TRADE UPDATE UKIE with a Twist UKIE’s new Chief Executive, Jo Twist talks to MCV about her views on the games industry and her plans for UKIE
With a background in digital and creative technology what will your experience bring to UKIE? Firstly, I play games. I am in no way a hardcore gamer, but my life has had games in it for as long as I can remember, stretching as far back as Pong, Manholeand taking me right up to my current game of choice Triple Town. I have written about games, studied games, and commissioned them.
I have been a lifelong advocate and fan of what happens when creativity meets digital innovation driven by people with a passion to do something different, and that’s why my industry of choice is the games industry.
I’m passionate about games and games design principles breaking into other areas of creativity and life – particularly the power of games for telling stories and learning. Games to me are fundamentally systems for learning: the rules, the decisions players make, the fails, are all what learning is about. When Alice Taylor asked me to join her to commission at Channel 4 education, I leapt at the chance. I couldn’t wait to get stuck into working with some of the best, most inventive, cleverest and funniest indie developers around to create games that were totally different. As commissioner of multiplatform entertainment at the BBC I believed that entertainment should have meant playfulness and fun. I did manage to inject some of that into entertainment, commissioning some two screen playalongs, revamping Mastermind online, and creating Only Connect online, but my ambitions for the future of interactive entertainment did not match theirs. I hope that my background in working with developers and the wider entertainment industry who need innovative ideas will help UKIE to reach out to this side of the industry and that my experience of education, creative technology and youth culture, will give me fresh perspective on the industry.
Many of the new breed of digital creative businesses see a trade body as not relevant to their needs.
“ Jo Twist, UKIE
Jo Twist joins UKIE following stints at Channel 4 and BBC
Where do you think the industry is going and how can UKIE best represent it?
I want to reach out as a priority to smaller developers so they can be the best businesses and make the best content they can. I also want to find out how we can help them take more risks, make those games they have always wanted to and get the access to money and resources they need to do that. The talent pipeline – one that is richly diverse at that – is critical to their success, which is why the Next Gen Skills campaign is so close to my heart. It’s a fascinating time, with debates around where devices are heading, the size and direction of the digital market, the influence of the cloud and how best to build better services and pricing models.
We want to lead that debate and
make sure we get some answers. We’ve announced that we’re hosting an IP creation forum and we will be helping our members to navigate other big industry issues. The imminent appointment of a research manager should provide our members with forward-looking information on a wide range of subjects. I used to be a fan of the ELSPA white papers and I think we could be better at that sort of insight. Fundamentally we need to immerse ourselves in the industry and be as relevant to small start-up developers as we are to big multinational publishers. There are different demands from each, but also much common ground and it will be my role to bring the industry together under the UKIE banner.
UKIE’s vision is to make the UK the best place in the world to develop and publish games – what will you be doing to further represent the interests of studios? UKIE already represents every UK- based publisher and has grown its developer membership considerably over the last year.
But we need to do more. We’re currently asking the development community what it is that they need and it’s vital that we appeal to the new breed of smaller digital creative businesses that are making interactive entertainment but don’t see themselves as part of the ‘traditional’ games industry too. Many of the new breed of digital creative businesses see a trade body as not relevant to the needs of their business. We need to make