Month: August 2018

Replaying Japan 2018

The last few days I have been in Nottingham, land of Robin Hood, at Replaying Japan 2018 (PDF) conference in the National Videogame Arcade. You can see my conference notes on Replaying Japan 2018 here. The quality of the papers was excellent. The community is gelling and the research is getting more and more interesting. Some highlights:

  • The theme was music and we had a number of excellent papers on Japanese game music. We now have a Replaying Japan journal, thanks to Ritsumeikan. I’m the English editor so stay tuned for a CFP.
  • As per tradition, Keiji Amano and I gave a paper on pachinko. This time we talked about the line between gambling and gaming.
  • The keynotes were fabulous. The first was Masaya Matsuura who developed PaRappa the Rapper and other music games. He reflected philosophically about music, play and sound. The second was David Wise who has composed music for games including Nintendo’s Donkey Kong Country series.

It struck a number of us that the community is becoming sufficiently developed that it may be time to form an association in order to properly involve people. Until now it has been loosely organized by a network of us. It may be time to formalize.

EaaSI | The Software Preservation Network

I just learned about a new project called EaaSI | The Software Preservation Network. Stanford will be one of the nodes. They are looking at how to provide emulation as a service. They are using technology from Freiburg called bwFLA Emulation as Service.

Emulation as a strategy for digital preservation is about to become an accepted technology for memory institutions as a method for coping a large variety of complex digital objects. Hence, the demand for ready-made and especially easy-to-use emulation services will grow. In order to provide user-friendly emulation services a scalable, distributed system model is required to be run on heterogeneous Grid or Cluster infrastructure.

The Emulation-as-a-Service architecture simplifies access to preserved digital assets allowing end users to interact with the original environments running on different emulators. Ready-made emulation components provide a flexible web service API allowing for development of individual and tailored digital preservation workflows.

Emulation is going to be important to game preservation. Already the Internet Archive is making games and other software available with emulation. There is also the MAME (Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator) project that is a community project that has traditionally allowed people to play older games right from the bit sequence off cartridges.

Home – DIGRA 2018 Conference

Last week I was at the DIGRA 2018 Conference in Turin, Italy. The conference was well organized and the quality of papers was high. As always, I kept conference notes here.

I was struck how game studies is less and less about games. Of course, games are the subject of research, but game studies is less about the appreciation of games and more and more about what we can learn about other things through games. Games, like literature, have become a lens for looking at other things making the field richer and better aligned with other fields like media studies or literary criticism.

Next year the conference will be held in Japan and linked up with Replaying Japan. I look forward to the encounter between these different game studies cultures.