Ralph Henry Baer, widely acknowledged as “the Father of Video Games,” is the son of a Jewish shoe factory worker in Germany. In 1938, the Baer family fled from Hitler and immigrated to the Bronx in New York where he gained an interest in electronics. Baer was working as an engineer at Sanders Associates (now BAE Systems)in Nashua, New Hampshire, when he conceived the idea of playing games on a television screen in 1966. He filed the first video game patent in 1971. In February 2006, Baer was awarded the National Medal of Technology for “his groundbreaking and pioneering creation, development and commercialization of interactive video games, which spawned related uses, applications, and mega-industries in both the entertainment and education realms.”
Since then, video games have become a ubiquitous, billion-dollar industry, thanks to the Internet. Last year, the top five games alone raked in a staggering total income of $120.22 billion. Their individual performance: Dota 2, $47,780,465; Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, $21,171,751; PUBG MOBILE, $17,871,679; Arena of Valor, $17,365,745; PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, $16,031,339. The monetary rewards in the video game industry are astounding if you can land a hit.
Even the wildly popular mobile game Candy Crush Saga, which is free, has found a way to generate income by leveraging on the “addiction” of its over 250 million loyal fan base. The game is free, but players can pay for tools that help them finish levels or advance to the next level. Players spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year on those tools.
Closer to home, the Philippine eSports market is home to over 43 million active gamers, steadily increasing by 12.9 percent yearly since 2017. This growth is supported by the growing accessibility of smartphones and mobile Internet. Mobile eSports account for about 35 percent of the total gaming market in the Philippines. As of the first half of 2019, the country’s mobile eSports revenue amounted to $24 million.
The promise of the country’s eSports sector can best be seen in the results of the recently concluded 31st Southeast Asian Games in Hanoi, Vietnam. The Philippine eSports team SIBOL bagged two gold medals and two silver medals. With their medals, SIBOL placed third in the eSports division, with Vietnam at the top spot followed by Indonesia. SIBOL fielded a total of 54 eSports athletes across 10 events for titles such as Mobile Legends: Bang Bang, FIFA Online 4, Crossfire, Free Fire, League of Legends (Wild Rift, PC), and PlayersUnknownBattlegrounds (PUBG).
Here’s another gaming application: The Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) announced on Monday that it is launching a financial education game for local fisherfolk, targeting to educate over 1.9 million fishers nationwide. The game—which is called “Fish N’ Learn”—was developed under the BSP’s Financial Education (FinEd) Program for fisherfolk, in partnership with the Department of Agriculture-Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources (DA-BFAR), United States Agency for International Development (USAID)-Fish Right Program, and BDO Foundation (Read, “Central bank hopes game can teach fishers finance,” in the BusinessMirror, May 23, 2022).
According to the BSP, Fish N’ Learn simulates real-life events that influence the financial behavior of fishermen and their families. It aims to empower the agri-fisheries sector by reinforcing positive money habits and values among fisherfolk through a fun and interactive game.
BSP Governor Benjamin Diokno said the creation of the game highlights the important role of our fisherfolk, who serve as food security frontliners in the ongoing pandemic. “Fish N’ Learn is meant to give our fisherfolk the primacy that they deserve by focusing on improving their financial health and overall quality of life, which helps to foster a financially healthy citizenry. Strong public-private partnerships are instrumental to achieve sustainable and scalable programs such as this one,” Diokno said.
We commend the BSP and its partners for coming out with a novel idea of empowering our fishermen through an interactive game. If the BSP’s Fish N’ Learn becomes extremely successful and popular among our fisherfolk, then we can replicate this kind of initiative in other sectors. Who knows, a more practical version of FarmVille that teaches users how to make money in the real world may arouse the Filipino youth’s interest in agriculture.
Interactive games may just be the key to open the potential of other economic sectors, and strengthen the country’s economy.