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Games Gap Closing After East-West Mission Media School Professor represents UK |
The 'East-West' divide in computer gaming is somewhat wider than we think but the games industries in Asia and Europe are working together in a bid to capture a share of each other's expanding markets.
Professor Peter Comninos, Director of Bournemouth University's National Centre for Computer Animation, recently returned from a UK Trade & Investment (UKTI) mission to the Far East related to the computer games industry.
The mission, aimed at strengthening relationships with key established and new games companies in Asia, gave Professor Comninos an insight into what makes games popular in the East and how centres of excellence like the NCCA can contribute to bridging the gap with the West.
"There are many differences between the actual games played in the East and West and how those games are played," says Prof Comninos. "Some of that has to do with design, colours and the cuteness of the characters which in a lot of Far Eastern games is commonplace; they also tend to build things in their games whilst we seem to invent some very nasty looking characters who destroy things in our games."
What also struck Professor Comninos was the way that games in the Far East are played.
"People in the Far East tend to enter the same virtual worlds to engage with each other whereas people in the West play more individualist games," he continues. "One particular service provider showed us live data from the network and in one case there were 120,000 Chinese users playing the same Massively Multi-player Online computer Game (MMOG) from home, all in the same virtual world at the same time."
One of the key challenges that Professor Comninos realised following his return to the UK is how to instil those cultural and international aspects in his own students who are seeking to make a name for themselves in the computer games industry.
"We've already had a number of opportunities to collaborate with Hong Kong and Chinese universities and we are teaching people from the Far East here in Bournemouth who will be producing for a different market than our own," he concludes. "The emphasis of our computer animation programmes in Bournemouth is not on games, as such, but computer animation in general but with about 40% of our undergraduates going into games as a career, we need to continue to look closely at how that industry shapes up around the world and ensure that we instil that culturalisation and internationalisation into all of our graduates."
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