Office workers need to knuckle down and play hard

Oct 19 2008 By Dave Harte

I’ve got the answer to saving the West Midlands from the worst of the economic downturn. In the face of plunging stocks, beleaguered banks and a crippling credit crunch comes news that in the last year sales of computer games consoles have doubled.

Leading analysts expect the trend to continue with the Games Industry Magazine, The Edge, predicting that games software will be pretty much recession-proof as well.

Which of course is all great news for the West Midlands given that we have a fifth of the UK workforce for the games industry and a couple of the big players in Codemasters and Blitz.

It’s also pretty good news for me as I’ve long held that my willingness to spend hours and days and weeks absorbed in games that involve random (or indeed well planned and executed) acts of violence is all part of a larger strategy to keep the West Midlands afloat.

Every console you buy and every game you play is all part of keeping the UK’s, and therefore the West Midlands’, computer games industry afloat. It’s well known that mass entertainment does well in a recession – the boom in cinema-going in 1930s America taught us that.

The much-heralded shift to Serious Games and the riches expected to follow may be a red herring given that a key anticipated market for Serious Games, corporate training, is likely to be feeling the pinch itself. Now more than ever we should be getting behind our entertainment games market, it’s time to knuckle down and get some playing done.

Without a doubt we’ve got to tighten our belts: turn down the radiators a degree or two, walk where we would have used the car, use Aldi where we would have used Waitrose. Above all it’s a time to save those pennies and spend them wisely in our local video game store.

Because if we’re going to get through this then we need each and every one of us sat in front of our consoles brutally slaying Russians in the Leamington Spa-produced Operation Flashpoint.

Workers – get up from your desks and head for home – your region needs you.