I'm currently reading Jamie Woodcock's lovely book "Marx at the Arcade", from where the following quote is taken. It displays how Boris Johnson flip-flopped completely from naming videogames as something awful to regaling in the monies the industry provides for the rich.

Videogames [...] make up the majority (51.3 percent) of entertainment spending in the UK. This potential—and it is worth stressing that often these statistics are exaggerated— has captured the imagination of many actors, from investors to governments. For example, the British politician Boris Johnson used to write scathingly critical takes on videogames.

A prominent member of the right-wing Conservative Party in the UK, he is famous for his carefully curated image as a bumbling aristocrat. In an article for the right-wing British newspaper the Telegraph, Johnson once wrote the following about children who play video games:

They become like blinking lizards, motionless, absorbed, only the twitching of their hands showing they are still conscious. These machines teach them nothing. They stimulate no ratiocination, discovery or feat of memory—though some of them may cunningly pretend to be educational. . . . So I say now: stop just lying there in your post-Christmas state of crapulous indifference.

Get up off the sofa. Can the DVD of Desperate Housewives, and go to where your children are sitting in auto-lobotomy in front of the console. Summon up all your strength, all your courage. Steel yourself for the screams and yank out that plug. And if they still kick up a fuss, then get out the sledgehammer and strike a blow for literacy.

What is interesting about these arguments is not their substance (of course!), but the deep cynicism and paternalism they entail. Johnson claimed that games were to blame for low literacy rates, but rather than jumping on a games-cause-violence bandwagon, he advocated physical violence in response.

However, jumping forward over a decade, Johnson (now the mayor of London) had changed his tune.

In 2016, he gave a speech to encourage the games industry in London, along with providing it a round of funding:

We’re home to fantastic software studios, like State of Play and Sports Interactive, who make world-leading games, like Lumino City and Football Manager. From NASA to the NHS, games software now influences the way we manage our health, educate our children, and even how we explore space, but international competition remains fierce and we need to ensure our city can compete with our global gaming rivals. Games London will be a three-year program that will help the game sector shout louder and attract more investment.

Rather than wanting to smash up videogames, Johnson instead now sees a whole range of benefits. Similarly, in a recent report on the games industry in the UK, George Osborne (then the chancellor of the exchequer and also a member of the Conservative Party) decried that the games industry was “one of the UK’s great strengths” and that today is a “golden age” for the creative sector, which also included films, high-end TV, and animation programming.

This shift in tone, and indeed investments, signals an important change. If we think back to the roots of the industry, videogames have clearly come a long way. No longer an expert’s pursuit, but now something that the political representatives for the UK’s ruling class see as integral to capitalism.