Games and the Govt - Part One

Gamers' Voice came about because there was one Daily Mail article too many, knocking games, knocking gamers. I set up a Facebook group, asked people whether they were interested in trying to give an alternative platform to gamers in the United Kingdom and within two weeks 15,000 people have joined it.

Our intention is to try and get politicians and the media to dig a little deeper and show a little more perspective when it comes to reflecting games in the UK.

I've been taken on the hop a little bit because I didn't think we'd get that many, but we've got our first meeting in the House of Commons in a couple of weeks' time on December 9. I'm hoping we're going to put a structure in place so that we can give a real voice to gamers up and down the country and the kind of model I'm thinking about – although I want the members to decide how to set it up – is to be the equivalent in gaming of what the Football Supporters' Association is in football. They're going to give a platform to ordinary people who are going out there and just love playing games.

It's a bit early days yet. We haven't got any money; we haven't got any pencils, any office or anything, but I've asked the 15,000 members of the group to come - so far 20 or 30 or them have said they're arriving. Really it's their group, I've just facilitated this. I want to help them obviously in Westminster, but I want gamers to get together and find their own voice and get a platform. I'm talking to as many people as I can to see if whether we can get some seed-corn funding and hopefully we'll get some kind of programme of activity going in the next month or two.

Well, in political terms it's already had a big impact. There're a lot of MPs who've already talked to me about how they can go about talking to gamers, what the issues are, because of course they only read the papers as well, and if the only things you read in the papers is that games are bad and they're turning our children into monsters then it's going to cloud their view.

I think we've already started to recalibrate that debate and it's just a question of being reasonable, engaging with people when they come out with these ridiculous comments, and trying to get a balanced view about what games really are.

Absolutely. What I'd like the media to do is, sure, if there's a piece of content in a game you're worried about then let's have a debate about that - like you do with film. But don't condemn the entire industry because one scene in one game is unpleasant to one journalist.

They just need to get a more reasoned view. I don't think people realise how culturally significant games are in the lives of many people in the UK, and what big business it is for the UK economy, and they've got to take that into account.

I think it was probably the right thing. Look, I don't buy the argument that games are different to films. People say they're more immersive and therefore it's a different experience. I've never cried at a videogame, I've cried at plenty of films. I think what that did with that game - the classification and the extra content warning - I suspect there's a bit of PR involved in that, but also I think it's the industry wising up.

Keith Vaz... I disagree with him on his views on the industry, but one of the things he has done is make sure that the games industry gets its act together with things like classification, and the retail outlets are pretty responsible about how they sell games.

The challenge now is how parents realise that they've got a responsibility to make sure that some of the content their kids are exposed to in games is dealt with appropriately.