New Otaku

What a tiring week - physically draining and mentally over-stimulating. Sitting in my tiny hotel room in Suidobashi (near Shinjuku) I've got a little time to kill before packing up and heading home from Japan. This was a fun and very valuable/worthwhile trip. The IGDA's chapter in Japan didn't let me rest for a second...

By all counts, the Tokyo Game Show was a success, with record attendance being announced. The PSP had a strong showing, as did most of the big publishers. Admittedly, it was kinda odd to seem some of the Western companies (eg, EA, Atari, etc) pushing their titles - they felt out of place amongst all the samurai and whacky cute character games... Capcom had very compelling content, and I was most impressed by the glimpse of Okami!

More impressive still, were the volunteers of the Japanese IGDA chapter, several who claim that their full-time job is being an IGDA volunteer Of all the worldwide chapters, they have the most robust structure and widest scope of efforts. Further, they made extra effort to ensure that I didn't get lost, always had sushi in my belly, and had places to go and people to see. (In fact, I think the IGDA should look into some kind of travel service whereby developers can get in loco support whenever they travel to a city with an IGDA chapter

But, despite the progress of the chapter, the overall Japanese game industry is very closed, secretive and set in its ways. I brought this up in my opening speech for the conference portion of TGS, stating that it was like feudal Japan: closed to outside input and without a unified front. This was further demonstrated by the audience gasp when Greg Coomer spoke about how Valve incorporates input from users into their design/game, and does all the work to make their game user mod'able, etc. (ie, there is a clearly defined barrier between creator and consumer in Japan). That said, it is nice to see that the chapter is making progress in fostering a sense of developer community. Case in point, the IGDA-hosted developer party welcomed not only Japanese developers but also from folks from China, France, Korea, North America, etc, all interacting/connecting. Nice.

Closing out the week, I had a chance to visit the famed Ghibli Museum with Gonzalo Frasca. A truly unique experience that I recommend to anyone who is a fan of Hayao Miyazaki's work and/or anime in general. Luckily, we escaped the magic of Ghibli in time to head over to the University of Tokyo. We both spoke on recent academic trends in game studies/education along with industry collaborations with the academic world. Giving a lecture with concurrent translation (ie, speak-stop-translate-speak cycles) was a challenge, but it seemed to work out well, if the insightfulness of the audience questions were any indication...