Greetings from seat 15E on the Nozomi 282 bound for Tokyo. I’ve just left the Japan Board Games Business Expo and I’m energized, optimistic, and yes, even inspired. Someone check to see if I’m having a stroke.
The BGBE1 is Osaka’s answer to Tokyo’s Game Market. This year’s show was held at INTEX Osaka, a massive arts and convention center built right on the waterfront. Inside, creators, publishers, printers, manufacturers, and, of course, the fans, all mingle together in a hodgepodge of shopping, shop-talk, and more shopping.
But let me back up.
Osaka shines bright as a commercial and creative center of Japan. It’s not as polished as the high-gloss neon of Tokyo. It’s not as traditional as the stately jewels of Kyoto. Instead, Osaka is where the merchant class ran smack dab into the artisan class and created the commercial aesthetic Japan is known for, if not proud of2.
What I mean is, all those beautiful arts that get so much space in the glossy travel mags, things like origami and ikebana, those come out of the courtesan traditions of Kyoto. The organized, efficient bureaucracy that makes it possible to travel the length and breadth of Japan with every train running exactly on time3, that’s all Tokyo. But Osaka?
Osaka gave birth to the incredible kitchenware Japan is known for. It turned glass cutting and paper mache into arts. It crafted the bamboo screens and Butsudan that define Japanese homes. Osaka, in other words, is the home of the practical arts. Where the artistic impulse meets the commercial mind.
Perfect for board games.
Board games have been having a moment for about twenty years. I like to think that this moment is going to last and the flattening of culture means that we’ll always remember the unique place board games occupy between story telling and problem solving with stops at art, design, relationship building, and social bonding along the way. But, like I said, I’m an optimist.
Like every kid born before the internet became a thing, I grew up playing board games. I have fond memories of playing Risk and Axis and Allies with my cousins, friends, anyone I could coerce into sitting down with me.
And like a lot of kids with hyper-developed imaginations, I moved on from board games into role-playing games4 and thence to video games. And then I came right on back to board games when I started teaching.
In the early years of my career, board games were the saving grace of many a lesson when I just didn’t know what to do with the students. Run to the closet and grab a board game or three. After all, there’s nothing like a game of Scrabble to remind you of all the words you forgot.
Over the years, I stopped using the pre-made printables in the teachers’ room and started making my own. I soon realized I had more fun doing that than I did doing regular lesson activities. And that other teachers liked using the materials I made not just because they were convenient but because they were good.
Right about this time, the term gamification entered the mainstream and everything got turned into a game. Great. It works. Kind of. The trouble is, when the game stops being fun, the lessons stop being learned5.
Enter Ludic Pedagogy. Ludic is a derivative of the Latin word for game, ludus, which is where we also get really fun words like ludicrous, but you knew that. More importantly, when ludic thought is applied to pedagogy, the result is a form of teaching that encourages every act of learning to be playful and fun.
Crucially, this does not mean that everything ought to be a game. Rather, it means every activity should be assessed for how it affects the learners under the idea that learning is, or ought to be, fun.
This is both a response to and rebuke of older models of learning that stress memorization and practical application rather than learning to improve reasoning or logic skills. But of course, logic is just another word for problem solving and isn’t that one thing that board games are really good at?
I set out for Osaka6 with three goals - to find printers for my games, to find potential publishers for games I can’t make myself, and to connect with the community at large. I’m happy to report that I was successful with all three goals. I’m less happy to report that I broke my budget into small pieces and then stomped on them. Repeatedly.
The sense of community and camaraderie in the exhibition hall is palpable. People are happy to talk and enthuse with each other over the games on display or just games in general. They’re happy to share resources and information, to make introductions. Mention you’re developing a game of your own and watch their faces light up. Trust me when I say that doesn’t happen elsewhere.
More importantly, and consider this a pitch, if you will, creativity permeates the atmosphere like a miasma. You can, Pepe Le Pew style, follow strands of creativity like scents in the air and trace them back to a game, a designer, an artist, a publisher, a particularly exuberant fan.
Walking out of the Expo, my own sense of creativity surged. In between scribbling out these notes, I’ve filled my notes app in my phone with ideas, observations, fragments and scraps of images that might be something someday. It is, in other words, a hell of a good way to spend the weekend.
Got to love a good initialism.
It is also home to a booming craft beer scene; I can attest in good conscience that Craft Beer Base Mothertree has an excellent red pale ale that I will happily drink every time I find myself in Osaka.
Like this particular shinkansen. Crowded, sure. Expensive, naturally. Late, not in this lifetime Buddy.
I still have, somewhere in my files, a copy of the first role-playing game I ever made, created in Printshop and printed on my family’s dot-matrix printer. Good times.
This is why you still don’t speak Spanish despite your four-year streak on Duolingo.
If Orwell had Paris and London, I’ll take Tokyo and Osaka and call it a draw.
Yes!!! So happy for you. Can't wait to hear all about it.