Gordon Brown: Society must look at video games

Gordon Brown has reiterated that he is not interested in censoring the interactive entertainment industry – and promised to detail plans of his new review into video games today.

After being asked to deliver his message to the ‘makers of video games’ at a press conference at 10 Downing Street yesterday, Mr Brown said:

Where there is pornographic or violent material any parent is going to be concerned about the impact… and any parent wants the reassurance that we are doing everything in our power.

We have got to look at this as a society. I hope this is one of the areas where there can be common ground between all parties. I am not interested in censorship at all, but I think we do need rules governing some aspects of the internet and videos where children are involved and the whole purpose of this review would be to draw on the advice of all sources so that we can look at this in a sensible way.

This is a challenge of modern society as a result of the explosive development of the internet, new forms of media, multimedia forms of communication.

"And of course at an earlier age than ever before children have access to all these materials and I think every parent here, but every parent in the country would be concerned that we do what we can. So we will set up this review, we will announce the details of it tomorrow and I hope that from the media itself there will be large numbers of people who will want to be involved in this exercise.”