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.