The Member of Paliament who chairs a bipartisan working on the British video game business told Edge Online that most of his colleagues are more conversant with other forms of media.

In his chat with EO MP John Whittingdale dished on a variety of game-related topics from the recent Digital Britain report to broadband speeds to a new requirement that games be culturally British in order to qualify for tax breaks. The thoughtful comments offered by the Conservative MP indicate that he has devoted some time to researching the role of games in British society. Among his remarks:

The case for some kind of incentive to make sure that the UK remains one of the major locations for games development [is] something that needs to be pressed quickly, because the longer we leave it, the greater risk there will be a steady loss of jobs to places like Canada...

 

There’s definitely an educational component. I think it does no harm for policy makers who are going to be debating issues affecting the games industry to have some experience of videogames. If that means developers and publishers coming into the House of Commons, demonstrating them, and giving MPs a sense of what the game involves, that has to be a good thing.

 

My guess would be that very few ministers in the government spend a great deal of time playing computer games, whereas they do go to the cinema, they do watch television, and they do listen to the radio... there may be ministers who rush home to play GTA all night, but it’s unlikely...

Given the age of most MPs, they’re probably thinking back to Space Invaders and Atari consoles. The other thing is that there’s a lot of negativity around, a lot of concern that young people who spend their hours gaming are missing out on educational activities. The case that gaming can bring benefits is something we need to promote, and then there’s always been the fear that somehow certain games may be damaging because of the violent content, and there’s a lot of mythology around that...

 

A game like Manhunt 2... we need to impose controls to ensure that children cannot purchase them. But then there’s the hysteria over something like the suicide bomber web game Kaboom, which everyone got very worked up about. When I went online and tried it out, the idea that this was going to turn the nation into suicide bombers was clearly absurd...