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It took little Becker College in Worcester to get Massachusetts elected officials to commit to action on boosting the videogame sector in the Bay State.
At a videogame forum at Becker today called MASSImpact, college President Robert Johnson got the state officials in attendance - including Lt. Gov. Timothy Murray, state Rep. Brian Dempsey of Haverhill and event co-host state Rep. Vincent Pedone of Worcester - to agree to convene a working group to see what the state can do to help the sector grow.
According to a Becker spokesperson, the first planning meeting for establishing the working group has already been scheduled, and though he didn’t specify the date, it will be soon.
Pedone said the process started a few weeks back, when, in advance of the forum, he brought House Speaker Rep. Robert DeLeo to Becker to see first hand the game design program called by the Princeton Review as the No. 1 in New England and the No. 4 overall in the country. According to Pedone, DeLeo was so impressed by that and the fact that the already $2 billion sector in Massachusetts is projected globally to grow by more than 10 percent annually, that he said support for the sector needs to get into the next budget cycle.
The forum was split into three panel discussions. The first was a look at how a successful cluster had already grown in Worcester, the biotech cluster. On that panel was Jack Healy, director of the Massachusetts Manufacturing Extension Partnership; Kevin O’Sullivan, president and CEO of Massachusetts Biomedical Initiatives; Patrick Larkin, director of the MTC John Adams Innovation Institute; Elizabeth Higgins, founder and CEO of GlycoSolutions; and Mark Claypool, director of the game design program at Worcester Polytechnic Institute.
The second panel brought the issues home, featuring game industry experts including Hank Howie, president of Blue Fang Games; Monty Sharma, general manager of Vivox; Ken Surdan, vice president of operations at Turbine; Jon Radoff, CEO of Disruptor Beam; and secretary of housing and economic development Greg Bialecki.
Radoff started the discussion off with a harsh assessment of the games sector in Mass. as No. 2 on the East Coast behind Maryland and probably in decline already. But he also said that the region had one feature that was far above other regions - the level of a smart, talented workforce. While Montreal today announced it had landed at 400-person location for game company THQ, Radoff noted: “I think the people of Montreal are perfectly smart, but they aren’t Massachusetts.”
Howie of Blue Fang concurred. “Game making infrastructure is almost pure talent,” he said.
The third panel was the politicians turn. In addition to moderator Pedone, Murray and Dempsey, the panel included Worcester City Manager Michael O’Brien; Terence Flotte, dean of UMass Medical School; and U.S. Rep. James McGovern. O’Brien stole the show early, calling Boston a “suburb city” of Worcester and inviting the legislators to designate Worcester as the test city for any game sector boosting ideas.
While the plan to start a working group was seen as encouraging by the game industry crowd in attendance, the current state of the sector was pretty discouraging, Radoff said.
“The videogame industry here has succeeded despite the state,” he said. “There aren’t a lot of things about Massachusetts that are attractive to game companies.”
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