empower
“Permission to switch off. I never thought about it like that – how beneficial is that! so simple. So effective.”
Wates Group
Creative Scotland, the national agency for the arts, screen and creative industries north of the border is launching a campaign to research and understand the country’s video games and interactive sectors more fully.
In previous years, the organisation has carried out full sector reviews for film, literature, music, dance, theatre and visual arts. These reviews have been large-scale, consultant-driven and generally focused upon using publicly available data to highlight the size, structure, growth and issues facing each of the different areas of the arts.
The problem has been that the projects have been top-down, carried out by people without any internal knowledge of the industry in question and have ignored hard research in favour of using existing data sets.
This has caused some problems in the past, with several sectors questioning the relevance and the outcome of their review and highlighting the fact that much of the publicly available data does not accurately reflect the industry in question – or at least misses significant parts of it.
To counter this, Creative Scotland, Scottish Enterprise and the Scottish Games Network (us!) are collaborating to carry out a survey which is far smaller, more focused and directed specifically at those people working in and around the games sector.
This will take the form of a short, simple online survey which will help to identify and categorise the various companies, organisations and individuals working in the Scottish games scene – full-time, part-time and freelance.
To kick things off, Creative Scotland is holding a briefing session in Edinburgh on October 15th 2015.
The event is free to attend, though space is limited, so anyone interested should register on EventBrite as soon as possible.
It takes place at:
Grassmarket Community Project
86 Candlemaker Row
EH1 2QA Edinburgh
United Kingdom
We’d urge you to attend. The games sector in Scotland has not yet had any sort of official research into its size, constituent parts, work focus, or the way it’s evolving.
Please try to make it along and find out more about the plans to make sure Scotland’s games industry is fully understood and can benefit from the best possible support from the government, parliament and public sector.
See you there.
