
It's a very good question. Britain has been involved in the affairs of just about every country on Earth at one time or another, both influencing it, and being influenced by it. Even ignoring that fact, a strong case could be made that anything in Europe or the Commonwealth has to do with british culture, since britain founded one and jointly founded and subscribed to the other. More importantly, closer to home, there are lots of issues with government promoting one culture over others, since it's supposed to be a multicultural society. For instance, in Scotland, they have to support Scots-Gaelic as well as English. In Northern Ireland, it's even more complicated, as they (legally) have to support Ulster-Scots as well as Irish language and culture and British culture. I'm pretty sure there are similar issues with Islam, Hindu culture, etc.
Seems to me that it won't be long before someone is suing the government on the basis that they're being discriminated against as game developers, because they're from a non-English background.
Can this guy help?
http://www.reuben.org/ncs/members/biogs/meddick.asp
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
I'm sure it'll only lead to only completely accurate portrays of true English culture, just like how America's Army does similar for the US army.
So expect:
- Restaurant Simulator - using entirely British food and cooking techniques; build a world-beating restaurant that makes Italians cry.
- British Football 3D - play entirely respectful games of football winning with skill, but also good manners and complimenting the opponents to victory.
- Railways on-line - improve an already perfect railway to be even more "perfecter". The more you make the French jealous, the more points you get.
I can't wait!
throw new NoSignatureException();
If I promise to drive 20 MPH on the wrong side of the road in the game, will they buy me a copy of Grand Theft Auto?
What if I promise to drive 200KPH through tunnels, killing all occupants, will the French pick up the tab?
--- Generation X: The first generation to have SIG lines inferior to their parents... ---
Hmm, would a game where you are a rebel in a authoritarian state count?
Gang Bangers and Mash.
Dear Richard Garriot,
Since there is a tax break for games that are culturally British, now is the time for you to quit screwing around on space stations, brow beat the rights to Ultima back, and Get Lord British and the Avatar kicking ass and taking names once again in Sorsia. RESSURECT ORIGIN PLEASE! I need a good Wing Commander game KTHX!
We now return you to your regularlly scheduled M$ vs Linux /. flame war...
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
does anyone see the irony in this...
Will they send money to foreign developers for making culturally British games, like Paradox Interactive's "Victoria: An Empire Under the Sun"?
A bit of this might be good.
Cultural content for the entire world should not be produced in one country with the blandness we've seen from Hollywood. In TV and film many of us have seen perfectly good foreign works ("Let the Right One In", "Red Dwarf", "The Dinner Game") with terrible American remakes. We don't even know what we're missing compared to if games were less of a styrofoam-culture creation. I think the tragic fatalism valued in British culture, for example, might make for better stories than the juvenile "everything must work out in the end for our hero" thing wee have here.
So long as the tax breaks don't become embargos or similar and don't become strong enough to actually prevent games from crossing borders, this could be very good for gamers.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
I expect my check from Gordon Brown any day now.
My first thought was that instead of having a "BFG" in a first person shooter, it would have a "BGF" (big giant foot) weapon in the game. Grand theft auto would have "bobbies" instead of police?
maybe they'll resurrect 'the getaway 3' from it's dead state.
... games like this?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hooligans:_Storm_Over_Europe
There is a war going on for your mind.
They should skip the games and move straight to the Illustrated Primers, there's no better way of propagating British cultural memes.
Perhaps they might have benefited from this?
Okay... maybe not.
Morris Dance Revolution
Basically, you could keep the entire game as-is... just add in a "muppet" or "tosser" here or there.
Oh, and you would have to add far more crap looking cars, with a few more supercars.
Something witty.
... for all the bad things in the UK which curiously don't seem to happen nearly as much in other EU countries. CCTV, zero tolerance bullshit, paedophilia scares, Iraq war scandals, etc.
I'm sorry, but I can't think of "Culturally British Games" without expecting Monty Python cast members to be involved somewhere.
How about Llamatron?
Really, all this boils down to is more work for Stephen Fry.
Bow-ties are cool.
There, fixed the subject for you ....
"The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes" - Winston Churchill
An article that gives the americans all the chance they can to make cheap jabs. I shall refrain from thinking or saying anymore, I'll just shoot you all.
I argue because it's the internet....and I can.
... and no one's mentioned World of Conkers?!
Seriously -- that's all you need. How can they turn down your MMORPG with its radical new character class "that speak[s] to a British narrative" and "reflect[s] our cultural particularism" -- AND kicks ass!?!
DNA is a Turing machine. You, however, being dynamic and emergent, are not.