What do you do at Ukie?
Well as the first part of my longwinded job title suggests, I’m responsible for all of the research and data side of things at Ukie Towers, which it turns out is quite a wide remit as games is a very broad church.
At the centre of it all are those core economic stats about the UK industry – so things like working out how many games companies there are in the UK, how many people work in the industry or the size of the UK market (which was £7bn at last count 😊). This tends to be harder to do than you might think, so there’s a lot of working with all kinds of datasets, industry partners, surveying and mainly crying into Excel.
On top of that, I lead on all our academic collaborations, which includes things like our Industry Census and current Inclusivity and Onscreen Representation projects. My role in any of these hugely varies, but is generally keeping them all shipshape and moving, working with the universities to iron out the details, wrangle data or provide that kind of “industry view”.
The second part of my job title means that I also take the lead on a lot of our tech-related projects, whether managing something like the UK Games Map, building and running Ukiepedia or helping the Ukie team set up our internal systems.
But really there’s a lot more on the day-to-day and I have a part to play in a lot of Ukie’s work whether research-related or not. It’s quite hard to sum up, but it’s definitely a very varied role!
What are you playing at the moment?
Aside from perpetually playing Doom (original Doom, which is proper Doom), I’m am playing a LOT of Streets of Rage 4. It’s a perfect homage to the 90s originals, but updated with modern fighting game mechanics to give it that real ‘exact’, fluid edge. Plus the new Mr X Nightmare DLC just takes an already beautiful thing and wraps it in something even more beautiful. Like a scotch egg.
Other than that, in more tranquil times, I can be found playing Cities Skylines, Civ 6 and recently really enjoyed our good member Auroch Digital’s The Colonists.
Streets of Rage 4's Mr X Nightmare DLC: "Like a scotch egg". Buy here.
What made you want to join the games industry?
I didn’t get started in games until I joined Ukie, actually.
I’ve always loved games, but before this I worked in the music industry for a long time which as a massive music nerd, I really enjoyed. Eventually though, I decided to broaden my horizons and spent a couple of years bouncing around between all kinds of cool (3D printing) and not-so-cool (pharmaceutical PR – oh man, wow) industries, but nothing quite grabbed me.
Then in early 2016, I kind of realised that the UK games industry existed, hunted around and saw some ads for a role at the new London Games Festival that was starting up, which then in turn led me on to a role as Research Analyst at Ukie HQ. After an interview here that was at least 50% about an epic game of Civilization we’d all just read about on Reddit, the rest is history.
But I’m very glad to have found a home in games – out of all the industries I’ve worked in, this one is the friendliest, fastest moving and most importantly, the most fun. Still, all that experience of other sectors has proved amazingly helpful to me here, so I’m a big believer that you don’t need to go down the “games and only games” career path. There’s a big, weird world out there to explore!
What do you do in your spare time, apart from playing games?
Music stuff, generally. I’m a musician, so you can often find me strapped to either a guitar or Ableton, or any of the many other increasingly weird instruments I own. Over lockdown, I got quite into the chiptune scene for a while, so tried my hand at a few tunes you can listen to here, should you so wish.
Other than that I generally buy too many records, including quite a few game soundtracks, and have occasionally been known to do a bit of creative writing when the mood takes me.
Do you have a pet? If not, what pet would you like to have one day?
I do not have a pet. I suppose I would have a dog, if pushed, but it’d have to be a lazy one. One of those ones that looks like you got a normal dog and melted it into a puddle. They’re good dogs.