The Alliance of New Generation Interactive Leisure and Simulations (ANGILS) relaunched recently to focus on the growth of the  burgeoning market. It specifically wants to address the business side of the market, identifying the key issues facing the industry to work out practical solutions for these.
 
In 2003, ANGILS was originally founded as a non-profit-making networking group. In October, ANGILS turned itself into a trade body for serious games and now, ANGILS wants to hammer out an action plan for the group, aimed to develop the growth of the serious games market.

The main aim of the working parties of ANGILS, says CEO Martine Parry, is "to drill down to present the value of serious games to the commercial and educational markets to widen our understanding of how to position them: from engagement through productivity to mission-critical outcomes".

We believe that this renewed focus at the business side of the serious games industry makes a lot of sense. After all, a major - if not the biggest - concern of any industry, even that of serious gaming, is to make money, albeit the educational aspect is also of great concern.

The Alliance of New Generation Interactive Leisure and Simulations (ANGILS) started out as a UK-based organization for people who wanted to see how far games could go in being useful for other lines of work. These days, however, the organization has changed its focus somewhat and made itself into a trade body.

The newly reconstituted trade body known as ANGILS launched yesterday. Once simply a means to network, ANGILS is now devoted to looking at serious games and the development of new technologies for gaming and other forms of digital entertainment, inviting individuals and organizations to join in.

Why would this be important, you might ask? It's because the world of gaming is gaining more ground outside of the niche it's been put in. From the applications of gaming in educating people or in training particular skills, or from simply programming the best applications or the most useful workarounds for your PSP and DS, gaming is expanding its influence as a field where different interests converge. ANGILS has in its member roster groups that represent those usually unrelated interests, such as defense organizations and centers devoted to educational technology.

As founding CEO Martine Parry said of the enterprise,

This is a two-way street, with the game industry benefiting from access to a relevant pool of talent, new projects, new markets and emerging technologies that can help address the issues with next-gen games development. The knowledge industries meanwhile have greater and more cost-effective access to the tools, programming and design know-how that they need to fulfill their requirements for immersive and /or engaging environments, whether simple Flash-based learning games or rich virtual worlds.

At its very best interpretation, homebrewers out there may have an easier time getting a job in the UK. At the very least, it means that gaming is getting support from folks you wouldn't normally expect support from, including some lawyers.