Parents advised to make Better Use of Game Ratings.

The Video Games industry has been getting its house in order over the past few months, improving the rating systems used on games, the information, explanations, the visuals used to show the ratings, and industry guidelines around the ratings too.

This now highlights an altogether new problem, that despite huge efforts made by games retailers, and publishers, some parents are failing to use all of this information to protect their children.

“For 13 years, the National Institute on Media and the Family has been asking the video game industry and retailers to take responsibility to keep mature-rated video games away from kids,” said Dr. David Walsh, president and founder of the group.

“This year the industry has improved its ratings enforcement and given parents new tools when choosing the right videogame for their child. That’s a significant step in the right direction.”

A recent report produced in America produced by the Federal Trade Commission that found only 20 per cent of children who tried to purchase mature-rated games from retailers were successful, compared to data from 2003, where 55 per cent of under-age consumers bought M-rated games.

The weakness in the system lies now with the adults, the adults that purchase M-rated or 18+ games for underage children to play them, or give them as presents, or knowingly let them play their own adult games.

It is very easy for a society to pass on the responsibility for monitoring & enforcing ratings onto the games publishers and retailers. But as history has shown with Films, the cinemas aren’t the places where children are watching films past their age range, it’s at home with the parents, watching the DVD. The retailers have the guidelines, and all indications are that they are properly enforcing them at point of sale.

Parents have been given all the tools and information necessary to allow them work out whether the content is suitable for their children. It is now up to the parents to make those unpopular decisions and enforce the guidelines which have been provided at their request.

Dear Alistair Darling – Please Cut Fuel Duty by 10p in Tomorrow’s Pre Budget Report

Newspapers, Journalists, Web, TV and all other media writers are currently preoccupied by what Alistair Darling is going to announce tomorrow in his Pre Budget Report.  The consensus is that it will be a spending led budget, looking to increase public spending, domestic spending and business spending, in the hope the kick start the UK Economy.

The policies & changes need to be about putting money back into the pockets of the people and businesses who are most likely to spend it.  This is a particular necessity given that the multi million pounds given to the banks for the same reason has just resulted in them putting the funds back into their coffers to protect them from the next rainy day.

So we have one policy suggestion for Alistair Darling that will help people on low incomes, help the ordinary hardworking family, help small businesses and help UK industry in general.

Fuel Duty Cut by 10p per Litre.

Although this would be contrary to the Environmental lobbying surrounding the Transport Industry, it could be one of the most cohesive and across the board positive policies to help the UK fight the recession and the credit crunch.

• A Cut in fuel duty would increase the pounds in the pocket for most UK families.  And it’s not a policy that disproportionately favours the higher earners.  For lower earners fuel takes up a proportionately larger part of the household income, so this is a fair and equitable way to cut taxes.
• It would reduce one of the larger costs of most UK small businesses.
• The costs of Deliveries would be cheaper, the fuel surcharges levied by most parcel carriers could be reduced.
• The “Carriage” and “delivery” costs represent up to 40% of the retail price of many items sold in the shops.  Cutting fuel prices will work through to cheaper costs all round.
• Particularly with regard to British grown and produced food, where fuel costs are a large part of the costs of production.
• Industries such as the Road Haulage Industry, the Light Goods carriers, couriers, parcel carriers, taxi companies will all see an immediate impact, and as “middlemen” this all gets passed on up the chain all the way to the consumers.

And most important of all – the “feel good factor”.

Don’t underestimate the importance of the feel good factor, the last thing that office workers need when they leave their offices late at night is an absence of Taxi Drivers, and a reduced bus service timetable.  The last thing Christmas shoppers need is a reason not to drive into town to buy presents. 

 

Cutting Fuel Duty is simply a refund for the overpayment we made during the summer.

In the Spring & Summer months, UK households and businesses paid massive amounts of additional fuel duty, spurred on by the % based levies on rapidly increasing oil costs.

Cutting fuel duty now would be a simple reimbursement of the additional amounts that we overpaid during the summer months. 

 

Environmental v Economic Arguments

The environmentalists may argue that such a drastic cut in fuel duty could cause massive detriment to achieving the carbon emission reductions that have been targeted.  Our argument though would be that there should be a whole policy & strategy in place to achieve reduced emmissions, and a reliance upon fuel duty as a big stick to hit motorist with isn’t a strategy.

The recession and the credit crunch have shown both UK businesses and households just how easy it is to incorporate energy saving methods into their daily lives.  This doesn’t need to change simply because the cost of fuel has gone down.  Instead it should be demonstrated that if people carrying using the alternative transport methods, wiser car buying, and other fuel saving techniques then this gives them the opportunity for the fuel duty cut to put real cash in their pockets.

So….

 

Dear Alistair Darling,

We as ordinary households, owners and employees of the UK’s small businesses, are writing to you to urge a 10p cut in fuel duty, for the purposes of helping low income households, and small businesses that are trying hard to continue business during these testing economic circumstances………….

(Image from www.taxthefish.com)

Citylink Results show hope for Rentokills Parcel Division

Citylinks Q3 results recently published show that although the company is still a major loss making company, it is reversing some of the trends that have contributed to its previously stuggling history.

Citylink states that it still on course to make a £45 million loss for the 2008 year, however it is pleased to say that the losses are reducing by £1m per month due to cost reducing strategies including reducing the vehicle fleet by 10% and employee numbers by around 1000 during the last year.

A major turnaround as far as Citylink is concerned is concerning customer service.  In the year to April 2008 Citylink made £20m worth of credits to its customers, for late or non deliveries, breakages, losses etc.  Improving customer service has been a major target for Citylink, and recent results indicate that Citylink is now providing a 99% on time service, which is operational excellence as far as the parcel industry is concerned, as a result credits to customers for the next twelve months are expected to be 75% lower at only £5m.

All of this has been acheived in what Alan Brown (CEO of Rentokill) describes as a “rawly flat” market, with a worsening revenue trend.

The challenge for Citylink, and all of the parcel networks, will be delivering the Christmas parcels. 

Traditionally the spending for Christmas starts in November, and November’s parcel volumes show the start of the Christmas rush.  This year however, it looks as if November’s parcel numbers will show little or no increase on Octobers.  Alan Brown voices concern that there could be a “huge surge” in the last two weeks of December, and that the logistics and distribution industries are on “tenderhooks” waiting for the seasonal uplift to start.

The overall statement that sums up the entire industry very well is that it is in a “complicated situation”.  And that is a fair summary.

Digital Information will need a revolution in the classrooms

Microsoft commonly quote that “By 2010 the amount of digital information in the world is set to double every 72 hours.”

Blogging has now become mainstream with virtually all business having a blog with their website, and social networking means that pretty much everybody has at least 2 or 3 profiles.

The skills that we will need to cope with the mass of digital information are very different from the skills that anyone older than current school age will have been taught.  Traditional education centres around teaching information, and the student learns that information, and carries it around in their head.  Over time, recall of the precise detail of the information weakens, but the student still “knows” enough about it to go and refresh their knowledge through google, the web, or even still books.

In the future, the skills required will be centred around retreiving & gathering information rather than learning it.  And most importantly, about filtering information.

A google search on a general subject matter such as “Gordon Brown” currently returns about 15 million matches.  If we follow the logic we will soon have 30m matches, and then 60m…..etc etc. 

So how do we know which ones are right and which ones are wrong, which are fact and which are fiction, which are opinion and which are source documents.

When you can carry around the whole internet in your pocket, accessing it all in a second off your phone, or ipod or ultra portable laptop you don’t need to be able to remember vast quantities of facts and dates. 

Our mainstream schools currently teach ICT as a module, a specific subject taught in a classroom, learning word processing, spreadsheets, a bit of access, a bit of basic code, and if you are very lucky, photo and video editing etc.  Fundamentally, ICT lessons are not that different to those taught 10 or even 15 years ago.

ICT needs to disappear from the curriculum, and just be taken into every lesson in the same way that “writing” is.  Be viewed as a tool rather than a subject matter.  We teach our children how to hold pencils, and how to form their letters, how to read from left to right.  We now need to extend that approach to digital skills.

Will future educators teach children how to touchtype (will they even need to be able to type), how to form searches, how to skim read vast quanties of data and extract the one relevant bit.  How will the examination process work, what use in the digital world is an qualification about recalling information?

One thing is certain, the debate on education in the digital future is just starting.

Megatrends of Gaming – Article (3) – Merchandising

This post is a discussion of the the Megatrends of Game Design, written by Pascal Luban.  When it comes to merchandising Luban states;

“Today’s games feature rich and popular universes, which may yield products taking many forms: action figures, manga and comics, ornaments, school supplies, ringtones, animated series or evan novels, theatrical screenplays, or the much wider boradcast of video game tournaments.”

“I am convinced that we will get there.  Some games will give more compelling shows than others, in the sense of being watched and understood by the viewers”

Again this is nothing particularly new, it’s just something that the next generation games should take on board at the conception phase as opposed to the “cash cow” phase.  Tomb Raider is probably the computer game that springs to most people’s mind as the first to take computer game characters into the cinematic world.  There have been others, see here before, and many many others since, although none of them have really had the box office sucess of the Lara Croft films.

The reason why so many video games progress well into cinema is the lack of plot.  When gamers are playing their game they are caught up the action of the game, the stages that they need to do to progress, the objects they need to collect, etc etc etc.  This doesn’t make rivetting cinema, infact it’s probably as exciting for someone else to watch as a dash around tescos.  And this is the issue that needs to be addressed if games designers and publishers want to get the most out of the merchandising.

The leading MMORPG games seem to have the merchandising far more nailed.  With World or Warcraft merchandising carefully controlled by Blizzard, but including models, cards, t-shirts & clothing, books, soundtracks, pc peripherals, board games and strategy guides.  Oh yes, and a $100m budget movie currently in production.

The MMORPG have much more scope for merchandising than the traditional shot and slash type of games, because plot is what the games are all about.  There may even be the risk, that despite spending $100m on the film that true World of Warcraft fans and players may be disappointed, because the whole MMORPG concept is built around the players fantasies and imagination – will it be as good when it makes it onto the big screen?

Uwe Boll who applied to Blizzard for the role of director in the World of Warcraft movie, about making a true and faithful adaption of a film;

“You go for it, to please the game fans, but on the other hand if you have the hard core gamers, they live in their own world. And you cannot fulfill their ideas from a video game based movie, it’s impossible. 

For games to move effortlessly between film, product, game and online virtual communities there needs to be a plot, something that the player can associate with, can internalise, not just scores & results.