Welcome to the JapanLab!
We are a digital humanities project hosted by the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin. Our goal is to generate a steady stream of faculty-advised, student-designed educational video games about Japanese history, culture, and language for use in Japanese Studies classrooms. On our website, you can play our games, find lesson plans and resources for teaching with digital humanities, and learn about bringing our program’s framework to your institution.
Explore our Games →
Find our games on itch.io at https://japanlab.itch.io/
Palace of Poetry
Ready, Set, Yokohama!
Ako: A Tale of Loyalty
The Censor’s Desk
Ghosts Over the Water
Death and Taxes
JapanLab Highlights and
Free Tutorials for
Aspiring Developers
Visit our YouTube channel for helpful tutorials on beginner-friendly game engines.
Through trailers, project expos, and student walkthroughs, we highlight how interactive media can deepen our understanding of Japanese history, literature, and game development.
JapanLab teams have developed free, ready-to-play educational games that explore Japanese history, literature, and culture from the medieval, early modern, and modern periods.
We have developed a wide array of digital resources that are available for free for teachers across the world, including lesson plans for our games and advice for teaching with digital humanities.
Find out more about our faculty-student collaborative teams and the way we’ve used internship opportunities and traditional classes to support student-faculty collaboration.