Collecting and Archiving A Gaming Experience

Books, films, music, paintings… While there is a custom of archiving these cultural and artistic works, how should interactive media – that is, video games – be preserved? And what will be created from that? Speakers from a research institute, a corporation, and an art museum will each consider video game archive initiatives passing them on to the future from their individual standpoints.

Speakers:
Koichi Hosoi (Professor, Ritsumeikan University)
Youichiro Miyake (Game-AI Researcher)
Kazuho Soeda (Curator, Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art)

Speaker’s Profiles

Koichi Hosoi
Koichi Hosoi established a general digital archive that stores a range of Japanese cultural resources, from traditional entertainment to modern pop culture, and is interested in revitalizing the content sector by making links to new social business models based on regional and industry/academia/government collaboration. His Game Archive Project, which deals with long-term storage of digital games, has been running from the late-1990s to the present day as a comprehensive social preservation activity for games run via an industry/academia/government collaboration. He has published “The Life and Times of Nintendo Famicom: The Birth of TV Games” (published by NTT) and more.

Yoichiro Miyake
Youichiro Miyake majored in mathematics at Kyoto University, graduated with a MA in Physics from Osaka University, and a PhD in Engineering from University of Tokyo. In 2004, he began engaging in research and development of artificial intelligence in digital games. He is a specially-appointed professor at Ritsumeikan University Graduate School of Artificial Intelligence, a specially-appointed professor at the Science and the Institute of Industrial Science and a researcher at the Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology at University of Tokyo, and a guest professor at University of Kyushu. He established the Game AI Subcommittee (and serves as its chair) of the Japan Chapter of the International Game Developers Association, is a board member of DiGRA Japan, Vice-Chairman of the Editorial Board and Senior Board Member of the Japan Society for Artificial Intelligence, and a member of the steering committee for the Information Processing Society of Japan, Game Informatics Research Group. In 2020, he won the JSAI Best Paper Award for “Game AI General Theory and its Implementation in AAA Digital Game – A Case Study of AI System in Final Fantasy XV.”

Kazuho Soeda
Kazuho Soeda (b.1982, Fukuoka, Japan) graduated with a MA in Art History from the Graduate School of Humanities and Sociology and Faculty of Letters, University of Tokyo, and is currently Chief Curator at Aichi Prefecture Museum of Art. He has written about games from a museum perspective for Bijutsu Techo with articles such as “Issues Surrounding Video Games in Museum Collections” and “Reading into Artists’ Practices from Analog Games.”