DiGRA Deja Vu

Yay, I only skipped one session of the entire conference. Having been lagged all through the week I am a husk of the man I once was (despite the photographic evidence that may pop up via the evil surveillance tool that is Flickr). I even went to the karoake (which will surprise almost anyone who knows me), although I arrived a little late having spent a while in the Irish bar next door talking games and film with Grethe Mitchell. Ah the joys of drinking in fake european surroundings when in Tokyo.

I figure I should note down my immediate impressions before I forget, not in the interests of completeness or accuracy, but because I wish I had done the same after Utrecht and Vancouver.

Should anyone read this, please note that it was great, Tokyo was fantastic, and I would send the conference an invitation to be my Facebook friend or whatever if I could and if I had a Facebook account. I cannot thank everyone enough etc. etc. I moan only because I am a curmudgeonly git.

So, in no particular order:

1. DiGRA is a bunch of really nice passionate people and getting to see them once every two years is worth a little grief. This supportive little community is something I both need and adore.

2. Is DiGRA an academic research association, as its name sort of implies? If so I would question a couple of things about the conference, starting with some of the more prominent stuff. A clue -- More than once I would have loved to have been a Japanese speaker with a broken translation set.

3. Why had I sat through exactly the same papers that I had heard in 2003 and 2005? I figure the authors had changed, but I swear the papers were identical. Maybe WoW had replaced EQ, but otherwise they were the same...

4. Note to self. Programming has the potential to break a conference. Thematic days and not tracks make no sense, unless you are selling this as a conference to dip in and out of.

5. Question. Will I get thrown out of DiGRA because I don't carry a picture of my WoW avatar in my wallet alongside snaps of my kids?

6. Related. I wonder what the WoW equivalent will be in 2009? I have a thousand yen left to bet it isn't still WoW...

7. Nicest and scariest surprise was how many astute and careful scholars are working bang in the same area as myself. I almost dread rereading my dated and imminent PoP essay on time now.

8. Work out whether writing blog entries while still lagged and stuck in a hotel room smaller than your suitcase is really a good idea.