On December 1st I met with Akira Baba who was the founding President of DiGRA Japan [Japanese]. He is a professor at the Graduate School of Interdisciplinary Information Studies and a member of the Interfaculty Initiative in Information Studies at the University of Tokyo. The meeting was set up by Kiyonori Nagasaki who is in the same interdisciplinary faculty and we had a student who translated for professor Baba. Our conversation revolved around the challenges of university/industry engagement.
Dr. Baba is one of the few researchers who has set up a lab to work with industry. His Baba lab [Japanese] has done contract research, developed games that were then commercialized, and worked with other stakeholders on serious games. He sees very little collaboration with industry in Japan partly because the games industry isn’t really interested in what happens in universities, but also because few people are set up to collaborate.
We talked about different ways to engage with industry. I mentioned our report “Computer Games and Canada’s Digital Economy” for which we interviewed game designers. I mentioned that training students is one of the ways we see universities connecting with industry. Internships and industry judged competitions are two ways to bridge with industry, though they have their problems too. He felt that Japanese universities are not used to internships which makes them difficult to set up.
In 2006 Dr. Baba chaired a government panel that looked into a “Game Industry Strategy – A Vision for the Development and the Future of the Game Industry.” (See the METI news announcement with link to PDF) The vision included a Development Strategy, Business Strategy, and Communications Strategy. That vision and related activities are now over and he is collaborating with the government to develop new initiatives.
We talked about the challenges of preservation. As others have told me, copyright is a serious impediment to preservation of games. Publishers apparently have to send copies of their games to the National Diet Library, but no one is preserving them or the associated hardware because of fear of infringing copyright. Because of the interest and involvement of the government Japan may develop a centralized preservation system that benefits all and respects intellectual property. He also mentioned the importance of preserving not only games and platforms but the context of games.
I was lucky to have some time with Professor Baba as he is spending a lot of time in Germany working on an image archiving project there.