MP for Multiplayer

I think parliament is generally behind the curve on a lot of things. The massive explosion in the diversity and reach of games in the last decade basically passed parliament by. I guess we now how that slightly weird cohort of people in their early to mid 40s for whom games were a revelation when the Sinclair ZX Spectrum came out. Some of us now in quite senior positions in parliament remember those days of playing Manic Miner and remember what pleasure it brought to us as adolescents and we don't want to deprive our children of that recreational activity.

So there's a bit of generational stuff to it, but also I think parliament has just wised up a bit, and also I think the way that the industry engages with parliament has been central to that. The kind of research that TIGA regularly produce on employment, the size of the industry, export potential, skills, average wages - it's really important for policy makers to be reminded of that and they're doing a very good job for the industry.

Well we're going to dust ourselves off after tax-breaks. I think this year we've got to talk about skills, we've got to talk about whether there's any other transitional arrangements we can draw on for the industry, about the R&D tax credits, whether we can work with some of the structural funds, some of the other economic partnerships - whether they can be used.

We've got to help TIGA with some of their vocational courses, I think we should be pushing that agenda too - there's quite a bit we can do, but it's predominantly around skills I would say.

Well, do you know what I did with that? I set it up, we got 17,000 members - I organised an inaugural meeting and hosted them on the House of Commons and then I let go. They've formed their own committee, they're doing their own thing. I occasionally drop buy on their Facebook page to make sure that they're still in a huge conversation - and they seem to be.

I'm not leading it now, I wanted to leave gamers to decide their own strategy. What I think would probably be helpful would be if some of the big players in the industry could help them get a bit more structure - they do need some funding.

Don't underestimate how powerful their social network is - whenever there's a problem with gaming I still get plenty of MPs who phone me up and say - I've just had a dozen emails drop into my inbox from Gamers' Voice members, and they're very angry about X or Y. So as a cultural force they're still there, but it for Gamers' Voice to so their own thing now, I'm just glad I was able to bring them together.

Well, it was a heavily editorialised piece. I wish they'd reached out a little bit more to talk to other people. They could have talked to some of the people who are doing very positive things with games - they could have talked to Graham Brown-Martin, he could have put them in touch with some of the greatest teachers in the country who are capturing the imagination of young people every day using off-the-shelf game packages.

It's a pity that they rehearsed a quite hackneyed mantra really about games doing bad things for children. We know that, in life, anything done to excess can have a downside. No-one seriously disagrees with that. But to try and project the games industry as trying to deliberately deprive people of sleep, money, time, work and social contact is basically anachronistic and inaccurate.