RAND and the EU tackle online games

OFCOM is the UK telecommunications watchdog group — independent, but chartered by the government to “further the interests of consumers” as regards telecommuncations of all sorts: TV, radio, spectrum, and high-speed data networks (meaning, the Net).

Last December, the EC proposed some new regulations for basically all forms of video; anything that provided a moving picture to the audience, basically. I gather there has been some controversy about the proposals, because they basically extend the practices of TV regulation to fields such as mobile video, games, and streaming video.

So OFCOM hired RAND Europe to do a study. It’s 200 pages. You can read the high level summary here: Assessing Indirect Impacts of the EC Proposals for Video Regulation.

The bottom line is that RAND comes down on the side of as little regulation as possible. From the summary:

As for online games, RAND Europe finds that this industry is global, and that the added value activity of creating and developing games is highly ‘portable’. This industry is therefore highly susceptible to increases in regulation in one territory, however small, especially when that regulation does not have parallels in other territories where development activities could easily be shifted RAND Europe recommends that serious consideration be given to excluding online games altogether from the scope of the AVMS Directive.

There’s 200 pages, but here’s a relevant bit pulled out from the middle:

[I]nhabitants have as many choices of behaviour as people in the real world: they can simply choose not to view the content. In fact, they have to seek out the content by going to the BBC’s territory in order to see the stream. There are more layers of self-censorship available than in the linear TV world. As with TV, they can switch off their PC altogether; and parents can prevent children who have logged in from viewing objectionable material, or from using the programme at all. Users can not only stop watching the content; they can go to other parts of the world, they can stop the software programme and exit that world. There are many points at which ‘virtual worlders’ can cease viewing adult or offensive content. Media literacy is a vital element in this.

Virtual worlds can be expected to contain as much objectionable material as the human mind can fantasise, just as in the real world. In the same way as an adult can walk into a video or DVD shop and buy material unsuitable for broadcast, the same can be done within a virtual world. It is community and individual self-regulation and the normative values of a group which are a much greater regulator of behaviour than law. Criminal and contract law continue to exist in virtual worlds, but regulation of the individual video provider would appear to be highly cumbersome, and either impossible or prohibitively expensive to enforce.

Placing barriers to European growth in this market could have significant impacts. The moving of game hosting servers outside Europe (or new initiatives not developing a physical European presence) may have a limited economic impact individually, but games development and support offices are of greater importance and the investment decisions are linked.

This is in interesting contrast to the recent experiences of a GamesIndustry.biz writer (this is from the newsletter — I can’t find a web link for it):

…one friend of mine turned on her Nintendo DS recently to discover that the latest inhabitant of her Animal Crossing village was a pink elephant in a swastika shirt who said “sieg heil!” at the end of every sentence. While not exactly impressed, she took it rather well – and a little investigation traced the origins of the offending creature to its origins. It transpired that it had been created by someone she didn’t know and had never even heard of, and had hopped through four DS consoles before arriving on hers.

Perhaps overly restrictive devices on the part of the developers and operators can actually make it harder to avoid this sort of content.

Open question: can the general public actually tolerate the sort of openness that RAND proposes?