Interview with Jo Twist OBE

Jo Twist, OBE, was born in Hong Kong in 1973. Her mother, a primary school teacher, was originally from Scotland, and her father, a civil engineer, was from England. They moved to Hong Kong where her father worked on some of the big engineering projects, after living in Africa. Jo has an older sister.

 Growing up in Hong Kong exposed Jo to many different influences and allowed her to develop her love of technology, she explains: “It was during the seventies so a golden period in my book and I was obsessed from a very young age with shiny things and gadgets.  You know, Hong Kong was quite a good place to get gadgets and you always had the newest technology there.”

Jo and her sister and mother moved back to the West Coast of Scotland, near Loch Lomond, after her parents split up in the early 80’s.

Jo’s first experiences of computers included her primary school’s BBC Micro, a friend’s ZX Spectrum, and an Optim, on which she had been prescribed to play Pong by her opticians as a way to cure a squint.

In Hong Kong, Jo attended the Peak School and says that it gives her “nothing but good memories.” Back in Scotland, Jo first attended a local primary school before attending a girls’ secondary school in Glasgow for a year, and then moving to what Jo describes as “a very, very, expensive boarding school in Edinburgh.” She says: “It was the making of me because I learned about social justice and equality and how to use privilege and that there are massive divisions in society around poverty and privilege.”

Having fallen in love with Edinburgh, Jo applied to Scottish universities. The first university to offer a place was Dundee which, although Jo didn’t realise it at the time, was the seat of the games industry in the UK, but she ultimately settled on the University of Edinburgh to study for an MA in cultural geography.

 As part of her course, Jo did three optional subjects in her first two years. She explains how one of these became a defining course for her: “I think, the formative subject for me was social anthropology and I almost decided to take that on full-time because I was just fascinated by this whole idea of ethnography and objectivity and subjectivity and how you describe things that you see, and how, whenever anyone is describing history or trying to do some kind of ethnography, it is impossible to remove yourself from the process.”

It was at Edinburgh that Jo found her love for the internet. For her undergraduate dissertation, Jo did an ethnographic study about internet cafes in Edinburgh and compared them to nineteenth century Parisian coffee houses where they were semi public/private spaces where debate took place. She says: “In 1992 I got the internet, I was using Gopher at the time, pre-Mosaic, and I was accessing all these academic papers that were unpublished and I was absolutely fascinated about the kind of digital virtual worlds that were being created and opening up through the internet.”

While many of lecturers were sceptical about the idea of meaningful online communities, one lecturer, Liz Bondi, encouraged Jo to take her studying in the field further. Taking the advice, Jo first did a MSc in Qualitative Research Methods at the University of Edinburgh followed by a PhD in Online Communities from the University of Newcastle’s Centre for Urban Technology. She explains: “What I wanted to study was this whole world of online social virtual worlds and communities and how they were impacting how we thought about communities and physical space in real life.” In Newcastle, Steve Graham and his colleagues were looking at telecommunications in the city; how new technologies information communication networks were changing the flow of power and changing and reshaping geography, reshaping power dynamics.

Jo’s doctorate was supported by British Telecom’s research and development laboratories which were interested in local community networks, how the internet and access to the internet would help revitalise and strengthen local communities.  Jo says that the subject of her research also allowed her to overcome the isolation that many students cite for dropping out of PhD studies. She explains: “I was lucky because my whole subject area was about online communities, virtual communities, ……it meant that part of my research was being part of online communities. I met some really amazing friends, I just chatted to people all the time on the internet while I was in my office, while I was working, while I was writing, while I was thinking.  And that, I think, really helped me combat that isolation that you feel, particularly doing a PhD.”

BBC Newsround
Following her studies, Jo decided to move away from the slow pace of academia which contrasted strongly with the fast-moving world of the internet. In 2000 she applied for a role for BBC Newsround, a children’s news programme on BBC that still exists.  She explains: “They were looking to build what they called their virtual community and they were looking for an associate producer and a researcher. I applied for associate producer job knowing that I wouldn’t get it. I got invited to an interview and they really liked what I’d been studying, so, they gave me a researcher job.”

Earning £18,500, Jo became one of a team of three ‘e-angels’, creating online news coverage that supplemented the eight-minute TV programme. The role involved devising interactive elements including games such as Poacher Patrol which Jo devised. She says: “I didn’t know what the hell I was doing. I had to learn HTML, I had to publish, I had to do graphics, I had to run stories. I got to produce interactive programmes in our first interactive studio and we would do live webchats, we would do all sorts of really ground-breaking stuff, that we didn’t think was ground-breaking at the time, so it was fantastic, I loved it.”

She adds: “I think all journalists should work at Newsround to get that training of how to tell a story in very simple terms and also how to help children understand really complex matters.”

BBC News Online
In 2003, Jo moved onto become a tech journalist at BBC News Online. During her three years in the role, she enjoyed witnessing some of the big developments in tech and interviewed many of the leading lights. She says: “It was the best time because it was just when Google was on the up, Facebook hadn’t even been invented, YouTube was created in 2005 so I was there.  I was writing a lot about citizen journalism because we had then the London bombings and it was the height of Web 2.0.”

Jo left journalism in 20005 to spend just over a year at the Institute of Public Policy Research (2005) before returning to BBC for another four years as Multiplatform Channel Editor for BBC Three and then Multiplatform Commissioner, Entertainment and Switch.

However, frustrated at not being able to commission games, Jo moved to Channel 4 in 2010 as Commissioning Director for Education. Jo explains: “I went to Channel 4 to be able to tell stories in different ways, whether that be through comic books, social media projects, YouTube or through games.” Channel 4 had a remit of education as part of their public service commitment, as Jo explains: “So, we didn’t have to prove any return on financial investment, just an impact on young peoples’ lives.”

With the aim of using games to help teenagers understand real life issues such as citizenship, privacy, surveillance, body image, Jo commissioned Digital Emmy-winning Battlefront II, free to play browser and iOS games, (Sweatshop, Nomnation and International Racing Squirrels) alongside social media projects. Jo explains: “Games are learning, they are empathy engines, they’re places in which you can practise life in a safe way, they’re really good at building resilience, you can gain a set of critical-thinking skills because you’re able to look back at decisions you made and go back and redo them and see the consequences of the decisions that you make in a game.”

In 2012 Jo was headhunted for the role of CEO at The Association for UK Interactive Entertainment (Ukie) following its rebrand from ELSPA when it opened up to include game developers alongside publishers in the games industry. Jo says: “I think I was quite a risky candidate…. I remember at my final interview I had the most horrendous cold and I was sniffling throughout, and I thought I’ve got absolutely no chance of getting this, and then I got told I’d got it, so I was absolutely completely thrilled. I remember coming in to meet the team and I think quite a few people were a bit taken aback when they met me because they didn’t know who’d got the job and it was like, ‘Oh, Oh, it’s a woman!’ ”

Under Jo’s leadership, Ukie, in collaboration with Nesta, has produced gamesmap.uk; a geographical games map showing the 2,277 games companies, 102 universities and 151 service companies related to video games in the UK. She explains: “I suppose that was a little bit of my geography coming out in me. It was important, I think, to show the breadth of the industry.” The map demonstrates the spread of the UK’s games industry across the country with ‘heartlands’ in many places such as Dundee, Leamington and Liverpool. Jo goes on to say: “It was important to visually represent that, because place matters.  If you’re making games in Dundee, in Liverpool or in London… you are influenced by the culture around you, by the community, by the people, and I think that is really what makes the UK quite unique.”

The games industry is just forty years old and was started in the UK before going global, Jo continues: “I think it is very true that we are globally recognised for our creativity.  We had a real long historical strength in console games, in particular, and again we had powerhouses around the country where some absolutely fantastic games were being made.  A lot of those studios have subsequently disappeared but in their place lots and lots of flowers have bloomed.  And I think that’s because we’ve got this innate curiosity, we do have this mix of different sectors, innovation, creativity, art; we’ve got the best universities, we’ve got curious minds and I think that’s what makes us great.”

Despite the fact that half of the game playing population are women, Jo notes that a lot of those who are running successful games companies or are working in them are male.  She explains: “I think we had a bit of a hiccup in this country in terms of how we teach computer science and ICT in the nineties and hopefully we’re trying to get back on track. Unfortunately, I think that computer science now is still a little bit stereotyped; we still see not enough girls taking computer science up, we struggle to teach it creatively and we really need to teach it creatively.  There are lots and lots of brilliant initiatives, but I think we’ve got some work to do.”

As well as speaking about the lack of diversity the industry faces Jo also speaks about the stereotyping of games and the people who play games, as well as the lack of diverse role models in games. Jo says: “I don’t use the term ‘gamers’ deliberately because I think it carries those stereotypes.  No one asks me if I’m a filmer, or a booker, you know, they just don’t ask me that; it’s part of my cultural diet and when people say, ‘do you play games, I say of course.”

Jo says to solve some of these issues the industry needs to help people realise that this is a sector that offers people real opportunities across a wide variety of roles, not just programmers, as Jo says: “ We try and explain to people that, yes, we need programmers, we need mathematicians, we need people who understand physics.  But we need artists, writers, musicians, we need people who understand psychology, business, legal people, this is a proper sector with proper jobs and a whole bunch of different jobs.”

Another challenge is to change the reputation of gaming so that society recognises the transferable skills that those who play games develop; skills that society needs such communication, strategic thinking, the ability to work in teams, resilience, agility and curiosity.

A further challenge is to improve the diversity of characters in games, and to do this, Jo believes that it needs diversity in the teams producing the games. She explains: “We we do have people of colour in games but entirely not enough and that’s because it goes down to the kinds of diverse teams that we do have or don’t have, not just in terms of how you embody your identity and your diversity but also the diversity perspectives, you know different world view, different experience of life because of who you are or where you’ve been.”

She’s also keen to point out, however, that the industry is extremely adaptive, she says; “We have this real time connection now, because of the Internet, with our players.  We iterate all the time. Many games are live services now…. There’s such a diversity of types of games. I think that there are so many interesting stories to be told from so many more interesting diverse characters.” She points to the work Rami Ismail is doing to highlight territories that are desperate to have their voices heard through their games on a global stage. She concludes: “Everyone in the games industry talks about China as a world of opportunity because of the market size there but we have the whole of the African continent, the Indian continent, we have a whole world out there of potential creators and people who are already creating and we need to, as an industry, support that whole global network of voices and difference.”

In her role as Vice President for Games and Accessibility Charity SpecialEffect and the UK government sector champion for disabilities, Jo is working to improve the accessibility of games from conception. She gives several examples of how gaming can be beneficial to people with special needs including a young boy with very severe cystic fibrosis who was a top guild leader in his game, she says: “That’s where he felt free, and free of his wheelchair, and free of his apparatus and, could just hang out with his friends again.  And that’s incredibly important for us as humans.  Games can do that way beyond any other media I know.  So, it’s really important that we are looking at accessibility right from the get-go, that we’re modifying controllers, where we need, to so that people with physical disabilities can also once again perhaps get control in their lives or just do something as simple as play football with their friends in a game.”

While Jo thinks that consumer virtual reality equipment is still too expensive for a lot of people, she believes that it has a real future, in particular in helping with certain conditions such as Alzheimer’s and post-traumatic stress.

On the subject of artificial reality, Jo says: “I think AR is obviously where most people are putting their bets and, again, we saw some incredible stories of parents of kids with autism who, for the first time, broke out of their timetable or their schedule, or for the first time actually looked someone in the eye and said, ‘thank you’.  Their stories just make you cry.”

She believes it will also have an impact on the way we work saying: “that the workplace of the future is a mixed reality workplace; we’ve got a whole generation of young people who expect to modify and transact with the world in a completely different way and we are underestimating that.”

Jo identifies that diversity and inclusion is a huge challenge for the industry, however, she says: “I think the industry, and games industry in particular, is moving with it and we’re adapting and we’re trying to figure out what best practice looks like, how do you recruit in a more open way and inclusive way, how do you go that extra mile to make sure that you’re really trying to skill up the next generation.  And I think in twenty years’ time it’s going to be incredibly interesting to see.”

She believes that, “we forgot to teach an entire generation of kids growing up with the internet how to be online, how to protect themselves, how to manage their identities and I think we didn’t give them any kind of digital literacy about fake news.  Fake news is not new journalism.”

How society prepares for and deals with the fourth industrial revolution is also a challenge. Jo adds: “How do we cultivate the skills that we need to navigate this?  What are those jobs that two-thirds of children now will be in?  Two-thirds of children now will be in jobs that don’t exist yet.  So, it’s a real challenge for society.”

As for many other industries, the videogames industry is concerned about the impact of Brexit. Some of the main issues include the ability to continue recruiting international talent, maintaining the UK’s position as the leading game development hub in Europe, and maintaining the free flow of data and getting a data adequacy decision from Europe.

On the data flow issue, Jo explains: “We, as a digital economy business, rely on an instantaneous connection with our players and dataflows across the globe, so unless we have a legal basis for that come 29 March it’s going to be quite difficult.  But we work very hard to lobby governments along with the other tech and creative sectors to make sure that those things are in place.  I do think that we’ve got so much going for us as an industry right now and we’re really going into a golden age, particularly with the independent game developing scene.”

Jo says that being awarded her OBE is one of the biggest achievements of her life, she says: “It was a real honour and, again, incredibly humbling because it was for creative industries so recognising a lot of the stuff that I’d done way before Ukie, because, when I look back at those other projects, even before Channel 4, there was a whole group of us whom I’m still in contact with, and we were doing some really risky things and we were really at the cutting edge of technology, so I think the OBE was probably the greatest thing so far.”

For anyone wanting to enter the games industry Jo says: It’s one of the most rewarding careers and jobs that you can ever have.  Depending on what kind of job you want to go into, there are so many roles, you don’t necessarily need a computer games degree.  You might have one, that’s great, but I think it’s having this broad curiosity and showing these other softer skills and transferrable skills is really key.  If you want to go into a particular technical discipline like art, you need a portfolio.  If you want to actually be making games, make some games.  We have free tools at the biggest and best studios in the world to use, like Unreal Engine and Unity.  And there’s lots of advice and support and programmes out there that will help you learn how to be making your games.  Lots of influences that you can get from BAFTA Young Game Designer competition, or there’s local game jams that happen.  So make games.  Keep making games.”

Awarded an OBE in 2016 for services to the creative industries.

Awarded the MCV Women in Games Award for outstanding contribution.  Deputy Chair of the British Screen Advisory Council.

London Tech Ambassador.

Chair of the BAFTA Games Committee and BAFTA Trustees.

Ambassador of the Mayor of London’s Culture Leadership Board.

Creative industry council member.

Visiting Professor at Ravensbourne University in London.

Vice President for Games and Accessibility Charity SpecialEffect.

The government sector champion for disabilities.

Interviewed by: Elisabetta Mori on the 6th November 2018 at the offices of ukie

Transcribed by: Donna Coulon

Abstracted by: Lynda Feeley