JAPAN 4530: Game Night, But It's Class

Most of us have had an experience where your high school teacher lectures the class and says something like, “Just you wait for college; it won’t be all fun and games.” But little do they know that in Ashton Lazarus’s class it literally is all fun and games.

“JAPAN 4530: Games, Play, Japan” delves into the history, theory, and practice of Japanese games spanning from the 10th century to the present day. The course comes from Lazarus’s and his colleagues' desire to incorporate gaming into the World Languages & Cultures department.

“Japan is so central to the history of video games, and I think actually the history of gaming more generally… I took the leap and said, ‘Okay, I’m going to try to teach this course in the spring of 2024’, and now I’ve taught it twice,” Lazarus says.

The course curriculum begins in premodern times and ends in modern Japan. Students learn about games like Uta-awase and Karuta, as well as Pokémon and virtual reality games.

“The students always know so much more than I do about all that [video games], except for maybe the old historical stuff, but especially VR,” he says. “They’re all like, ‘Oh yeah, I have an Oculus. I use it all the time.’ It’s really interesting to get their perspective about that.”

In class, students engage in discussion, share their opinions on gaming theories, and, of course, play games.

“The course really begins with a philosophical overview of these two concepts: games and play. We read more recent, mostly Western, theoretical writings, like ‘What is play?’ How do we understand it?” he says.  
 

One of the games they play in class is Sugoroku, a traditional board game similar to Chutes and Ladders.

“Each of the squares is a stop on the route from Tokyo—Edo at the time—to Kyoto… You would get some dice…You advance based on the number you were throwing, and you’re trying to end up in the middle,” he says. “I brought the [Sugoroku] board… I split the class up into groups, then they decide on their little figures, their little indicators to move around.”

The game has been popular in Japan for centuries and has been remade time and time again using alternative prompts. One student even recreated the game with a K-pop theme for their final project.

The second half of the course mainly focuses on video games and thinking about Japanese pop culture as a global force.

“We explore a few different topics related to video games to end the last three weeks or so. Things like gender and embodiment in gaming [and] disability in gaming,” he says.

For Lazarus, one of the most exciting parts of the class is seeing what students come up with for their final projects and learning from them.

“You can design a game. It could be a video game; it could be a board game… You can write an essay or a research paper. This semester, I had a few students who actually did a video essay, which was really cool,” he says.

The final project is a unique opportunity for students to think deeply about the concepts they learn in that semester and to apply them. One student even created their own card game based on the early-modern folk monsters called yokai.

“It’s a fully functional, fully realized card game with awesome art… It’s just so cool to be able to hold it,” he says.

Projects like this capture what makes “Game Play, Japan” a one-of-a-kind experience. Students aren’t just learning about the history and theory of Japanese games; they’re putting those ideas into practice and seeing how play can be studied and experienced.