Game Market 2023 report

Yesterday (December 10th 2023) I went to day two of the Tokyo Game Market, the first time I’ve been since the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Weather – ☀️ | Mood – 😊

🏪 Booths I visited

(in no particular order)

🔪 Murder Mystery booth

In September, seminar students and I went on a field trip, staying two nights in the Meiji University Seminar House. Whilst there, I took two murder mystery games created by Group SNE: 

• 人狼村の祝祭　(Festival at the Werewolf Village)
• 何度だって青い月に火を灯した (No matter how many times, I lit a fire to the blue moon)

I was unsure how much they would take to the games, but in fact they liked it so much we played both of them in the same day. It was a fantastic experience.

I’ve since used the same murder mysteries as part of my English language teaching, creating zines to support their language learning. One to help students take notes during play, and another zine for them to do simulated recall after playing.

The two murder mysteries mentioned above do not have an English version yet, so students have been reading the book in Japanese, translating keywords and phrases into English and playing by speaking English. 

I think the open-ended discussion and information gathering aspects of murder mysteries really DO work in a TBLT approach to teaching. (see my TBLT gaming framework here:

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There seems to be a lot of buzz around murder mystery games right now. The fact that there is a special corner of the Game Market attests to this. I spoke with students and we think that murder mystery games represent a nice middle ground between board games (particularly hidden role games like ‘Werewolf’ and TRPGs like “Call of Cthulhu” which are longer, detailed campaigns. A murder mystery in a box represents a superb role-playing experience without the long set-up of TRPGs. So, needless to say, I was very excited to learn what new murder mysteries exist. 

University booths

There were several universities with booths at the Game Market this year. The ones I saw: 

• 武蔵野美術大学 Musashino Art University
• 東京電機大学非電源ゲーム部 Tokyo Denki University (TDU)
• 湘北短期大学高木ゼミ Takagi Seminar – Shohoku College

Focusing on TDU, the university I used to work at, I was really impressed by their professionalism. They have been approached by a larger publisher to make their game on a larger scale, too. As the fledgling York Game Lab, we have a lot to learn from them.

The Shohoku College booth was the only booth that featured the name “Seminar” and is a wonderful example of what I’d like to do with my seminar class. They sold games at ¥500 each and we picked up a kind of Love Letter meets 犯人は踊る passing game. It was fun and definitely worth the ¥500.

Educational games

Two stand-out booths were selling games related to education. They are:

• LODU：SDGsゲームで未来をつくる (Lodu: Making the future with SDGs games)
• 食べ残しNOゲームでSDGsを学ぼう (Learn about the SDGs with the “no food loss” game)

The first booth, Jonathan had a long chat with them and found out that they were interested in learning about how to pedagogically support gameplay towards deeper learning, and also have a crash course on gamification. As someone who wrote a paper on all of the above, I’m in. I’ll be emailing them later this week to try and arrange a consultation.

The second booth featured a game designed by an 11-year-old school student and is being used at a free, afterschool program down in Osaka as well as in select elementary schools there. The school also holds workshops for students much like a maker-space, teaching students to be creative, and independent learners. They have a 10-week cycle of guiding students towards creating their own product going from researching → making → playtesting. Not only games, but any creative project of their choice. From their website:

The classes in the Adventure Course follow the same seminar format as university courses, and over three months, students reach a single goal. First, they conduct self-research, addressing issues and solving problems related to their personal matters, ultimately working on self-development. Next, they engage in societal research, connecting the process from issue identification to problem-solving in the context of broader societal issues. To deepen children’s curiosity, they also receive lectures in university research labs and related companies.

I’m interested in working with this group, perhaps bringing their school into the Kanto region and Tokyo specifically.

Summary

The event was a much-needed refresher to the state of the Japanese board-gaming scene and reignited my interest towards getting my own publishing company (York Game Lab) set up and a booth at event in the future. I was impressed by the amount of murder mystery games and the booths that were showcasing educational games.