bbc.co.uk Navigation

Rory Cellan-Jones

Vaz v Watson - Modern Warfare 2

  • Rory Cellan-Jones
  • 9 Nov 09, 12:46 GMT

It's the biggest games launch of the year, possibly of all time, a title which is expected to sell 3 million copies in the UK alone over the coming days. It's the subject of feverish interest from fans, and great expectations from retailers, with stores opening at midnight, and a price war launched by one major supermarket chain. But Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 has also sparked off a battle between two prominent Labour MPs with very different views of digital culture.

Posters for Modern Warfare 2It started this morning with a story in the Daily Mail about the violence in the 18-rated game. The Mail said critics had accused the creators Activision of being irresponsible - but the only critic named was Keith Vaz, the Labour MP for Leicester East, who said this: "I am absolutely shocked by the level of violence in this game and am particularly concerned about how realistic the game itself looks."

Mr Vaz has been a long-term critic of the games industry, and plans to raise his concerns over Call of Duty in the Commons this afternoon in questions to the culture secretary and his team.

But within hours another Labour MP Tom Watson had hit back. Mr Watson is the former minister for digital engagement, and a prolific blogger and social networker who has shown a willingness to go on the attack over issues like cutting off illegal filesharers since he left the government in April.

He had already shown his impatience with critics of video games and this morning started a Facebook group, Gamers' Voice. The mission statement on the group's page says: "Are you sick of UK newspapers and (my fellow) politicians beating up on gaming? So am I. The truth is, UK gamers need their own pressure group. I want to help you start one up."

I got hold of Tom Watson and he told me that this morning's article had "pushed me over the edge". He said that the voice of ordinary games wasn't being heard:

"Everything that comes out of Parliament in relation to video games is relentlessly negative. There are thousands of people employed in this industry, there are 26 million people playing games. We should have a much more balanced view of the industry, indeed we should be supporting them through difficult times."

Keith Vaz's concern is about one particular level of the game, which involves the gamer deciding whether to kill unarmed civilians. I contacted Activision, and a spokesman pointed out that players encounter a mandatory "checkpoint" before this segment of the game, warning that it contains disturbing elements.

Tom Watson says the content in question is "deeply repulsive" and he would not want to play it himself - but he points out that similar material is in both books and films, and he believes that as long as there is a classification system which is well policed, there is not really an issue here.

Keith Vaz told me he was concerned by the way the manufacturers of the game were glorifying violence.

"Nobody is trying to stop anyone over the age of 18 purchasing this game," he said. But he said government, manufacturers, retailers and parents all had a responsibility to work together to protect children.

He already has a question listed for this afternoon about the steps taken by the government to implement the recommendations of the Byron Report on the classification of video games, and he will follow up with a supplementary about Call of Duty.

But Tom Watson is planning to hit back with his own views on the gaming industry. That's DCMS at 1430, and you can follow this bout of modern warfare on the BBC Democracy Live website - and maybe report back here on your verdict.

Rory Cellan-Jones

Huddle and Soundcloud - Europe's tech hopefuls

  • Rory Cellan-Jones
  • 9 Nov 09, 09:20 GMT

Can Europe compete with Silicon Valley when it comes to smart young web start-ups? When so much of the venture capital money is still based in Palo Alto and Mountain View, it's hard to start a business in Shoreditch or Stuttgart which can take on the world. But in the last week I've met two - Huddle and Soundcloud - which seem to stand a chance, both by offering fairly simple utilities in the internet "cloud".

Huddle

Huddle is a company based in south London providing office space to users all around the world. No, not a property company, because the offices used by Huddle's customers are in a web browser. The aim is to allow organisations large and small to have an online space, where staff and clients can share documents, calendars, even a virtual whiteboard. You sign up and are then presented with your first "workspace", described in the blurb as " a secure space that you can share with others and use to manage a project, team or client relationship." So then you can invite colleagues to join you in your online office, editing documents, scheduling meetings, and doing all those other tiresome but important tasks of the average office worker.

Huddle screengrabThere is a free ad-supported service, but Huddle is really aiming at businesses which will pay between £10 and £125 a month for large amounts of online storage. Hold on a minute, though, isn't this tiny start-up lying in the middle of the road waiting to be crushed by the biggest name on the web? After all Google's suite of online applications - documents, spreadsheets and presentations - already fulfils a similar purpose, and Google Wave, if it is ever transformed into something vaguely usable, will take the online collaboration business to a whole new level. And they are both free.

Nevertheless, Huddle has managed to grow rapidly. Its commercial director Charlie Blake Thomas told me that its user base was doubling every four months, and the firm was expecting to be "extremely close" to breaking even in the first quarter of next year - though I think we've all learned to take such forecasts with a pinch of salt. Its customers range from the energy firm Centrica to local councils and government departments, so why are they opting to "huddle" when they could share Google docs for nothing? Mr Blake Thomas said his firm offered a more professional and stable service, citing as an example one local council:"They started by using Google Docs but once they'd got 70 or 80 people onboard it just didn't work for them, and they upgraded to Huddle." He also claimed that, unlike a number of Google services, Huddle was not subject to outages.

There's talk of a ground-breaking deal in the offing which will see a company which still has just 35 employees getting the chance to offer its products to thousands of potential customers. Working together in the cloud is a fashionable new trend with plenty of established American giants sniffing a new way to extract cash from customers - but there is just a possibility that a British minnow could steal the business from under their noses.

Soundcloud

By contrast, sharing music online is now a pretty mature business - or is it? I discovered Soundcloud a while back when I was trying to find somewhere that would host audio files in the same way that YouTube hosts your video. Nobody else was really making it easy to upload music or other forms of audio and then share it in a simple way which anyone could access.

The likes of MySpace are useful for new bands attempting to promote themselves, Spotify and Napster offer online access to music for fans, but Soundcloud aims to be a simple utility for the music industry, allowing artists, labels, A&R executives to store tracks online which they and their fans can access anywhere.

Screengrab of Rory Cellan-Jones's Soundcloud clip"It's Flickr for audio" is how the co-founder Alex Ljung described it when I caught up with him last week, making the point that, like the photo-sharing service, it's aimed mainly at creators rather than consumers. So here are a couple of examples. This is a track by the band Them Crooked Vultures, which uses Soundcloud to distribute its music. The band also used MySpace to offer fans a preview of its new album, but Alex Ljung claims 20,000 fans listened on Soundcloud, compared to just 12,000 on MySpace.

And here is the interview I conducted with Alex, recorded on my phone and then uploaded to Soundcloud. Afterwards he explained that he'd been a sound designer in Stockholm when he and a friend Erik Whalforss came up with the idea for Soundcloud - and moved to Germany to make it happen. Now a team of 10 is running a business with over 350,000 customers, with offices in London as well as Berlin.

It is following the same "freemium" route as Huddle, with a limited free service, and then pro accounts at prices of as much as £45 a month allowing a record label to store unlimited amounts of music online. In the next week or so it will be releasing an iPhone app, allowing these pro customers - probably music label executives - to demo their tracks on the move, rather than handing out CDs as they do now.

So two smart web start-ups, both managing to survive and grow through the toughest recession in living memory. They've each received £2-3 million in venture capital funding, and have shown that you can do quite a lot these days with a clever idea and limited amounts of cash. Now comes the tough part - proving they can be profitable. Or, perhaps more realistically, finding a bigger firm to buy them and take them to the next level.

The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites

BBC.co.uk