This week, the UK games industry is in Westminster. Meeting politicians. Making the case for investment, recognition and support.
It’s the right conversation. But in the wrong room. With the wrong map. And the wrong ambition.
The UK has a secret weapon. A globally significant, internationally recognised, economically extraordinary capability in interactive technology that is already reshaping healthcare, education, defence, space exploration, urban design, data visualisation and financial services around the world.
We call it the games industry. And by doing so, we accidentally hide it from the people who need to understand it most.
Here is something worth reflecting on: The MPs and Ministers in those Westminster meetings are not strangers to games. Many of them play. Their children play. Their grandchildren play. Games are a part of their domestic lives in ways that would have been unimaginable to previous parliamentary generations.
And yet at a policy level, games remain almost entirely invisible.
Not because politicians don’t understand games. But because we keep presenting ourselves in ways that make it easy to file us under ‘entertainment’ and move on. We celebrate our significant economic value. We defend ourselves against moral panics and ethically ambiguous business models. We ask for more investment to make more games for more consumers. That’s it.
And then we wonder why nobody in DSIT, the Department for Education, Innovate UK, the NHS or the Ministry of Defence is calling.
The UK games industry is not a London industry. It never was. The studios, universities and innovators driving pioneering work in interactive technology are in Dundee, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Cardiff, Belfast, Guildford, Leamington Spa, Liverpool, Manchester and beyond. The founding moments of our global reputation were born in bedrooms and small studios far from the capital. Lemmings was built in Dundee. Lara Croft was born in Derby. The creative and intellectual heritage of this industry belongs to the whole country.
And yet the voices that dominate the national conversation are overwhelmingly those in London. They are the voices of those who have already succeeded within the existing consumer market model.
Their success is real and deserved. But their vision of what this industry is, and could be, is necessarily shaped by what made them successful. And what made them successful is not what will make the UK competitive in the next decade.
There is a strategy that looks beyond this. A documented, evidenced, cross-party supported framework, developed in Scotland, that maps exactly how games capability connects to the wider economy. How interactive technology becomes national infrastructure. How the interaction economy, the application of games tools, technologies and techniques far beyond entertainment, would position the UK as a genuinely unique global competitor.
It exists. It has parliamentary support. Yet it remains invisible to a trade architecture designed strictly to service the legacy consumer market.
This week, while the industry is in Westminster asking for more of what it already has, that strategy sits gathering dust.
That is not a failure of government. It is a failure of ambition and vision.
The interaction economy doesn’t need a celebratory reception in a Westminster conference room.
It needs leadership equal to the opportunity.
The UK games ecosystem stands at the forefront of the country’s digital future. It’s time to recognise that and look beyond ‘the industry’ as the architects of our shared digital future.