A GameCultural Tour of Brazil, Part 1

Last month, business brought me to Brazil. I spent most of December wandering the country; talking to members of the industry and gamers alike. In Brazil I found something completely different than anything I could possibly expect. 

  

Often Brazil is overlooked as a force in game culture. When we think of nations that impact gaming at large we think of Japan, the United States, Korea, and perhaps, China or the EU.  South America as a whole isn’t even on our radar, at least in the US, but it should be.

 

When I began to prepare for my trip to Brazil I started by asking about within the industry here for information on the games industry down there. Over and over I heard the same thing “it doesn’t exist” or “they’re like China except without the money”. People I spoke to thought of Brazil only as a backwater pirate nation where the PS2 had just gotten its official release and legitimate copies of games were impossible to sell. Like all stereotypes, there is some truth to these statements, but, like all stereotypes, that grain of truth covers a much greater lie.

 

One of my first stops was at the Center for Technology and Society at the Fundação Getúlio Vargas Rio de Janeiro Law School (henceforth referred to simply as FGV).   The school, is an internationally recognized center for intellectual property policy (they shepherd the Creative Commons international project) and have recently set up a division looking into how games, as an emerging medium, will be dealt with in the years to come. 

 

At FGV there was an amazing dialogue going on about games’ need to be classified as art in order to fall under the freedom of speech protections that all other artistic mediums enjoy in most first world nations. It was a question that was alive and active for them. A question not merely philosophic but legal and immediate. This lead me on my the first steps of my journey discovering game cultural in Brazil.

 

With the help of some intrepid students (Arthur Protasio, I speak of you) I spent a week walking through Rio, trying to understand how games were viewed. I found a sharp, but encouraging divide.

 

As a whole the non-game playing populous still sees games as an activity for children. They see them only as an entertainment; a potentially dangerous and morally degrading one at that. This group is the vast and overwhelming majority…but they are by no means the totality.

I saw museums where games were placed next to great paintings or sculptures. I saw an incredible high school whose function was to prepare students for the technological culture of the future through the medium of game.  I saw nascent game development programs in every university I visited… and I saw research, a great deal of research, about the impact of games as a cultural force.

 

The government of Brazil is a strange and bi-polar thing (as perhaps all democratic governments are). On the one hand, poorly worded draconian bills banning games appear whenever someone needs to score political points with the rural populous, on the other hand they have more grants for serious games and research regarding the cultural aspects of gaming than we do in the United States (this may be on overstatement as I don’t have exact numbers but I’m confident in relation to GDP this is absolutely true).

 

This means that the serious games industry is better developed in Brazil than in the United States and better funded. Not only does this in turn mean that they are creating better educational games and social games than I often see come out of the US but it also means they have another advantage, the opportunity to be fun.

 

In the media I’ve often bewailed fact that the educational/progressive games industry and the entertainment games industry are two separate industries in the United States. This isn’t true in Brazil. Brazil’s internal entertainment games industry is underdeveloped, so many of the people who in the US would gravitate towards the entertainment side of the industry have entered the edutainment/progressive games field in Brazil. This means that as the internal Brazilian entertainment industry begins to take shape many members of the progressive games industry will migrate over and the exchange between the two will blur the lines until there is only one industry in Brazil, busy creating fun games that matter.

 

Games right now aren’t an economic force in Brazil, they aren’t big business (at least not legitimately) and so those who desire to create games do so for the love of the medium, for they are not well remunerated. While this is in many ways tragic, it breeds creativity and a willingness to experiment. Developers in Brazil aren’t constrained by any of the traditions or mindsets that the more established industries of other countries have become locked into.

 

The small size of projects (no one is taking sixty million dollar risks in Brazil) and the general spillover from the progressive games industry go to further this general attitude of seeing game creation as an artistic endeavor. Of course, like all arts, 90% of what gets turned out by these first halting steps of a rudimentary industry will be terrible, but this does not prevent that last 10% from having a lasting impact on our medium and perhaps even on humanity in general.