The course

JapanLab History Game Development extends the highly successful JapanLab program, which was established in 2021. The course pairs a seminar on Japanese history with a studio laboratory in which students work in teams to either design and build a historical game or produce a comprehensive game concept proposal. Each semester the instructor sets a broad umbrella theme and teams pursue projects within that frame. The first half of the course emphasizes close engagement with primary sources and current scholarship while introducing core ideas from game studies. The second half converts the classroom into a collaborative studio where students develop either a playable prototype or a polished concept package through a sequence of scaffolded milestones, playtests, and revisions. The semester concludes with a public showcase in which teams present their prototypes or Game Design Document to peers and faculty.

The Game

This semester we will be developing video games focused on samurai mercenaries who found employment across Southeast Asia.

In the early seventeenth century, the Japanese mercenary became a familiar figure on battlefields across Southeast Asia. In Ayutthaya (modern Thailand), successive kings deployed a large contingent of these troops; in the Philippines Japanese recruits engaged in the bloody suppression of Chinese revolts on behalf of their Spanish masters; and in Cambodia, Japanese soldiers bolstered local forces gathered to resist a potential invasion.  The Dutch East India Company set up a systematic and highly ambitious program to recruit thousands of these soldiers to wage war across Southeast Asia.  

Despite their importance, these mercenaries have been largely forgotten. This class aims to take this fascinating but essentially unknown history and turn it into a compelling, educational video game. Some Japanese mercenaries survived to old age, but most died young. They were thrown into battle as expendable soldiers. Or they were accused of conspiracy and betrayal by their former masters with disastrous consequences. In Ayutthaya, the Japanese settlement was razed to the ground after accusations of a plot to seize power. The Dutch East India Company tortured it own soldiers while claiming to have discovered a massive conspiracy at Amboina.  

This course explores what it means to be a mercenary, the nature of private violence in a globalzing world and the brief but bloody lives of these lost samurai. It will provide you with enough history to start developing a game to bring these forgotten figures to life.