Games and the Govt - Part Two

My four-and-a-half year old's favourite game is an Apple app called ABC Phonics. His mother and I love that because he comes in on a Saturday morning at some terrible hour, 5:30am, and it gets me 20 minutes in bed extra because he can then run his finger across the top of an Apple iPhone.

That is amazing: he's learning phonics, he's learning to write, and he's using a piece of technology imaginatively to do that. And he's letting his dad have a lie-in in the morning - that's perfect for me. If other kids were doing this...

Which is why I think the educative games industry has a big growth in this country if we get it right.

Yeah, I do. And I'd like it reflected in their output and in the way they procure games and digital content. The BBC have spent GBP 1 billion on their website since 1994 - they could have breathed life into a lot of gaming companies if they'd got their contracts right and been generous with their licensing.

I'm not blaming the BBC as all this is new and fast-moving, but I would like to see a point where they can use their muscle to help the small guys in the industry to get on with making great games, great applications. Yeah, sure, use it on the BBC site but let the developer go and come up with a commercial offer around that as well.

I think it is, definitely. I just think it needs the BBC to be a little more agile with small games businesses. They could really, really help if they used their clout to bring a bit of life to it.

That's the great cultural divide in Britain. I see so many people for whom TV is just mood music now; it's ambient images. They're either on consoles playing games, or gaming on their laptops. There is a generation out there for whom TV is not the centre of their lives, it's just another form of content and that's hard for the telly guys to take on board. It's been their lives for so long - it's not going to be won overnight that argument.

There's absolutely no prospect of the Conservatives winning the next election so I think the videogames industry will be safe in Labour's hands!

You're not supposed to laugh at that bit!

[laughs] Let me just answer that seriously. Actually I've been very impressed with the Tory front bench on some of this as well. Sion Simon gets the games industry, so does [Shadow Minister for Culture] Ed Vaizey, so I would hope whoever wins the next election we can work cross-party on trying to get this industry some support. Obviously I'd like my side to be the ones doing it.

In parliament there are. There's a bit of a generational thing, and there's also a bit of people who just made it their business to go out and understand the industry. But they exist on both sides of the House and actually there's quite a lot of conversation that goes on between the two parties about what can be done in this space.

What I would hate is for this to become a party-political ping-pong match - we should actually be working together to see what we can do.