A Sticky Situation

Hide your kids, this discussion is gonna get blue.

For a start, you should read this article by Paul Bernal. It covers the main points of the issue I'm addressing far more intelligently than I could and fairly succinctly highlights all the issues such a motion could raise beyond the "well-meaning" original intentions. I am fully in agreement with what he says and I don't think I'll look to cover any of these points here.

But there is something I want to add regarding the "moral pressure" apparently present that has brought forward this push.

Our Glorious Leader has made his bold and totally vapid stance in the name of protecting children from corruption. The outcries of parents everywhere for a safer world for their kids has been heard, and it has been taken on board. Kids will no longer have to fear the necrotic and toxic presence of pornography online. Thank God.

But who is it that has worked so tirelessly to secure such a bright future for our young ones. Which champions of decency have brought forth salvation to our decrepit lands. What's that? The Daily Mail and The Sun?

It's been mentioned a lot in my online social circle. The irony... no, wait. That's far to light hearted and innocent a term. The SHEER-FUCKING-HYPOCRISY of these two bastions of sleaze shutting down the presence of naked peeps on the Internet is too much to bear. Can we so simply overlook The Sun's daily breasts on Page 3? Or The Mail's horrendously creepy stories that tend to centre on how attractive infants are becoming? Quite frankly, if we're taking moral advice from these bastards, I don't want to be innocent.

But this is not the time to be debating the morality of pornography, (Summary: It has dodgy parts. But, for the most part, it's just people having sex. Are we back to saying sex is immoral again? Because, no.) Now is the time to be questioning just why people should have to take an extra effort to partake in a fairly normal endeavour with absolutely no moral questionability whatsoever, just so lazy, half-arsed parents don't want to put any extra effort into bringing up the kids they are so clearly unsuited to raise.

Because there is yet more depressing irony to the notion that a Prime Minister who spent so much time claiming he would bring discipline back to the younger generations would be doing so much to actually alleviate the responsibility of those who actually need to be sorting this out. Parents. It's not all parents. It's obviously not all parents. Dad's all across the country are probably feeling a bit uneasy right now. But I also assume/know there will be a lot of parents who don't want this. But no-one listens to the majority. They don't need to complain.

I was lucky. I had sensible (well... ish) parents who understood that kids will do all the things that they have done, and the best means of "protecting" children from inevitable experiences is to actually explain these things reasonably and sympathetically.

Sadly, this is not a universal trait. There is that minority of parents who just leave their kids in the dark, and assume its everyone else's job to keep kids in check. This has been felt in schools, where parents blame teachers for the behaviour of their own kids, and in the rise of aggression in kids today (admittedly an assumption, but hard to deny). So when these parents take that rare and fleeting moment to actually take notice of their kids and find that they have seen a pair of boobs on the Internet, then it's obviously Google's fault. Nothing to do with a lack of attentiveness on their part. It's the same argument that was bandied about against gay marriage: "How do I explain this to my kids?" Maybe just by talking to them for once.

As a gamer, this is nothing new. Every week, it seems, there's some parent group bemoaning Grand Theft Auto or Call of Duty for teaching their kids to be violent. This is, of course, utter bullshit. I've played GTA since the London edition, and all it's taught me is that, after 7 or 8 games, GTA gets kind of tired. But still, you get the same, tired Mums Groups that write in to say video games should be banned; never seeing the fact that, if they just stopped buying them the damn things, there wouldn't be a problem.

But no, they have ranted and raved for tougher action and so now everyone has to be labelled a perve for having to stick up their hands and ask for porn. I await with baited breath for the inevitable news story that suggests someone is guilty of a crime based purely on their having "opted-in" to mature content. Our Fearless Overlord even went as far to take a stab at Internet providers and search engines for not doing enough, despite filters already being in place for this very purpose and the ever adapting procedures for taking down and filtering abuse-based content from search results. Yet, at the same time, you can guarantee that The Sun will keep tits on Page 3 and The Daily Mail will continue to salivate over 8-year old girls because El Presidente won't want to bother his press pals any more after the mild inconvenience caused by Levenson.

In short, this whole issue has made me irate, infuriated and just a little nauseated. I can only hope that this news will shortly be followed by the now traditional Tory U-turn, or by the revelation that, in practise, nothing will be changed and all this was just a cheap PR exercise. But I fear the threat of censorship, I fear the potential scapegoating and, above all, I fear for a future that takes us back to the dark ages of 'no sex please, we're British,' of kids that get confused because they grow up with an understanding that sex is all shady and immoral.

I thought we had made an advance since those days.

Shut Up and Take My Money

The vast and unyielding demon of procrastination that is The Internet has always proven itself to be an almighty leveller. In an instant; the well respected and admired can be dragged down into disrepute through YouTube just as some loser, 12-year old Canadian with a dorky haircut gets catapulted into stardom on the next link over. Twitter has helped topple dictators and derailed legislation. The internet community has turned ruthless, unforgiving and does not take previous history into consideration.

And so, The Internet has made itself a remarkable example for meritocracy. For every person that is ostracised for a reprehensible act, there is an untapped talent drawing in a very devoted audience. The world of comics, for example, has changed dramatically with the works of Jerry Holkins, Mike Krahulik, Scott Kurtz, et al creating a huge online school of independent cartoonists with a huge following that has begun to rival the devotion to the physical side of comics, dominated by the Marvel and DC Universes. Holkins and Krahulik’s joint creation, Penny Arcade, has evolved into a powerful member of the industry as a whole, with their own convention, PAX, becoming comparable in popularity to the more prolific comic conventions like SDCC. Additionally, the internet has provided a platform for physical comics by independent creators to gain a higher platform through both cheaper and wider advertising mediums and pure word of mouth. By providing a window into every other part of the world, the internet has totally changed the playing field, let alone the goalposts, in terms of media distribution.

The improved influence of the internet has led to the advent of a potentially world-changing concept; crowd funding, the most prominent of these projects being Kickstarter. Since its birth in 2008, the Kickstarter project has been making headlines by showing just how far the rules have been altered. The delightfully reaffirming concept is this: Creators sign up to present a concept through Kickstarter in the hopes of raising money to fund the creation of their project, offering certain perks for various levels of donation. The general public can then peruse these projects and donate to the ones that seem most appealing/deserving. It has garnered overwhelming success. Up to April this year, the site had collectively raised over $170 million with over 20,000 successful projects. One project in particular really started to make people take notice, reaching some incredible landmarks along the way. It reached its set target in just nine hours, managed to raise over $1 million dollars in one day before eventually raising over $3 million by the end of its run. Of course, it may have had a helping hand from the fact that the man asking for the money was this guy called Tim Schafer.

Now, I have an awareness of Tim Schafer. I don’t have the extensive knowledge of his portfolio of work that those who generously donated would likely have but I’m slowly schooling myself to catch up with respected society. However, I have enough experience of his work to know the man is to be admired, having grown up on the Monkey Island games and then finally uncovering Psychonauts after seeing it for cheap on Steam (a common trait with Schafer’s games that has probably been the cause of his turning to Kickstarter). He started out as part of a highly prolific LucasArts games division until they gave up creativity to milk the Star Wars franchise for all it was worth, after which he went on to found Double Fine Productions, following Schafer’s tradition of creating unique concepts and ladling on heaps of absolutely surreal humour. A fantastic combination for enjoyable games, sadly it isn’t so much in terms of marketability. Double Fine’s most notable gaming offerings; Psychonauts and Brütal Legend, both failed to make much of an impact in terms of sales figures, leading to support for Schafer’s future projects becoming difficult to come by. The games have, however, gained a significant cult following. Smaller games have been produced since including the highly regarded Costume Quest and Stacking but these obviously were able to be produced with a much lower budget and were handled pretty much independently.

With this new project, Double Fine Adventure, Schafer is going back to his game-making roots with a point-and-click adventure game. By using Kickstarter, Schafer can raise the investment required without the ‘significant strings attached that can pull the game in the wrong directions or even cancel its production altogether,’ whilst letting the general public into some of the secrets of game production. A more democratic approach to games creation. The original target was a somewhat modest $400,000, at least in terms of the type of funding games usually require. The subsequent and overwhelming success of this fundraising, gaining over 85,000 backers to amass his highly impressive total, suggests he wields a significant audience that thinks Schafer is on to something good.

This presents an interesting question. What is the limit of Kickstarter fundraising? Another project, the E Paper Watch from Pebble, has recently broken the $10 million mark, 100 times more than the original goal set. Granted, the base price for the product and the various reward levels for Pebble were much higher than Double Fine’s and, thus, the average pledge was also much higher; $148 for Pebble, $38 for Double Fine. But this just means that if a good idea is presented attractively enough, people will put forward money for it to be made real. This isn’t too odd a concept, really. People always offer money for goods. Only, in this case, the money is paid first.

The only possibly surprising thing is the extent to which people have chosen to buy into the rewards above simply receiving the basic product, which require much higher contributions. Obviously, the lure of the additional perks plays a part in this but it is not a given; especially in current economic conditions. But, there is a precedent for this kind of generosity. When Radiohead released In Rainbows and gave buyers the option to name their price, including paying nothing, people still paid money, averaging roughly £4 per copy and taking more money than their previous album without including sales of the physical CD when it was released. If you give people the option to take something for free and nearly half still offer to pay money, it shows that there is clearly a strong belief in effort being rewarded.

So, what is to say we couldn’t see a major project, say a Hollywood quality film, finding at least the majority of its funding through a project like Kickstarter? Admittedly, a lot of hugely commercial projects, although that is certainly not the case for all (28 Days Later, for instance), require much, much more than the highest Kickstarter project so far but if the quantities raised continues to increase it would be interesting to see how much the level of project increases as well. Could the possibility of total creative freedom in their projects be an attractive enough prospect for someone like Terry Gilliam to take a punt and put their project on Kickstarter? And would it be successful? Online fundraising projects could, potentially, spark a new renaissance, unhindered by perceived marketability. In fact, it would be direct evidence of the true marketability of a project. If you can get people to pay for it before it’s even made, there is clearly demand for it. If they come anyway, then you should probably build it.