According to media research company Screen Digest, the estimated value of the UK computer and video games industry, which employs around 22,000 people, is in excess of £2bn. At the Edinburgh Interactive Entertainment Festival in 2005, keynote speaker Adam Singer said games had the potential to be as influential as film and television: "The games industry is facing an opportunity to be more than entertainment and more than education. It has the opportunity to become a medium," he said.

All this justifies Fred Hasson's decision to set up a trade body for games software developers in 2001, despite having no first-hand experience of the industry.

The former co-owner of digital consultancy H2P and, before that, director of marketing at digital communications agency Victoria Real, was working on a project for the South East England Development Agency (SEEDA) when he discovered a large cluster of gaming companies in the region. It occurred to him that while the Entertainment & Leisure Software Publishers Association represented games marketers, there wasn't an organisation for developers. He decided to act.

"Something needed to be done to harness the industry, give it support and get the companies talking to each other," recalls Hasson. With the backing of SEEDA and the DTI, he set up The Independent Games Development Association (TIGA) "within six months".

He now works closely with government departments in an effort to influence strategy. He needs their support, he says, because lower-cost and subsidised games developers from overseas are snapping at British developers' heels. "The UK is the third largest producer of games in the world. But we could be overtaken by Canada," says Hasson. "We've commissioned research to look at the effect of globalisation on the industry and the effect of state aid for the industry in countries like Canada and Korea."

Hasson believes it helps that games are beginning to shake off their superficial image. "Games software can be used for applications other than pure entertainment, so there's a whole area loosely called 'serious games' being developed." The Ministry of Defence and the NHS are among those organisations using games simulation to train staff to work more effectively.

If anything, it's attitudes within the industry that present Hasson with his biggest challenge. While TIGA is pushing hard for companies in the sector to communicate with each other, there are still one or two successful players that think they don't need a trade association, are coy about sharing information, or "cock a snook at corporate governance".
Unperturbed, TIGA has created a best practice handbook for the industry. "It gets people to share their know-how and stop reinventing the wheel every time they do something," says Hasson.

www.tiga.org