Genuinely Genial Game Gaijin Group Gabfest

In the wake of last month’s Tokyo Game Show was another opportunity to follow a variety of lectures and workshops at CEDEC and several symposia at DiGRA. One of these was a roundtable discussion about working as a foreign game developer in Japan, featuring a selection of gaijin from several corners of the world, all painstakingly building their careers in Japan. The line-up can be found on this page, the second section from the top. (Mr. Dylan Cuthbert was indisposed.)

On-line reports of this particular event, which I didn’t attend (or did I?)* are very sparse. Jason Della Rocca, head honcho of the IGDA, gives the whole DiGRA event a quick mention on his blog with a succinct:

DiGRA, on the other hand, was both wildly inspiring and numbingly boring.

Whereas the Japanese IGDA site only gives us a very brief blurb, turned into “hilaric” English thanks to the never boring Excite translation page:

It became shape that Mr. locker drew it out while questioning the panelist on the point that the researcher from foreign countries that gathered in this conference wanted to learn as a stance.

The two things we can learn from this all is that (a.) the organizers of DiGRA should, in future, record or transcribe these events for the benefit of the wider community, and yah-booh to them for not having done so this time, and (b.) the readers of this blog can see there are more game gaijin out there. Hopefully one of the attendees will write up the symposium on his own blog at some point in the future.

Let’s hope there will be more events like this, recorded for posterity with any luck. That way I might have something useful to post on the matter.

STOP PRESS: Literally not thirty seconds after posting this article I find this URL with an incomplete report of the discussion.

* No, I didn’t.