La. Trying to Lure Video Game Industry

BATON ROUGE, La. — Tax breaks have brought Hollywood’s movie industry to Louisiana. Now, the state wants to lure Hollywood’s video game industry.

Mark Smith, entertainment director for the state economic development department, said he aims to integrate video gaming into the state’s entertainment industry, bringing together music, film and digital production. He hopes to recruit video-game development companies already under contract with publishers or film studios, possibly connecting them to a Louisiana university to develop their products.

"Not many other states are doing this," Smith said. "It ties in so well with the film industry because a lot of major films coming out are marketed with video games."

Video games, with graphics, music and story lines, have assumed new prominence in the entertainment industry. The domestic video-game industry topped $13.9 billion in revenue last year, surpassing the domestic motion picture industry, said Marc Sherrod, director for game art and design at the Art Institute of California.

The movie and game industries are also intertwined. The games have essentially become an extension of Hollywood movies, or vice versa. Movies such as "Tomb Raider" and "Resident Evil" were originally video games. And large motion picture studios, like Walt Disney Co., have spun off their own game development companies.

"They broadcast the game at the same time as the movie, assuming the game sales would never be higher than when the movie comes out," Sherrod said.

Louisiana officials want to use tax credits to lure that market.

"One thing this program has taught us is that the transferable tax credit is a powerfully effective economic development tool," said Will French, president of Louisiana Production Capital, which buys tax credits from studios and sells them at a discounted rate to taxpayers.

"It works best if an industry is highly mobile, like video-game production," he said. "When I first heard ‘video-game production’ I sneered, then I realized it was a bigger industry than film."

But game companies will only come if Louisiana can produce skilled programmers and designers for them to employ to capture the tax credits. And such training must come from the universities, said Stephen Beck, director of the LSU Laboratory for Creative Technologies.

"If LSU were to do something like that, I think it would be a great boon to the university," said Beck, a digital music professor. "The nature of the curriculum demands that it crosses a lot of university lines. I don’t know if there’s critical mass of faculty interested in making something like this happen. But there’s no doubt we have a critical mass of students."

Chris Meyer, president of the Students’ Video Game Alliance at LSU, said he and other students got bogged down trying to persuade the university to introduce a full-fledged video-game-development curriculum. Anyone serious about working in the industry has to leave the state, Meyer said.

"The industry is not here," he said.

Game development takes place in southern California and New England, where universities teach the full spectrum of development, from computer programming to visual design.

"They have resources in the form of people – people coming out of the college that are trained," said Robert Perkins, a part-time game developer in Baton Rouge. "It’s easy to pick them up when they’re right there."

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Information from: The Advocate, http:// WWW.THEADVOCATE.COM