This article is pretty much just as bad as Fox News is being accused of being.
To be honest if your going to "win" against opposition you need to do it by accepting the other side on it's own terms, not being even more bombastic in return. We also need to concede when the other side has legitimate points.
Commenting on "should the goverment be developing "Call Of Duty" " is a fairly valid statement to begin with, with the name largely being used because it's something people are familiar with. While "our boy" Brian Ambrozy, does make a comment about the funding going towards smaller studios, he fails to provide any counter examples of what would qualify and why, and for all comments about educational games and those "for the public good" he also fails to address how the gaming grants can guarantee that is going to happen... which to be honest he can't.
To be honest if I was on the other side I would have raped this guy three ways from sunday and make the beating he took here due to his own failures look petty in comparison. He's lucky that the guy he's debating against was so wrapped up in screaming about wastes of goverment dollars rather than the issue itself.
See, nothing prevents someone from using those federal dollars from making a game a lot like Call Of Duty, because by it's nature artwork can't be constrained by goverment standards in the US. Unlike nations like China where it holds onto the right to be exclusionary. There are cases of artists living off of goverment funds, and then producing works of "performance art" where they say paint an American flag on the bottom of a basin, urinate it, and then drop a cruicifix into the urine... and various other ridiculous things. Artists get blasted for a reason. You can defend the artistic merits of anything, and that includes something like "Call Of Duty" or "Super Mario Brothers", art is easy to project if you want to. Nothing prevents some guy from crating "Call Of Duty" and then calling it art to justify the goverment funding it's received. That funding does not mean that it's the sum total of everything invested in the game either.
By way of blasting this guy I'd have brought out a lot of indie titles like say Penumbra, or other horror works, or just indie games about killing minorities or slaughtering zombies. Then I would have given an artsy sounding pseudo-speil as if I was selling them. The point I could make is that the only real defense of games as artwork is that anything can be defended as artwork, and in this case in paticular it's far less likely to produce anything that would be generally accepted as artwork than other mediums.
Then of course I probabyl would have gotten into the tax ranting, to make the point that this is not the right time to be adding new mediums to be covered to federal artistic grants when we have trouble paying our national bills to begin with, especilly ones that are so dubious in the results they would acheive.
Don't misunderstand this, I'm not saying I'd be right, or I even agree with what "I" say above, just that it would be easy to do.
Truthfully this is pretty much "non news" in my mind as it came down to what seemed to be two, totally unprepared morons. "Our guy" who just seemed to give canned response right from when games were expected, and "their guy" who seemed mostly motivated by blasting anything and everything the goverment wanted to spend money on right now. Honestly I never got the impresison he was paticularly anti-video games or anything, he just didn't want to see the money spent. If we were at a differant time in the country's history with more money to spread around he might have even been fairly accepting.
Really the only noteworthy thing about the whole thing was Fox News' way of framing the debate by using "Call Of Duty" and really I don't think they were doing anything bad, they were just generating hype for the debate which is their job. Overall Fox News seemed to be neutral, and simply providing the platform and the attention grabbing elements, sure they WERE a bit over the top in talking about goverment funding of Call Of Duty, but really I can't fault that because if some guy wanted to use the $10,000 budget to develop a game like that, nothing stops him. What's more for all comments about big budget games, I don't think it's totally out there that we might see it happen and here is why:
The thing about gaming being defined as art is that it opened the door for various kinds of tax breaks. The most expensive thing about developing games nowadays, shooters in paticular, is buying the rights to the tool boxes like "Unreal", "Havoc Physix" and other assorted things. Rignt now we're probably going to see the companies making those tool boxes donating them to artists for good PR and of course sweet tax breaks (mostly the latter). The talent a lot of "AAA" games get can also be obtained by artists for free under a similar principle, movie studios, composers, etc.. will donate resources to artistic film makers, actors will donate their time (which is why you can get some big name people in student films), and all kinds of things, all because it's now again... a valid tax write off. There are like 15 minute art films out there done on a "shoestring budget" but actually have millions of dollars in resources invested in them all due to artistic donations of time and resources.
This is to say nothing of art communes, where there are basically hotels that provide free room and board for artists as long as they create. Granted the waiting lists for those can be pretty substantial, but it does mean that things like food and rent don't apply to various acknowleged artists. This is how some of these guys can live for 20 years without a job and only receiving a few thousand dollars a year for the goverment, and produce stuff, we just don't see it with gaming right now, but the door is open.
The point here being is that as bombastic as it was, Fox is actually right, the acceptance of games as art *IS* opening exactly that door. It's not just about the grant money, but everything else that goes with it. Also the costs, which the guy in the against column didn't explain himself well on, come from people donating resources and time instead of paying actual money, which means that the goverment is effectively giving up the money they would be receiving instead.
So basically we're probably going to see a lot of these "art games" winding up with the same basic tools the big boys play with, and no real requirements to prevent them from making something like "Call Of Duty" other than they find some way to justify it artistically, saying that "killing these terrorist scumbags is all about a man's journey to enlightenment through the appreciation of muzzle flash". There is no requirement such art be good, or even make sense. Heck, some artists get away with basically babbling and then saying "it's just too deep for you". Think of the ENN joke on an indie game conferance.
Also I can almost guarantee that big name game developers are probably going to be able to donate their time the way movie stars donate theirs down the road. Instead of paying taxes someone like say "Gabe Newell" could donate a few hours consulting on indie games and write it off of Valve's taxes. I wouldn't be surprised if they find some way of using the system to cut development costs by having games developed "artistically" with the money invested being covered through tax breaks, as a way of experimenting, so that way they effectively get their R&D for free and can then choose which projects to actually grab for non-artistic professional release.
I'm getting well away from the basic point, but the thing is that while Fox was being bombastic, they sort of do have a point. We're probably going to see indie games developing on a much higher level now, as the actual grant money is only the tiniest tip of the iceberg. Being accepted as art means it's now eligible for tax deductable donations.
