DiGRA Japan

DiGRA Japan was declared to be born yesterday!
Its website was running yesterday,but currently it is down:
http://www.digrajapan.org.
I'm now working on the translation of this website.

Hotels around the University of Tokyo

It is way too early to talk about hotels but since I noticed a coule of them, I leave some links here:
Forest Hongo
http://http://www.forest-hongo.com/English/HotelInformation.htm
It is a new and small hotel of the Ministry of Education Mutual Aid Association. Very close to the main gate of the University. The price range is from 10,000yen to 20,000yen. A member of the Ministry of Education Mutual Aid Association (like professors of national universities) can get special discount, but even without discount, this hotel seems to be a good value. Its restaurant serves a very nice lunch with a reasonable price.
Hotel Kizankan
http://www4.ocn.ne.jp/~kizanweb/
This hotel is located between the campus and the Hongo Sanchome subway station. It seems to be a so-called "business hotel," which offers very reasonable prices but room size and amenities are minimum.

DiGRA Japan's legal status

The organizing body of DiGRA 2007 is DiGRA Japan, a chapter of DiGRA and a national association of game scholars in Japan. We thought that this would be more appropriate than having a single university as the sole organizing body of DiGRA 2007 because we wanted (and we still do) to make it an inter-university effort. Making DiGRA 2007 the University of Tokyo business would be detrimental for the future of game studies in Japan. This is why we hurried to establish DiGRA Japan and made it the host organization of DiGRA 2007.
This, however, generated one disadvantage. The University of Tokyo is an independent administrative agency and has a corporate status (hojinkaku), which means the university can sign an agreement as a legal entity. We chose to establish DiGRa Japan as a voluntary association (nin'i dantai), because getting a corporate status is difficult (in terms of amount of time and energy we would need to spend for paperwork). Therefore, DiGRA Japan does not have a legal personality. All the contracts will be concluded in the name of its representatives. This means, if any problem occurs, DiGRA Japan executive board members will take (legal or financial) responsibilities.
DiGRA Japan's rather informal status caused some concerns among DiGRA executives. This concern, however, comes from cultural difference, or difference about how academic organizations are managed in Japan.
The fact that DiGRA Japan does not have a legal personality means we are going to take all the financial and legal risk. This might look a lot, but we are much better off this way than to make DiGRA Japan a corporate body. If we have to do all the necessary paperwork now, we will not be able to do other essential activities for DiGRA 2007, such as raising money for the conference. In Japan, only very large learned societies can afford to have a corporate status. DiGRA Japan will likely to have a few hundreds members to start, and that would be too small to support its going through a very tedious process. So, we would rather accept such risk and put off making DiGRA Japan have a more legally defined status. Because of the difficulty of getting a corporate status, it is quite common among small or mid-size learned societies not to have a corporate status and to host or organize conferences. It is also common, in such societies, an individual, usually the president, assumes all the legal and financial responsibilities.

Announced on Gamasutra

The DiGRA 2007 meeting in Tokyo was announced on Gamasutra. The new seems to be based on the announcement on the DiGRA website:
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=9024

Full papers and work-in-progress presentations

One of the salient features of DiGRA 2007 is that speakers are selected based on their full papers not abstracts. This is because we feel we need tighter quality control of papers for game studies to receive respectability.
We are, however, aware of the necessity to provide opportunities for scholars (especially junior scholars) to talk about their work in progress. We did not mention in the first circular, but we plan to provide such opportunities.

Come on, Google!

Blogger.com seems to be having a technical problem...

Getting help

Javier Salazar at Tohoku Gakuin University has kindly offered to help us. To organize an international conference, someone who can speak English is a great help. We would appreciate any volunteers.

Out of town

The reason I am working on Sunday is not that I am workaholic. I will be out of town from Monday to Wednesday, and there are things I want to get done before Thursday.

I have sent out the first circular to digra-announce and gamesnetwork lists.

The First Circular

I repost the First Circular. Please feel free to circulate this:

DiGRA 2007 First Circular

(I apologize for cross-posting. Please feel free to circulate this message.)
We, the DiGRA 2007 Local Organizing Committee, are happy to announce that the third DiGRA (Digital Games Research Association) international conference will be held in Tokyo, Japan in September 2007. Scholars of digital games from around the world are encouraged to submit a paper and to participate in the conference. Held in the world capital of videogames, this conference will be an event that no game studies scholar can afford to miss. We are working hard for DiGRA 2007 to be truly special.

The theme of this conference is “Situated Play.” Game play does not take place in vacuum. For play to be possible, certain social, cultural, economic, and technological conditions need to converge. Digital games, therefore, require truly diverse approaches to illuminate their extremely multi-faceted nature. The goal of this conference is to shed more light on these various kinds of situatedness of games. In particular, the conference aims to bridge professionally and geographically diverse scholars and practitioners. We therefore welcome panel proposals and papers that describe various facets regarding the situatedness of digital games and attempt to combine a range of approaches in innovative ways.

For our participants' convenience, the dates of the conference will be set close to the Tokyo Game Show so that participants can take advantage of both events. The selection of papers will be based on full papers instead of abstracts, and the deadline will be in February 2007. A second circular revealing more details about DiGRA 2007 will be issued in late May or early July.

We hope to see you in Tokyo!

- DiGRA 2007 Local Organizing Committee
Akira Baba (Chair), Kiyoshi Shin, Akinori Nakamura, Kenji Ito

New blog

I decided to create a new and separate blog just for postings related to the DiGRA 2007 conference.
The original blog was http://kenjiito.blogspot.com/.