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in Future Skills highlighting the need for particular skills and the need to
adapt third-level courses (McNaboe 2005).
As an academic I can hardly be an independent commentator on the issue
of universities supplying industry-relevant skilled graduates. However, as
one who has studied the games industry for the past ten years what I feel is
missing from this debate is a discussion of why the industry has problems
attracting and retaining experienced staf . If we move away from skills to
focus on workers we bring in a dif erent perspective. Might the skills short-
ages have something to do with working conditions in the industry, remu-
neration, training and accreditation (Kerr 2011)? What is also missing is an
acknowledgment that this industry already has a very highly qualifi ed work-
force, according to Skillset, with 80 per cent having achieved a degree while
the average for the wider creative industries is 57 per cent. Thus what the
industry appears to be suggesting is that university graduates do not have the
“particular” skills that certain sections of their industry require and it does
not want to have to pay higher salaries to attract/retain those people into the
industry from other sectors or to compete with growing industries in other
countries or engage in training themselves. A survey of twenty-four game
companies in 2010 in the UK found that the fi rst comparative disadvantage
for games companies in the UK was labour costs, followed by the low qual-
ity of education and skills shortages (Bakhshi and Mateos-Garcia 2010, 4).
The fact that labour costs were top is revealing. Although there are prob-
ably instances where certain colleges and universities may have inadequate
resources and experience to teach certain aspects of video games, the larger
debate over whether or not universities are about training or about educa-
tion looms large. What is missing from this debate is any questioning of the
relative role of third-level educational institutions and the industry itself in
“training” workers. Should universities in particular be training graduates
narrowly for particular jobs or giving them a broader education to prepare
them for a career in a highly volatile industry?
CONCLUSION
At present game companies in the UK and Ireland are involved in all areas of
the games production value chain, and changes in the global games indus-
try in terms of technology and restructuring have had a signifi cant impact
over the last decade. The UK is still a signifi cant development location in
European and global terms both in relation to employment and revenues
in real terms. However, it is clear that the growing presence of multina-
tional publisher/developers (employing over half of employees by some esti-
mates) is fostering a sense of greater precariousness and a discourse which
focuses on labour costs, talent/skills gaps, government supports and the
need for greater IP protection. In the last section of this chapter we have
tried to point to anomalies and contradictions in the discourse of the trade
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