Lecturer and researcher in the Department of Sociology at NUI Maynooth, Aphra Kerr is also founder of GameDevelopers.ie and over the course of the last decade has been one of the most reliable voices on the subject of the gaming industry in Ireland.

In 2002 she was behind the research document ‘Loading …Please Wait: Ireland and the Global Games Industry’ which included 15 face to face interviews with representatives of companies including Funcom, Havok, Kapooki, Eirplay and Vivendi alongside government agencies, retail and media commentators.

‘Operation Flashpoint’ – one of the games Havok has been involved in. Will they hire many more Irish employees in the near future though?

In that report, she estimated that there were just over 300 people employed in the games industry in Ireland. Kerr was co-author of another report from last year – simply entitled ‘The Games Industry in Ireland 2009’ – in which she estimates that the games industry here had expanded to 1,277 full time permanent employees plus 170 contractors and twenty-two freelancers.

Her book ‘The Business and Culture of Digital Games: Gamework/Gameplay’ was published in 2006 by Sage publications, while other recent publications include this year’s collaboration with Stefano De Paoli entitled ‘We Will Always be One Step Ahead of Them’ which is a case study on the ‘Economy of Cheating in MMORPGs’.

Komplett talked to her about the health, or lack thereof, of the Irish gaming industry, how to expand the industry and what she would do if she were put in charge of making things happen in this sector.

Why did you set up GameDevelopers.ie initially?

I set it up nearly eight years ago as my post-doc research in DCU was on games and the games industry.  Then coming out of writing up ‘Loading …Please Wait’ we realised that the games companies didn’t really know each other and there was obviously a need for them to start networking and maybe share information.

So, that was where GameDevelopers came out of. I got two students from DCU to help me and also some funding from different companies and we set it up. It went live in April 2002 so it’s just about to become eight years old.

In terms of the gaming industry, considering you did a follow up document last year as well, how different is the gaming business landscape here now to what you found in 2002?

There are a few of the same players, obviously Microsoft is still here and still involved but there’s been a lot of change in terms of the companies, the multinationals who have come in, some of which have been bought out; then new Irish companies which have been established and subsequently bought out like Havok and Demonware. From a technology generation standpoint too obviously things have changed quite a bit there, with mobile games and other leaps forward.

We have a new generation of iPhone apps companies, companies starting to look at browser, social and casual games. The one or two companies that we did have at that time in the console/PC games space we don’t have any longer so there’s been a lot of change. Microsoft is one of the few companies that are still around and still doing what they did at that time which was localisation.

According to Kerr's 2009 research, of those working in the games industry here, a great number are not Irish.

Recently Dublin-based Havok created 26 jobs in the US “because the quality of talent coming out of computer science” is not what they would like in Ireland. Is that a sign that we’re really falling down in some areas despite a decade of growth in people working in the games industry?

Well Havok are involved in a very specialised space obviously with middleware and software development for game development companies, so they have a very particular high-end technical need. Though the fact that they can’t source their workforce with the particular skills they’re looking for here clearly signals there may be some gaps.

But I don’t think that would apply to all game development given all the different areas of game development which we have now so I think we probably have the skills to move into certain areas but there are perhaps niche areas that we may not providing or we may not have the kind of adequate graduates for.

Can moves like the creation of DIT’s new gaming MSc help in that regard?

Well I don’t think any one course will ever create an industry, we’ve now had ten years of trying to build things up… I mean when I started my research, that would be the other thing that concerned us, the only course that were available would have been the Diploma course in Ballyfermot and maybe one other. Now, every IT in the country and practically every University have either a stream within an undergraduate computer science degree, and/or perhaps a Masters that’s relevant.

Whether you’re looking at the programming side, whether you’re looking at the design side or whether you’re looking at the animation side there’s work going on. Then obviously the other courses which would feed in to gaming such as localization, there are now a lot of courses across all the institutions in the country.

If Bertie Ahern can get tax free exemption for his autobiography surely a few games developers should benefit too.

There was a suggestion on the Your Nation Your Call website to give games developers artist status and in turn tax exemption, could something as radical as that help develop the industry here?

Well other countries are doing it, it’s just been announced in the UK budget that they’re looking at tax relief, the French Government give tax relief on game development and both the Canadian and South Korean governments give support so it’s not a particularly ‘out there’ suggestion.

Going back to the roll of these games courses though, we obviously need people with the appropriate skills so, that’s one element of helping to grow a games industry we also need people with the business skills and we need the seed and enterprise capital so while a course will provide one element – provided its content is appropriate and they keep up to date with what’s happening in the industry –there are the other elements, the other players have to provide. I would think that more could be done in regards to public agencies to support the development of indigenous companies in this space.

Is that help from public agencies happening at all in your opinion?

The multinationals coming in here seem to be attracted by various things that are here and the numbers that are coming in would suggest that the IDA is marketing the country well in that respect. We have Activision for instance, so that shows some work is being done to get the right people here.

For the indigenous start ups though, I still think that we should be looking at what the challenges are for these companies in terms of establishment, in terms of publishing, in terms of distribution because this is a global market space. They’re not developing these products for the Irish market per se. So, potentially these companies can be the high value added, or whatever the latest buzz word is, ‘high potential international start ups’ or whatever. Anyway they’re intentionally focused, they’re service industries and it can be an application or it can be a game distributed over the web. We have to see what are the challenges for these companies and see where we can help them to generate jobs.

It’s not just games, it’s other areas of digital media as well but you do find that it’s difficult to get the seed capital to get particularly bigger projects off the ground.

The Government seems to have a steering group for everything these days but if you were to sit on one that was developing the games industry what would be the first things on your agenda?

I would probably have some sort of seed funding similar to what the Irish Film Board provides to film and animation so that developers can get to a stage where they can have a product that they can pitch to the international market. I think for original IP projects we need to have some supports in place so that companies can get to stage where they can pitch it to international publishers certainly.

Then there’s obviously companies who should be pitching for service work which is not original IP work. There’s different things that can be done to help the industry and also to get students who are coming out as graduates to gain some experience and get some projects into their portfolio so that can start building things to pitch internationally.

I think for graduates who want to create games for the console space, not casual games, but TripleA type games, you’ll have to go abroad to the UK or Canada increasingly. However, it’s no bad thing if we can get them back when they have experience and they can set up teams and bring that back with them it’s something we need to keep an eye on I think.