A Slice of DICE

I think if you individually spoke to many of my friends in Korea, they would be able to articulate what they believe to be the strengths and differences between their country from Japan, from Thailand, and moving down the peninsula.

You do, it's such a melange of cultures - you look at the peninsula and you have Kuala Lumpur which is really a Muslim nation, more so than Asian, in terms of cultural influences. And even Singapore itself embraces so many different nationalities in its history... it was one of Britain's colonies not too many years ago, a couple of generations...

That's a good observation, and you're right. At the same time I think you have companies who choose to grow and are successful by focusing on their home market, and their home market exclusively - but at the same time if you are a practitioner of game-making you get to a point where you want to be seen as relevant to a larger - a global - audience.

I think that the success of KartRider and Nexon is certainly a great example of doing something well, and then looking for something that would work well on a larger stage.

It may be a long way away, and it will probably always be out of reach unless we take steps to try and provide a forum, to see what we can do and find out what the common things are.

I'm not sure - beyond the fact that there's a desire among the brightest and best in the interactive entertainment companies to want to play on a global stage... if that's the only thing they have in common, I guess that's as good a starting point as any.

I think that for years, at least during my tenure at the Academy, every time I go to the Continent, or the UK, someone always comes up to me to talk about creating a DICE for Europe. I think that the national boundaries and cultural differences are much stronger on the Continent than what I've experienced personally in my role at the Academy in the Pacific Rim.

Maybe it's because the newness of their entrance into interactive entertainment - isolating Japan for one second, because so much of our success can be traced back to Nintendo and the creation of the home market with the NES - but nevertheless I think that there seems to be less dogma in terms of "I'll never go there; I have no interest in listening to them."

Because they are trading more internationally in terms of IP than they have in the last ten years. And do I think the DICE Summit Asia will be the bridge to all the areas and problems? No, I'm not that naïve, but I think it's a good starting point for conversations, and I think what I'm trying to do in terms of programming for this first attempt is to look for game-makers, people responsible for the creation of games, to talk about how they view the global market and what they create for it, and the things that everyone has in common.