What I didn’t take the time to blog about last month was my attendance at the Scottish Games Network launch event held in Edinburgh. I’ve been broadly supportive of the idea of making SGN official since Brian announced it in October. I’m sure it must be a little disconcerting for him to think that simply declaring that SGN is now the official games industry trade body for Scotland is enough to make it happen, but it’s not really as simple as that. All a trade body really needs to be taken seriously is the support of the companies it purports to represent. Officially or not, I think SGN has been doing a pretty good job of representing our interests, without being asked, or paid. The proof is in the pudding as they say, and so we will judge it on the work it does.

What I’ve said, both here on the company blog and in person when I’m out and about amongst the rest of the industry, is that communication is key. As an industry we’re not generally competing with each other. We gain a lot by collaborating, sharing knowledge, ideas and inspiration. Many if not most of the client relationships we have were started by going out, seeing what the rest of the industry was doing, and letting them know who we are and what we do. Without a focus point, to do that we’d all have to be contacting each other, and that is time-consuming and not very practical. The simple fact is: locality is important. I know what many of the game developers in Edinburgh are up to, because I meet them. Either at @GameDevEd, or at other industry events around town. I know what some of the developers in Dundee are up to, but generally only because I’m in touch with individuals at various studios up there and we chat regularly. I’d love to know more about what’s going on up there, as it’s very easy for me to lose touch, especially when we or they get busy.

So for me there’s a definite niche to be filled, that of a locus for information, someone or something capable of routing information around. That’s especially true for those outside the industry. I’m sure there are many, many Scottish organisations that are interested in interactive digital entertainment, with ideas and projects just waiting to be made. I don’t know who they are. I’d love to talk to them though. They don’t know who we are. Few outside the industry do. It’s just as infeasible for them to cold-contact every games developer in the country as it is for me to cold-contact random organisations to offer our services. But if there were a central point of information, obvious and high profile, those two organisations can be connected together. They can go to that central provider and say “we’ve got a budget and an idea, but we don’t know who can help us,” and be told “Well, Black Company makes games about that size, or Proper, or Storm Cloud. Here are their details, I’ll introduce you.”

More importantly I feel that the government bodies here in Scotland, the Parliament, Creative Scotland, the many media departments, could all be engaging with the creative digital interactive media talent here in Scotland much more, if they had a reliable conduit into the industry. Scotland is a country exploding at the seams with culture and history, and I feel it’s crying out to be exploited in interactive media. I’ve long chafed at the need to globalise and homogenise our games to appeal to the world-wide audience. We should be embracing our heritage and making games that tap into our local culture. Such as Beeswing, a lovely little project, set in rural Scotland.

Beeswing

It’s fantastic that the Kickstarter for this was successfully funded (with a few of my pounds as well). Instinctively though I looked at it and thought – this is the sort of stuff that the Scottish government should be actively encouraging. I believe they would too, if they had a practical way of engaging with the Scottish games development community to start these discussions. So again, a central focal point can enable those two sides to get together and make amazing things happen.

Visibility is one of the main reasons we are members of TIGA, and is why we’ll be happy to become paying members of the Scottish Games Network as well. Not because one is better than the other, but because they serve different localities. The TIGA folks are lovely, and very efficient. They give us a presence in Westminster that I feel is important. They cover the UK industry and beyond, and that is also an area in which we are very interested. We don’t cut our business dealings off at Hadrian’s wall. But like it or not, Black Company isn’t well placed to attend events in London, and so a sister organisation that can provide even more coverage in Scotland seems like a very good idea to me.