Cutting Edges in Strange Places: New media debates and the computer and video games industry in the UK

During the late 1990s, ‘new media’ has increasingly been targeted by policy makers at all levels for its potential as a new growth industry. Until now, most of our understanding of new media has been drawn from (largely) industry-driven technoevangelising, and from studies of particular geographical clusters, derived from new institutional economics. The validity of these approaches is examined in relation to the empirical example of the UK computer and video games industry, together with insights drawn from the political economy of cultural industries. The authors argue that the games industry shares a business model and industrial structure familiar from political economy accounts of ‘old’ media, such as the film industry, while exhibiting a new, much more dispersed geography of production. Thus the example of the games industry should alert academics and policymakers alike to the important sub-sectoral specificities contained within the term ‘new media’, which call for different explanatory frameworks and different support mechanisms alike.