Gaming industry set to surge in India

CHENNAI, INDIA: From playing video games years back to doing professional courses in order to caricature your own games, it couldn’t get bigger than this. The story of Indian IT industry has been legendary but over the years, East European countries and the United States have been successful in developing models in the video animation domain.

Gaming as a culture

With gaming and animation industry entering a serious phase, India too joined the bandwagon with movies such as Hanuman and the much talked about Ghatothkach, developed indigenously.

Analysts believe that India has a lot of catching up to do in terms of regularly churning out films, characters that are driving games etc.

While the west has well developed gaming and developing domains, does our nation find to itself in the crossroads? Is India beginning to accept gaming as a culture?

Many answer in the affirmative.

Atindriya Bose, country manager, Sony Computer Entertainment avers, “From being looked upon with certain amount of doubt, gaming has come a long way towards becoming a mainstream entertainment. It has cut through the cultural barrier and is becoming more and more acceptable across the consumer segments.”

“Indian audience is now participating across the range. With the advent of social gaming, people are now using gaming consoles towards creating impromptu singing competition and quizzing contests, things that can be done in groups as unadulterated fun.”

A serious game this

Undoubtedly, gaming and animation today are a serious business and rake in high moolah for companies specializing in this segment.

Rajasekhar, vice president, HR and Operations for Crest Animation Studios points, “The profession of entertaining be it via gaming or animation is definitely a serious profession.”

An important element arising now is the need to ingrain animation into the curriculum. Pundits believe in the ardent need to expose students and encourage them to develop their game creating skills.

“One of the big issues here is the education model, which focuses a lot on mugging up and reading everything in the book and writing it back in the exam. The IT specialists in India have great technical skills that can work to a specification but they cannot generate a specification. The next of Indian software industry has to be that they have to become developers of their own intellectual property,” points out Prof. Lachlan MacKinnon, head of School of Computing and Creative Technologies, University of Abertay Dundee in Scotland.

This is important because MacKinnon feels-- “If they (India) do not, someone else will come and say that at lower cost we can do the same thing. It is more in digital media where you constantly need creative talent and fresh ideas. Part of that is definitely changing the way people are taught. Potential of that to happen through state university is very unlikely. They are very much driven by the fixed model.”

Analysts aver that there is an ardent need to develop new centers.

The University of Abertay Dundee is already working with the government of Maharashtra in creating new institutes and looking at how to develop creative process. “The way we do it is focusing at early stages on student experience their capabilities of problem solving by working in teams with different backgrounds. On our campus we have 75 different nationalities, so the outcome is that we have lot of different culture experience coming on together,” says MacKinnon.

Change in mindset

Many believe that parental mindsets have to change in order to shape their children’s career moves and that could go a long way in perhaps building gaming and animation as an attractive career opportunity.

Rajasekhar enthuses, “Today’s parents are much more aware and well informed; they are encouraging and supportive of the child’s desire. The future would see more of such parents, who would support the child’s career aspirations irrespective of the choice that he/she make. It is therefore imperative to focus all the energies and strategies towards educating, and generating the awareness amongst the workforce of the future, the future human resource pool who would be living and experiencing the amazing possibilities of the 3D CGI technology instead of the parents.”

A roadblock for India stems from the fact that India, at the moment does not have degree programs in animation and digital media games. But worldwide, it is a massive industry growing at the blitzkrieg speed.

MacKinnon believes that gaming unlike software engineering or semiconductor manufacturer could be done anywhere at lowest possible data as it is ingrained in human experience and culture which has a local as well as global nature.

“We are helping to develop programs in India with institutes offering courses in these things. We will be seeing a massive growth in mobile games.” The university is working with colleges in India and in China.

“In the last 18 months to two years India has shown interest in our gaming program. Films like Hanuman have had a great effect in terms of thinking about Indian product in a video animation model,” says MacKinnon.

The mindset needs to change if India is to become a gaming development destination and the faster this happens, the better it is for the young Indian population that has over the years feasted on the Walt Disneys of the world.