Image provided by JASDFW
Over the last decades, gaming has become a major component of the entertainment industry with an estimated 162 million American households owning a gaming console and an estimated market size of $1.9 billion in 2021. As countless people across the globe began to shelter-in-place in early 2020 due to COVID-19, the gaming industry saw little slow down in its popularity, with anticipated releases such as Animal Crossing: New Horizons from Nintendo, selling 13.5 million copies worldwide and 50% of these sales being digital downloads. While digital downloads are not a new trend, this is as first for a release from a major gaming company. How will the industry respond with the gravitation to digital downloads? Will game cartridges/disk become a thing of the past? And how will retailers respond to this changing market?
In this meeting, presented by the Japan-America Society of Dallas/ Fort Worth (JASDFW), join speakers and experts from the gaming and digital entertainment industry as they discuss gaming, digital entertainment and Cool Japan in the era of COVID-19.
Topics to be discussed during this webinar include:
Current status of industry with so many people at home
Social aspects of how digital content is keeping people connected
How the trend will continue, with digital purchases over physical game copies being sold
Importance of digital entertainment for Japanese cultural diplomacy and soft power
This meeting is free with registration. Click the button below to register:
About the Speakers:
Oliver J. H. Barder
Freelance Journalist and Game Director
Since I started my professional life, I have maintained two parallel careers, one in the press and another in game development. This has given me a unique insight into the creative aspect of how a medium like gaming is structured.
Not to mention that working at companies like Disney gave me a means to understand how the film industry and especially Hollywood operates.
These days I am based in Japan and work as both a game director as well as a writer for Forbes. My remit on the latter is to cover Japanese pop-culture and games. In addition to this, I also cover Japanese toys for various outlets. These are mainly of the mecha variety.
In regards to my background and interests, I am British and come from a musical background, playing the trumpet to Grade VIII level and having sung as a chorister for the London Philharmonic in various performances. I also love literature and am still an avid reader.
Naomi Clark
Assistant Arts Professor, New York University Game Center
Naomi Clark has been designing and producing games for over twenty years. She’s helped create games for a wide variety of platforms and audiences, from construction games for kids at LEGO to light-hearted strategy games, mobile sim-management games, and games for conferences and classrooms. Naomi is a Japanese-American who spent some of her school years with family in Osaka and Yokohama. Her most recent game, Consentacle, is a cooperative card game for two players that attempts to upend tired stereotypes about “tentacle porn” by creating a playful space where communication and mutual understanding is paramount. She’s also part of the faculty at the NYU Game Center, where she teaches classes on the foundations of game design, user research, and tabletop role-playing.
David Najjab
Director of Institutional Partnerships, Gearbox Entertainment
David Najjab is Director of Institutional Partnerships at Gearbox Software in Frisco, Texas. He handles governmental relations both in the U.S. and internationally, working with governments and institutions to facilitate Gearbox’s rapid growth and various collaborative projects. His most recent endeavor has been working Borderlands Citizen Science, a crowdsourced citizen science project that leverages the hit game Borderlands’ massive player base to conduct actual scientific research. David came to the game industry by way of academia, where he started some of the first and highest ranked video game programs in the U.S., including the University of Texas at Dallas program and the Guildhall at SMU. David holds a B.A. from the University of Texas at Dallas and an M.F.A. from Bard College in New York. He is on the boards of the Texas Association of Business, the Canada/Texas Chamber of Commerce and the Texas A&M Art and Architecture Department, and is very active with the Entertainment Software Association’s Public Policy committee.
About the Moderator:
Matthew Edward Hawkins
Producer & Curator, Attract Mode
Editor & Personality, FORT90
Matt specializes in pinpointing, preserving, curating, advocating, and actively producing video game culture. As the driving force behind the game culture collective Attract Mode, Matt has produced exhibitions all across North America; collaborators include Giant Robot, Fangamer, Babycastles, Toronto International Film Festival, Toronto Comics Arts Festival, NYU Game Center, and First Second Books. The focus on game culture emerged after years as a game journalist, for a variety of outlets, including: Kotaku, NBC News, MTV News, Nickelodeon Magazine, Electronic Gaming Monthly, Siliconera, Gamasutra, GameSetWatch, and Tiny Cartridge.
In addition to game coverage, Matt has also been part of game creation; after a stint as lead designer of Ubisoft’s experimental New York studio in the early 2000s, Matt would become involved in indie development, by either producing games himself or helping others with theirs, as an consultant & instructor. Matt is also part of Death By Audio Arcade, which recently established Wonderville, Brooklyn’s new home for independently made arcade games, where he is the resident film programmer (in addition to video games, Matt is also active in the field of motion pictures).
All images and biographies provided by JASDFW