Games Workshop co-founder and industry legend Ian Livingstone, currently acting as the British government’s Creative Industries Champion, claims that we are living in the “second golden age of games”.
During a talk at the BFI Video Games Day in London, Livingstone praised titles like Minecraft and League of Legends for proving that anyone can make a successful game, but also claimed the industry still has work to do in order to be taken seriously by mainstream culture.
“Now is the second golden age of games,” Livingstone said. “Anybody can make a game in their own creative, cultural way, in a less formulaic way than some console games, in order to find new audiences.”
Regarding the bad press the industry still gets, he added; “Games have always had a bad press. Since the invention of chess, history has not been kind to games. Grand Theft Auto V was the absolute embodiment of science meeting art. It should’ve been put at the forefront of the British games industry as a success, but instead it was castigated by the mainstream press.”
Livingstone went on to warn of the negative impact of mobile game saturation, such as the endless Angry Birds imitators available, but in general the talk was a very positive one. As you’d expect from an event celebrating the video games industry.
