CENTER FOR COMPUTATION & TECHNOLOGY

Source: Game Daily 

BATON ROUGE, La. – While most U.S. cities push biotech to drive economic growth, one municipality is using video games to do the same -- Baton Rouge, Louisiana. It's an unlikely match, given the establishment of California as the nation's video game capital, but one the fast-growing Southern city is convinced will be its future just the same.

The interest in bringing video game developers to Baton Rouge started in 2005, prior to Hurricane Katrina, to complement the area's strong ties to film production. Louisiana is currently third in U.S. film production after California and New York, says the Baton Rouge Area Chamber, which saw the overlapping opportunity of video games and acted on it.

To kick-start the new initiative, the state passed an aggressive "burn and earn" tax incentive, with which video game developers can enjoy up to 20 percent credit on expenditures. The legislature was enough to immediately lure in Nerjyzed Entertainment, which was hoping to relocate their business from Dallas to either Austin, Atlanta, or Baton Rouge. A second development studio, Tesseraction (now Resurgent Interactive), relocated shortly after Nerjyzed in October 2007, and a third casual game developer, Yatec, sprouted in the wake of the attractive incentive, post-Katrina.

"The fast developments were a little serendipitous," says Stacey Simmons, director of the Baton Rouge Area Digital Industries Consortium. She reminds us that Nerjyzed CEO Jacqueline Beauchamp is a Baton Rouge native. "But there was a lot of engineering and planning as well," she adds. Given all that's been accomplished so far, not to mention the active roles of the mayor's office, the area chamber, and the adjacent LSU to foster video game development, we believe her.

In addition to the resident studios and ongoing promotion of tax incentives to attract more developers, Baton Rouge regularly attends and sponsors VIP events at the annual Game Developers Conference, and it hosts the Red Stick Animation Festival, of which game animation plays a part. And the city has an educational cooperative with LSU to encourage local game design talent. "Games are bigger than all of Hollywood combined, so it's a no-brainer economic driver for municipalities," says LSU's Stephen Beck, who dabbles in Wii Remote experimentation on the side a la Johnny Lee. "University programs will have to adapt to ubiquitous computing and video games, or they'll lose all their students."

So how does one of the fastest growing U.S. cities (with a population under one million) get turned on to games in lieu of more traditional industries (even more reputable and respected in the eyes of some) to drive economic growth? They believe what monthly NPD numbers already confirm: that gaming is an $18 billion dollar industry growing faster than any other form of entertainment. Said size and continued growth inevitably leads to more jobs and future sustainability, something Baton Rouge clearly understands on behalf of its inhabitants.

But the city has its work cut out if it wishes to become a gaming Mecca within 10 years. Combined employees of the above mentioned studios currently amount to fewer than 100 -- a drop in the bucket compared to other areas of the nation. What's more, the mid-sized metropolitan city rooted in Southern traditions will likely never seize the attention of the formidable publishing giants. But with the rising interest of downloadble games, indie development, and casual expansion, maybe Baton Rouge doesn't have to. The city's economy would no doubt be more than pleased with at least an honorable mention as a second-tier development location.

In any case, it was quite surreal to see a mid-sized city and state capital roll out the red carpet for an industry and medium that is still largely criticized by many in government. Maybe politicians aren't so bad after all.