Michal Maciej Mazur
Back to homepage

Position Essay

Worlds without instruction manuals

An essay about games as cultural systems, everyday life in Japan, public writing, and intercultural education.

At Tokyo Game Show I once stopped in front of a student project called Space Smoking. Its creator, Wataru Yamamoto, had built a game about walking down a street with a cigarette while increasingly absurd obstacles—including urinating xenomorphs—tried to put it out. He described this wonderfully strange idea with the calm seriousness of someone who had already spent many nights making it work. We talked, exchanged impressions, and I offered a few words of encouragement. Several days later, a message arrived in Japanese and Polish. The game was memorable, but so was that small attempt to cross the distance between us.

Moments like this are why I have never been able to keep games, Japan, writing, and education in separate boxes. A game asks us to enter an unfamiliar system without mistaking our first impression for the whole truth. Living in another country, joining an international classroom, or trying to understand someone whose experience differs from ours asks much the same thing. There is no icon floating above a cultural misunderstanding telling us which button will fix it.

The tutorial ends quickly

Games are entertainment. They can also be small laboratories of attention. We learn to read a room before opening the next door, notice what the interface emphasises, decide whether a character can be trusted, and discover which actions a world rewards. Even a badly designed tutorial teaches something—usually patience, occasionally new vocabulary, and sometimes the location of the power button.

Intercultural learning begins in a similar gap between confidence and knowledge. We enter a classroom, institution, language, or city carrying habits that once worked perfectly well. Suddenly they are only one possible set of controls. We observe. We misread the situation. We adjust. If we are fortunate, someone explains what we missed; if not, embarrassment becomes a remarkably efficient teacher.

This does not mean that playing a Japanese role-playing game grants instant expertise in Japan, any more than winning a season of Football Manager qualifies somebody to run Manchester United. It means that games can make interpretation tangible. They remind us that every world has rules, but no rule explains the whole world.

Japan is not a bonus map

For years I have written about Japan for Polish readers. The temptation is always there to present the country as a cabinet of curiosities: vending machines, neon signs, silent trains, unusual mascots, and a new “only in Japan” revelation every seven minutes. It is colourful, clickable, and often terribly incomplete.

Japan is not scenery behind a game, nor a bonus map unlocked after boarding a plane. It is a lived place made of routines, institutions, disagreements, work, memory, humour, convenience, and contradiction. The interesting question is rarely “Why are the Japanese so different?” A better one is: what made this practice ordinary here, who benefits from it, who struggles with it, and what do I still fail to see?

Games help because they preserve traces of those ordinary worlds. A convenience store, school corridor, family meal, ghost story, or clumsy localisation can reveal assumptions that a tourist guide overlooks. None of these details speaks for an entire culture. Together, however, they give us something better than a postcard: context.

A magazine and a university walk into the same story

A games magazine and a university may appear to occupy opposite ends of the map. One wants a strong opening, a human voice, and a reader who does not abandon the page after three paragraphs. The other asks for careful concepts, evidence, and conclusions that survive more than an editorial deadline. I have never found the border between them as solid as it looks.

Writing for PSX Extreme taught me to begin with a scene, respect the reader’s time, and explain why a detail matters before burying it under information. Academic work taught me to distrust an elegant claim that cannot carry the weight placed upon it. Teaching brings both lessons into the same room. A good class needs structure and evidence, but it also needs curiosity, rhythm, surprise, and a reason for the people inside it to care.

Public writing is therefore not a side corridor leading away from the university. It changes what I notice when I return. A conversation on a train, a student’s unexpected interpretation, the packaging of an old Super Famicom game, or the strange life of the Amiga in Japan can all become questions about language, participation, memory, and learning. The traffic moves both ways.

Reading worlds together

In my university work, I design intercultural learning, faculty-development activities, and spaces in which students must make their thinking visible to one another. As Mazzi, I write about games, media, and Japan for readers far beyond the classroom. The formats differ, but the basic promise is the same: I will not hand you an exotic object and ask you to admire it from a distance. Let us go inside, look around, and work out together what makes it move.

That promise also requires humility. A teacher can misunderstand a classroom. A critic can misread a game. A long-time resident can still misread Japan. Experience gives us better questions, not permanent immunity from error. The goal is not to finish cultural learning as if it were a campaign with a final boss. It is to become more attentive to the worlds we enter and more responsible for the meanings we build there with other people.

Then the screen goes dark. The controller returns to the shelf. What remains is the habit of looking twice—and the suspicion that the most interesting part of a game may begin after we stop talking only about the game.