UKIE's Jo Twist - Part 1

Taking the position of CEO at one of the industry's trade bodies is never a light undertaking, but doing so in a time of such great transition and turmoil can't make it any easier. Add to that the fact that Jo Twist took over in a week which saw the industry at the centre of a swathe of government attention and activity and you'd be forgiven for thinking that the new boss might be showing the strain somewhat.

In fact, when we meet with Jo in UKIE's London office, she's full of energy and enthusiasm, interspersing UKIE policy and wider ideas with relaxed jokes and anecdotes. Make no mistake, however, Twist has a serious and broad ranging agenda for both the body and the industry as a whole - but one which pivots on a single key factor: listening to her members.

In this first half of a two-part interview, Twist explains her general views on what she sees as UKIE's main responsibilities, why we need more industry rockstars and the role of education in games and vice versa.

Q: So, your first week has been quite eventful, what have you already identified as the key areas which you see UKIE as needing to be involved in?

Jo Twist: So, obviously coming into this job from Channel 4 education, I was very interested in the Next Gen Skills campaign. That was what grabbed my attention. That was very close to my heart, given my background, the things I've been involved in, the power of games as I see it in young people's lives. Not just as an industry but in the sense of formats themselves.

I've already got an idea of priorities that we need to focus on, and a couple that I'm bringing in. But I'm going to be spending the first hundred days, really doing a lot of listening. We have over one hundred members, we have the board, we have a lot of people in the industry I want to talk to.

I want to spend that time listening, actively, then making a decision about what the road map ahead is going to be. I think I initially said I wanted to make a three year plan, but I think it has to be an 18 month road map, really, of where we want to be. I have to spend that time doing that listening.

I think the Next Gen Skills campaign is absolutely critical to keeping that momentum going and I think that what happened last week and UKIE's role in leading that campaign has been fantastic and the team have done a brilliant job.

Now, I'm laying down the challenge of making sure that every campaign we do makes as much noise. It's really shown to me that UKIE's got such a strong leadership role in speaking to government and opening those doors, whereas before perhaps we haven't had such strong representation in terms of the games industry.

It's great that we're leading that. I think the next stage is about implementation and the role that we play in the industry in supporting and educating teachers and figuring out how we actually action this and make it a cool part of the curriculum.

Q: That's something that I've discussed before, actually, that there might be this Catch 22 situation where you move to computer skills in the curriculum, but there are no graduates to teach it because all of those people have moved on to jobs in the tech industry. Obviously this is a long term plan, what's the next step in making sure you keep that momentum going?

Jo Twist: Obviously teachers do a fantastic job, and it's a bloody hard job; my mother was a teacher and I know how hard they work. There are a lot of other things that they need to care about as well. It's really about giving them resources, figuring out what resources we as an industry can provide them with, in terms of actual resources or lesson plans.

Teachers are very good at doing lesson plans, but they need time to understand how to use this in the classroom and why they should be using certain things, whether they be games or programming languages like Scratch.

We're going to be doing a lot of consulting with teachers, education leaders and governors; that's one of our main priorities, to understand what their requirements are. Figuring out what the very basics of computer science are across the industry which we want kids and graduates to come out with, what we want people to go into higher education with.

It's really about an approach to computer science rather than learning any particular language, because as we know, that changes all the time. I think that's a mistake that people have made before. It's really about identifying what the best principles are that we need people to come out with, how that we can best give teachers the resources so they can decide how to use those resources in the classroom to achieve those goals; then we can find that we have a really rich seam of highly talented individuals coming out of school and university and straight into jobs.

We've got a role, as UKIE, to play in that as well. Helping our members, especially younger developers, to get access to that talent. There's so much talent that we could actually provide the industry with.

Q: Do you see that as something which you could do in conjunction with the people who would perhaps be your eventual competitors for those graduates? The UK science industry has had a rough time over the last few years, grants and research are down - the whole programme could do with some help. Do you see those areas as competitors?

Jo Twist: I don't see anybody as competitors. I'm a big fan of the collaborative approach, because we're all in it for the same aim, which is to get more young people interested in computer science and other science, technology, engineering and maths subjects.

Especially with girls, obviously as a woman I would say that, but it's a very, very big problem - I think a collaborative approach is the only way forward. Sometimes that can be difficult because you end up struggling to decide what your actually going to do, but we're ready to step up to that mark and take a leadership role in that.

Games aren't necessarily just about computer science. The examples we've seen of kids in classrooms using Scratch, being completely turned off maths and other subjects, and afterwards getting really into maths and suddenly realising, 'oh my god, I'm using maths to make this game!'

Games can open up so many different avenues in so many other disciplines. It's not just about providing people who can create games full stop.

Q: The education initiatives were a huge breakthrough in terms of seeing a prominent member of the games industry praised, lauded and feted by the government, affecting policy and getting results. It was fantastic to see. Do you think that has opened doors which will help that continue?

Jo Twist: Oh absolutely. It's all about relationship building at the end of the day. I'm a big fan of an evidence-based approach to policy. We have all the evidence we need, and we have the poster boys like Ian [Livingstone], who won't thank me for calling him that!

We need many, many more people like that. I look to our members and our potential members and those outside that as well, to find those new poster boys and girls, to be those ambassadors, the new legends that we can bring to government and say, look at what they've achieved, look at how fantastic this industry is.

The door is open, the campaign has done that for us. We absolutely do have a great relationship there now, and they trust us, but we need more rockstars, and there are plenty around.

Q: I'd agree. I think the industry hides too many of its lights under bushels, sadly. Do you think that there's a direct correlation between how much revenue an industry makes and what sort of lobbying access it gets?

Jo Twist: It's like any industry I guess, but no, there's a new breed of government officials and industry people who are really taking notice of what's happening. Shoreditch... I hate the phrase Silicon Roundabout... but they've grown up with the games industry - you could argue that it's actually about sense and what's good for the country and the industry.

I might be sounding Utopian in that, but I genuinely think that when they're presented with evidence and stories and reasons to actually make a change in policy, they'll do it.

Q: Your background obviously contains a lot of involvement in commissioning educational games. Do you think that we should be seeing the UK government approaching studios and asking them to create games which teach particular aspects of the curriculum?

Jo Twist: No. Our approach at Channel 4 Education was very much about finding the best people in the industry, who were usually independent developers, who were up and coming, supporting them and giving them a brief around a topic, which was usually what life skills we wanted to focus on for that year.

First and foremost the game must be fun. The game must be a bloody good game. We would work with the best people to do that.

For the learning aspect, games are learning systems in themselves and they're the best way, I think to help young people learn things and understand the consequences of the decisions that they make.

Even down to simple strategy games. You know in a strategy game that you learn, 'I'm not going to do that again, because that's not how I progress.' That's the same with learning in life. I considered games that we considered at Channel 4 Education to be complete metaphors to how you work your way through life, that was a key skill that we focused on. We didn't do curriculum-based education.

That's the really interesting part of games. They can be used in so many different ways in a formal educational environment to prompt or provoke young people into thinking about things that they've haven't before, or talking about things. The great example we had was The End, which we commissioned from Preloaded, which was about death.

That was based on research that kids and teenagers find it very difficult to talk about death, but it was a subject which preoccupies them and keeps them awake at night. The game was designed to be a fantastic platformer, but it also profiled you and asked you questions, provoked you into thinking.

Sweatshop was another example, from LittleLoud. It was about provoking the conversation about whether sweatshops are a good thing. I remember going to RPS and reading the comments thread, which I hate doing, usually, and all the comments were about sweatshops, they weren't about the game.

To see that on a games website was brilliant.

I was very passionate when I was at the BBC about public service content, and public service games, in particular. I was involved in some of the early OFCOM discussions and workshops about what the Public Service Publisher should be, and that turned into something else, but I do believe that there is a gap in the market for games with a purpose.

By that I mean, not games that are designed to be educational content, but games that are designed to be pubic service minded, so are taking risks with tackling subjects that you wouldn't expect to see in a AAA game. I think that's where the independent games developer community is doing some absolutely amazing stuff.

That's where there's going to be some real gems, and there are some already, but that's where there's going to be some real gems coming through. Phil Stewart at Preloaded did a really interesting blog post about games with a purpose and how they work with us to get the education messages across, but in a way that's just about the mechanic and not about facts that you're learning or anything like that.

When I was at the BBC it was very much about representing British culture and life, that was what public service TV content was about. Where are the games that do that? Apart from maybe The Getaway? [laughs]

But it does raise an interesting point and plays into another passion of mine, which is about diversity in content production generally across our industry. At Channel 4 we were very keen to make sure that the people who were pitching our content, producing ideas, were from a diverse range of perspectives and backgrounds.

Unless you get a diversity of people making content you don't get the diverse content itself.

Q: Which then becomes a vicious circle.

Jo Twist: Exactly. I think that's a really important area and something that we should be looking at.