The conference attracted a few hundred international delegates from academia and industry, offering a multiple track of long and short paper sessions as well as plenaries, symposia, and even game tournaments. Given the research focus of the conference, it also offered graduate student mentoring roundtables chaired by a number of high-profile established games researchers, including Henry Jenkins of MIT each of whom had agreed to read a student’s paper and provide expert advice and comments.

On the second day, DiGRA president Frans Mäyrä presented the best paper chosen by the reviewing committee. Simon Niedenthal’s winning paper, Shadow Play: Illumination in Game Worlds, focuses on the use of lights in games and demonstrates the complexity and multitude of technological dimensions involved in today’s digital games, any aspect of which can be studied in great depth.

Speaking of illumination, another unique feature of the conference included “lightning rounds,” in which a dozen or so small groups were formed around tables in one room to listen to three to five 5-minute presentations at each table. Both negative and positive feedback on this format was heard from delegates. However, I believe that it is a good idea to test out these new formats which, in this case, obviously gave more researchers the opportunity to present their work and stimulated small group discussion.

The registration fee of CA$400 (non-member, early bird rate) covered the conference kit with full proceedings on CD/DVD and free, stand-up breakfasts at which delegates were encouraged to mix and mingle. It was also interesting to observe that the attendees represented a wide range of age groups and included a good number of female participants. However, Asia was clearly under-represented.

How Culture Is Conveyed in Localized Games

There was a definite paucity of papers focusing on localization, with only one paper in the entire proceedings including the word "localization" in the title. Localization is apparently not a major research topic in the games research community, although there is clearly a commercial interest in this dimension for both games developers and publishers.

The Localization of Digital Games: A Case Study in China was presented by Quan Zhou, a PhD candidate at the University of Washington, at a lightning round. Zhou views digital games as a cultural product, thus requiring specific strategies different from software localization. He proposes a three-dimensional model to analyze and improve games localization. The model involves analyzing the following three factors:

• the in-game environment, including storyline, game play, engagement and interface;
• the external environment, e.g., socio-political issues, legal issues and ideology;
• and users as the bridge between the in-game and external environments, bringing their own cultural values, conventions and contexts for game playing, as well as the impact of the games on their lives.

Zhou is currently conducting case studies on both successful and failed foreign games localized for China.

Although not directly on the topic of localization, highly relevant is Wendy Wong’s Playing with Heritage: Semiotics and Cultural Analysis of the Online Mahjong Game in the Global Environment. Wong examines the way in which Chinese cultural heritage embedded in Mahjong games is re-packaged and sold as a popular online game in a global context. Wong’s paper discusses the issues involved in the globalization of games, such as stereotyping manifested in the font selection and the use of color, etc. when culture-specific content needs to be digested by players who are not necessarily familiar with the original cultural context. As such, this paper highlights some of the significant issues in the field of localization.

Another paper that delves into the cultural specificity of games is Philip Sharp’s Shenmue: Academia Distilled, which discusses the Saga AM2 game, Shenmue. Sharp, as a media artist, has studied this non-mainstream RPG (Role Playing Game) title and found it to be a rich aesthetic representation of Japanese culture. He also points out the complex nature of Japanese RPGs, which tend to blend all kinds of game genres – unlike their American counterparts.

Shenmue apparently has a cult following, despite its commercial failure, and Sharp argues the merit of studying this particular title as its complex content calls for a multi-disciplinary approach. As implied by Sharp, aesthetic beauty alone is clearly not enough for a game to secure international success. Yet Shenmue seems to contain many worthy elements for games study that could help shed light on the depth and complexity, as yet untapped, of this medium.

The Games Industry in Korea, China and Taiwan

There were a number of papers that specifically discussed the game scenes in Korea and China, where a number of unique trends seem to have developed. Ian MacInnes, of Syracuse University’s School of Information Study, addresses the emerging legal issues and likely control pattern arising from the online games market where game players also conduct transactions involving real money for virtual items in Virtual Worlds in Asia: Models and Legal Issues. The paper is extremely informative for understanding particular issues arising from online games in Korea and China.

Online games account for over 50% of online usage in Korea.

MacInnes pointed out the advanced ICT infrastructure in Korea, which enjoys the highest rate of broadband adoption in the world. Online games account for over 50% of online usage in Korea (multiple answers were allowed). Among 300 such companies now in operation, ItemBay is one of Korea’s first item auction companies, with over US$200 million worth of transactions recorded in 2004. This illustrates the scale and seriousness of the business in this market.

Fraudulent transactions of virtual items account for 70% of crimes committed by Korean teens!

What’s bringing item trade into the limelight are disputes over fraudulent transactions of virtual items, with over 10,000 cases in 2003 accounting for 70% of crimes committed by Korean teens. Quoting a study by KGDI (Korean Games Development & Promotion Institute), MacInnes highlights the ambivalence on the part of the game companies whose items are traded, with only 18.7% asking for such practices to be banned and nearly 30% accepting it with reinforced regulations.

As for the players themselves, most do not seem to accept the companies’ property rights over virtual items – despite the EULAs (End-User License Agreements) protecting the latter. Faced with the increasing number of crimes, the government is yet to come up with an effective solution. In the meantime, private industry is tightening security measures by imposing mandatory registration with real names on the players. Because this is only an emergent practice elsewhere in the world, Korea seems to be the first to have to deal with the situation.

China also has a developing item trade industry emerging from online games and supported by broadband connections, with 150 such games in operation. MacInnes describes the first court ruling concerning the liability of a games developer for protecting the player’s virtual items when he/she associates them with value in the real world. The case in Beijing’s District Court apparently found the game company Arctic Ice liable for the loss of a player’s virtual item, whose interest should have been protected against hacking, cheating, etc. This ruling was against the claim made in the EULA designed to protect the developer.

Another problem in China is the use of "Waigua,” which is software designed to automatically increase the user’s level in the game when the player is not playing (apparently 60% of players use it). The next is a practice known as “private server,” in which the culprit sets up his/her own server with the stolen, hacked or leaked source code and charges users without paying the required license fee to the games developer. One measure taken to protect the players’ interests is the establishment of a monitoring group of players who ensure fair play. This is still a developing field, and legal and control issues are yet to be resolved.

Taiwan is the second largest online gaming country in East Asia.

Taiwan also has a high penetration of broadband Internet users (over 9 million), of which more than 18% ranked online game playing as the most frequent use, making it the second largest online gaming country in East Asia after Korea. Accordingly, a large in-game asset transaction market has emerged, thereby allowing trading of virtual objects with real money. In An Irrational Black Market? Boundary Work Perspective on the Stigma of In-Game Asset Transaction, Yu-Hao Lee, of National Taiwan University’s Graduate Institute of Journalism, studies the root cause behind the negative public and media image in Taiwan of item trading, along with the players’ response to such negativity.

The virtual world is now impacting social reality in some countries.

Using interviews and the country’s largest gaming forum, Bahamut, Lee offers a new explanation for the negative public reception: the ambivalence of the players themselves engaged in this new universe on the boundary between work and play, adulthood and adolescence, and the real and virtual worlds which the item transactions enable. The social categories are inadequate to accommodate this new market. Lee's argument is that player ambivalence about online activities translates into public fear and negativism. Given the increasing number of players, Lee draws attention to a society at a crossroads, with the new phenomenon of the virtual world impacting social reality.

Leo San-Ming Whang of Yongsei University (Korea) presented The Online Game World as a Product, and the Behavioral Characteristics of Online Game Consumers as Role Player. Whang compares the different psychological impacts on players of the online games, Lineage and EverQuest, both of which are extremely popular in Korea.

Lineage is considered to be the most popular MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role playing game) in Korea, with an estimated 2.5 million paid subscribers. On the basis of the players’ game activity pattern, Whang’s findings point to the fact that very similar games by design can turn into products of a completely different nature, based on how they are received by end users. While Lineage creates a virtual world that merges with the players’ reality, EverQuest remains simply part of the outside “fantasy” world. It is interesting to note that, for not an insignificant number of players, the virtual world is having such an impact.

Another interesting paper was presented by Geung Chang entitled, A Study of the Gamers' Lifestyles in the On-line Game World: The Emergence of Cyber-Behavior Patterns in the Two Different Cultural Contexts of Korea and Japan. Focusing on the online game Lineage, Chang highlights the difference between Korean and Japanese players in terms of their lifestyles in the real world and their behaviors in online and offline contexts, using online surveys of a significant scale.

Firstly, while Lineage is extremely popular in Korea, the same is not true in Japan. More interest in item trade is also observed in Korea. While 27% of the Korean players have identified the virtual world as part of the real world, the corresponding figure is less than half that for their Japanese counterparts. Japanese players consider games as individual pursuits, while the Koreans value community activities. These differences will serve as useful pointers when online games are localized.

Emerging Study of Games in Japan and Amateur Created Imaginative Games

Only two papers were presented by researchers from Japan during the conference. Rumiko Hoshino of the Graduate School of Interdisciplinary Information Studies at the University of Tokyo presented The Dawn of Game Studies in Japan: What Held Japanese Games Studies Back at a lightning round. Hoshino highlights the lack of games studies at academia in Japan where, ironically, the games industry is fully developed with many internationally successful game titles. She points to three reasons for this:

• The secrecy observed by the industry, which makes it reluctant to disclose information due to the fear of players “modding” (modifying games), thus adversely affecting access to information by researchers. The fact that Japanese games are mostly console-based also makes it difficult for the researcher to look 'inside' the games.
• Lack of collaboration between universities and the industry is also a contributing factor.
• There is strong social prejudice against games, which are considered unworthy of academic studies.

The Japanese government now recognizes popular digital content as a cultural asset.

However, just recently some of the above contexts have begun to change, with industry-academia collaboration being seen as a necessity for universities to survive and for the industry to increase competitiveness through new game engine developments. Meanwhile, the government’s renewed recognition of popular digital content as a cultural asset is also encouraging games research. Accordingly, a number of Japanese universities are taking first steps in this direction, but Hoshino stresses the need for groundwork to establish a framework for games research in Japan.

The other presentation by a Japanese delegate (which I unfortunately missed) was Possibilities of Non-Commercial Games: The Case of Amateur Role Playing Game Designers in Japan, by Kenji Ito of the Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology at the University of Tokyo. Ito's paper highlights unique game designs arising from amateur competitions that are increasingly popular in Japan. These competitions unleash imagination unconstrained by the conventions imposed by commercial pressures.

Another main focus for this conference was games in education, as highlighted by keynote speaker Jim Gee's (University of Wisconsin at Madison) talk, Learning Is the Engine That Drives Good Video Games. Gee convincingly discussed an enormous, and perhaps a largely untapped, educational value inherent in games by showing potential elements in some game titles.

The conference’s last panel session elicited individual views from eight commentators on the topic of Games Studies: Now and in the Future, during which each member expressed the new directions, ideas, approaches, etc. that they sensed emerging at the conference. While the prejudice against video games as a valid research area still remains to differing degrees, it was clear from the panel’s comments that games research has now reached a critical mass. Interdisciplinary and international perspectives on games continue to evolve, and they will be particularly significant for games localization research.

NOTE: This was a large-scale conference, and I felt that I only managed to skim a tiny part of it. DiGRA's website makes available the full proceedings, so I encourage readers with interest in this domain to explore the huge array of approaches and dimensions to current games research.