REHABILIATING GAMERS’ IMAGE: A CONVERSATION WITH GAMER’S VOICE
As part of my games preservation research, I’m always on the look for any emerging (or existing!) groups that put a premium on political advocacy with the games industry. Videogame preservation is a field largely held up by non-institutional curators and archivists (fans), the vast majority of which are unpaid, unaffiliated and underappreciated. When I saw Gamer’s Voice come across my proverbial desk, I was intrigued by two things: their ties to the Stop Killing Games movement and the fact that they had a limited company already established.
Gamer’s Voice is a not-for-profit consumer advocacy group for game players set up by two friends Tom and James who met playing Magic the Gathering. They focus on issues that trouble the players of games rather than the makers of games. Games preservation is part of that but the group is also concerned about online safety regulations, campaigning for apprenticeships in the games industry, and the ways that game players are represented across the spheres of politics, media, and culture.
Gamer's Voices James Barker and Tom Shannon (L-R)
On their website it reads: “gamers face a unique challenge in the form of negative stereotypes—accusations that time is “wasted” playing games, or fearmongering about the supposed “harmful impacts” of gaming”.
The representation of ‘gamers’ is a thorny subject even in the most generous forums. Even using the word ‘gamer’ can act as a ritualistic chant to summon the most hateful, anime profile-picture-having commenter into your mentions. But Gamer’s Voice seems to be going about this rehabilitation of gamer identity differently: namely, like adults.
Managing Director James Baker spoke to me about Gamer’s Voice, their ties to Stop Killing Games, and representing the gamers in an inclusive and sensible way. The interview has been divided into topics and edited for clarity and brevity.
So what is Gamer’s Voice and what are you trying to achieve?
Gamer’s Voice came about because I had a background in digital rights campaigning. I've been doing digital rights campaigning for about 20 years. I've been doing a bit of frontline politics stuff, but also still interested in digital issues. I'm also a keen video game player as well and then I was aware of all the issues that gamers face, like heightened digital rights and consumer rights issues. It crosses over so much stuff in terms of how people's personal data is used, like copyright issues within gaming, ownership issues, issues around platform power, fair competition and how gaming is represented in the media which really bugs me. There's this kind of hostility that exists towards gaming that doesn't exist towards the other pastimes. And I think it's kind of a generational thing that is now changing as gamers who are millennials and Gen X are getting older, and get into positions of power. I still feel for gamers as a consumer group or identity that there isn’t any representation coming from the actual gamers themselves. There are angry internet movements that have popped up over time, but there's no kind of actual organisation doing proper advocacy for that group of individuals.
This is so different from other established industries. I use the analogy a lot of CAMRA (Campaign for Real Ale). There’s problems within the beer industry with the big pub companies, the big breweries and then there's a whole like CAMRA consumer movement around microbreweries, brewers and getting back to roots about the authenticity element of it. And I feel like similar things have happened with gaming where you've got this kind of involvement of the big mega publishers buying up studios, mothballing studios on purpose to write off the tax. Setting up a game, not caring about the devs, making games that the shareholders want rather than what the player base wants as well, and devs losing creative control over what they want to do from the big publishers. So I kind of felt like a load of those things mirror what happened for CAMRA and beer. So I felt like there was a kind of a market gap for a kind of consumer rights group or a digital rights group focusing on gamers.
What does your governance structure look like? How do you fund a gaming consumer rights NGO?
So we've got the not-for-profit limited company, we've got a [membership] structure where people can join us as supporters, and then that gives them a chance to vote for supporter directors. So we've got a plan to expand the board through a limited democratic model. And we want to expand it to have some non-exec directors. Our funding is literally just like a handful of people who started to become supporters, and we kind of want to build that up. But the other funding opportunities will come through Stop Killing Games’s reach. There is a chance that we're going to start doing some fundraising with them and they'll be able to give us a kind of grant as the UK NGO to work on SKG.
I've worked closely with Amnesty, Big Brother Watch, Liberty, and EFF., so I'm aware of how a lot of people do it with NGO funding models. Most have a kind of a split between donations, long term support and a subscription model, plus grant funding for particular projects. So we will be looking at grant funding opportunities for particular projects as well. But part of it depends quite a lot on who gets involved in it, what their interests are, it can take you in different directions as to the sort of grant funding you can apply for.
Can you walk me through your relationship with the Stop Killing Games Movement?
So we set Gamer’s Voice up and incorporated it in January this year. So, we're still in the early days, it took Tom and I till May to essentially launch, after finishing the site. And then upon launching, we reached out to Stop Killing Games. They’re in a position where they have a really big movement and they're having impact, and success, but they are still in the process of setting up their organisation . SKG has a decentralised network of people driven by Ross [Scott] as the founder, as well as volunteers, and a successful Discord to organise people, but they are still in the process of setting up the sort of structure that established political campaigns have. So as a movement we are in the process of creating national NGOs in different countries. There is one set up in America already. Mortiz, the General Director at SKG, asked if we wanted to take on the role of being the UK chapter, and act as Stop Killing Games UK. As our interests were aligned it made sense to Tom and I to team up and join the global movement. So Gamer’s Voice is an independent UK organisation with our own governance structure, but we're also the UK chapter of the Stop Killing Games campaign, and play a role in that global movement, or to put it another way Stop Killing Games is the umbrella campaign; Gamer’s Voice is the UK part of that organisation focused on domestic advocacy.
Games preservation is obviously a concern for a lot of game consumers, where does Gamer’s Voice position themselves in the preservation field?
Stop Killing Games started off being about game preservation but then wider issues started to affect the campaigns as well. One example is online safety. If all games are behind an age gate, then how can a small community group keep a kind of open source version of Red Alert alive if suddenly they have to do age-gating and comply with the Online Safety Act? We're not just anti-industry, we want to promote and work with the games industry as well. Sometimes we're going to be critical of practices, but actually we want to be constructive in terms of building a better gaming culture. And I think that there's a real challenge when it comes to game preservation. If you were to talk about other forms of art, whether it's literature or music or film, people would recognise that preservation is important.
You think of librarians, what is the equivalent of a librarian for games? I know there's museums, arcades and academics with an interest in this, and there are people doing it, but it's not very well funded by anyone. Where is the actual organisation doing preservation that is working with developers? Because part of it is like standard setting early on, right, in terms of what you can do early in cycles to ensure long term preservation. Someone needs to represent those interests and push back against that stuff politically and to try and advocate with politicians in a sensible way.
I imagine the idea of going about consumer rights for gamers ‘sensibly’ will draw criticism, especially from folks that might be suspicious in an environment where a lot of regressive political actors operate under the auspices of ‘consumer rights’.
I've already had some people criticise [us] and say that we don't need Gamergate with people in suits. But I think this is what we're trying to challenge. Because ‘gamer’, on the one hand, has a lot of negative connotations and there's like a cliche of teenage boys in their basement being angry about things. So part of what we want to do is improve the representation of gamers and gaming. But it is going to be difficult. And I think our stance on this is to kind of like to be sensible and mature about it. But we're going to get criticism by some people because [gaming] is a low trust community as well. So, like straight away, as soon as you had some MPs involved, we're having some people saying it's like inauthentic. But I've been playing games since the days of the Commodore 64, and what strikes me is that there's so many people out there who are gamers, but don't identify as gamers. But it's going to be a challenge for sure. We call this our‘upgrade the narrative’ campaign on the website. We want to focus in particular around sort of the benefits gaming has for disabled people and neurodivergent individuals. But it's interesting, there are some MPs now who are happy to come out and like to say they're gamers and associate with it so I think that does represent a shift.