Bit by Bit - Language Unlocks (Culture)

(Bit by Bit is a series that seeks to better understand timeless truth through gaming metaphors. The title refers to our progressive sanctification. And, you know, 1's and 0's)

Haven't done one of these in months, but I continue to be impressed with how gaming metaphors apply to unchanging truths and principles of life. Today's entry is related to my overseas work. It's not meant to discourage anyone who feels they can't learn languages well, but to encourage everyone to keep going.

The Struggle to Connect 

Language is one of the biggest barriers to ministry in East Asia. The difficulty of languages like Japanese, with three writing systems mixed together and complicated grammar, and Mandarin, with lots of similar-sounding words distinguished tonally and thousands of characters to memorize, is something most people are aware of.

When I say language is a huge barrier to ministry, I don't mean that one must be impressively fluent to do ministry over here. English teaching is always a way to help and meet people, and one can train many local pastors through a translator and accomplish important long-term kingdom work without spending years trying to get fluent in their language.

The problem, rather, is the relational issue: to connect with the average local person who does not speak your language, you need to speak their language well enough to do so, and while there are exceptions, most ministry that will not evaporate fairly quickly after you leave depends on that kind of connection. Without the language, you're also permanently separated from the culture; you can learn about it, but you'll always be missing a huge part of everything, a black box into which you rely on other people to look inside for you.

Language learning is tough, but that difficulty can be over-hyped too; there are some people who do struggle to learn any new language, but for most people with most languages it's a simple question of learning correctly (the right content studied in the right way) and investing enough time and effort to pound it into your brain until you make new neural pathways for it.

That means to learn a new language is to re-wire your own brain, so it only makes sense it would be a challenge. The attitude I condemn is neither the fear that one cannot do a good job in learning a new language due to its difficulty, nor the natural frustration that comes after much effort put into learning with seemingly little result; it's the attitude that says "language learning is hard, how little can I get by with and still serve?"

For me, as a Christian living overseas hoping to share my faith with as many people as possible in my community, language is a constantly present, relevant, and exhausting challenge. Most of my day-to-day communication here is done in Mandarin, and the more used to speaking it I become, the more obvious it becomes that it's not adequate. That doesn't mean I can't do what I do now with the language level I have now, it means I can see opportunities that lie beyond my reach because my language abilities aren't up to them yet. I want the language keys that open those doors.

There are discouraging days, where I feel like I should just give up and use English, and there are encouraging days where I can turn and see that, although the mountain ahead seems ever higher, I'm looking from a vantage point far above the plains below where I started.

But one of the most motivating things about the process of learning a new language, whether you've just started or over the long term, is that with every new useful phrase or word you learn, you are opening up new conversational or even social possibilities. This exciting process of slowly increasing your ability to function effectively in a new place and culture, at the same time greatly expanding your versatility and flexibility in ministry, is very similar to learning the rules and techniques of a new game.

Let's compare that process to an old classic:

Super Mario World

This is one of my favorite old games of all time. I think the designers hit a perfect balance of great art and level design; fresh and varying content and enemies so the levels don't get boring; memorable music themes, sound effects and cues; and secrets hidden everywhere. And yes, nostalgia may play a part; we did not have a SNES growing up, but I spent many hours playing it at friends' or cousins' houses.

One of my favorite parts of Super Mario World was how many secrets there were to unlock if you knew how. Whether flying above the screen in the Ghost House to unlock a secret level that gives you infinite lives (basically the secret to beating the game), or going to Star Road and finding all the different colored Yoshis, even the secret levels sometimes had their own secrets.

Secrets within secrets...

One of the more fun secrets to unlock in SMW are Switch Palaces. Everyone knows Mario games involve jumping under lots of blocks; Super Mario World introduced the innovation of several different colors of "exclamation point blocks" [ ! ], which must be "switched on" at the hidden switch palaces. (Only the first palace, Yellow, is in plain sight, the others must be found by discovering secrets in various levels) Until you find and activate the correspondingly-colored switch palace, these colored blocks are shown only as dotted outlines, showing where the blocks will be.

Early in the game, you had probably switched on the yellow blocks (further levels became fairly ridiculous if you didn't), but not yet the green, red, or blue ones, and every so often you saw a weird little area where you knew there was something going on, but only had the outlines of the potential colored blocks, so you wouldn't be able to reach the secret there without finding the switch palace of that color first.

Our family tradition was to run, jump, then switch directions exactly as he landed

Correct me if I am wrong, dear readers, but if memory serves, it is possible to finish the game with only the yellow blocks switched on. You don't need to unlock the secrets to finish it, you can make your way through and achieve the main goal of beating Bowser in his castle, which after everything it takes to get there is actually not terribly difficult.

However, that is not "really" beating the game. There is a way, by beating secret levels in the right way, to actually permanently change the in-game graphics from Spring/Summer to Autumn. The enemy designs change, the color palette changes, it's a victory which accomplishes much more than simply defeating the last boss and watching the credits.

Again, if memory serves, one cannot beat the final secret level and cause this change without the presence of the different colored blocks which you need to switch on at the hidden switch palaces. In other words, you can beat the final boss 100 times and the game won't change, but by switching on the missing blocks and unlocking the secret levels, you can affect the game itself.

Unlocking a Culture, Block by Block

Language is like that. Living in a new culture, in a new language environment, you start out with few things you can do. "Survival" language skills give you what is necessary to keep living there in the basic sense; you can get done the very basic things that must get done without finding someone that speaks your first language or someone to translate. You could continue in this way for a very long time, and many people do. 

But you won't even know what you don't know. You'll never have the conversations that could have opened up new doors, never get to know that local who can't speak English at all, but who is very influential in their own context, or can encourage you or be encouraged by you. You can set goals, ministry or otherwise, and reach them, and even "beat the game," by accomplishing everything you set out to do in a given time period.

What you set out to do might not be the best or most effective thing you could be doing, however. Missions is fraught with examples of people doing what they thought was a good idea and actually causing serious problems. But on a less extreme level, how many times have I read about and personally witnessed people who worked very hard, yet somehow found the long-term fruit from a given ministry was surprisingly absent?

That's not to denigrate their effort; God rewards our motive, not the outcome, which we are never totally in control of anyway. (sometimes not at all) But if your goal is to be as effective as you can, without enough language to get deeper into the culture, to understand the lives of the people you are ministering to, you won't know whether you're working in ways that make sense for the culture or not. I have been in the situation more than once of being present for someone ministering in English while listening to the attendees speaking Chinese, and realizing the attendees' assumption of what was happening and that of the person leading were wildly different.

I wonder how many times that has happened to me in the past, when I had no way of knowing.

Like the colored block outlines mentioned above, you might become aware that there are opportunities eluding you, but until you unlock the next level of your language abilities, you simply won't have access to them. That's not to say they're automatically open to you at that point. The secret levels are typically especially difficult or confusing, and have their own secrets. But knowing they exist gives you a whole new set of goals to strive for.

The Final Word

So if you are headed towards, or already work/minister in a multi-lingual context, my advice is this: To avoid burning out, make your default language goal whatever is enough to accomplish the goals you or your organization or ministry or team currently have--following our Super Mario World analogy, unlock those Yellow Blocks, then go ahead and set out to defeat your Bowser.

But set another goal too, which is that along the way you will keep trying to find those Switch Palaces and unlock new blocks to help you get into new areas. Then use the opportunities those new language abilities provide to go places and do things you couldn't before. Maybe the Star Road is where you'll find that breakthrough you've been praying for.

Bit by Bit - How Nintendo is a Byproduct of the Great Commission

 (Bit by Bit is a series expressing gospel
truths through gaming metaphors. The title refers to our progressive sanctification. And, you know, 1's and 0's)

No doubt, you doubt my premise. How could the Great Commission have anything to do with what is arguably the classic of all classic video games?

Hear me out... it's a closer correlation than you're probably expecting.

In 1541, Francis Xavier (former classmate of Ignatius of Loyola) set sail from Portugal to Goa, India. He did so at the request of Henry III of Portugal, who wanted him to address the reportedly declining state of the Church among Portuguese in India. Goa was Portugal's massively important colonial trading center in India, and from there Xavier was to spread the gospel in the East Indies. (Basically India to Indonesia)

Before his departure, Xavier (with Ignatius and others) had been involved in founding the Jesuit order. He thus went out as the first Jesuit missionary. (Of the Jesuit missions movement much can be said, both good and bad, but it brought Christ to many, many people around the world, and is something of which more evangelicals should be aware)

I won't spend this whole entry recounting Xavier's fascinating story (parts of his wikipedia article are quite poorly written, so I'd recommend looking elsewhere), but it is worth noting that in many ways he was ahead of his time as a missionary, employing methods we might call incarnational while those that followed after him often took more of a colonialist approach.

Xavier ministered in a variety of places around Asia, but one important and well-known period of ministry near the end of his life was the 2+ years he spent working in Japan, beginning in 1549.

While Xavier was making efforts to reach Japan with the permission of its rulers, a course of action he felt would be more culturally appropriate there, the Portuguese crew of his ships also quite naturally interacted with the local Japanese people. Seemingly not feeling personally invested in Xavier's missionary purpose, they began teaching a new game to the local people who enjoyed gambling, using a deck of Portuguese playing cards they'd brought with them. This caught on, and variants of the game spread widely. Gambling card games based on this European style 48-card deck became very popular, and were banned in the 1600's as Japan entered its centuries of isolation, closing itself off to the outside world and trying to rid itself of foreign influences. People who enjoyed the card games found various ways around this ban, however, often by changing the look of the cards. Over the next century or two the decks involved into what became known as the Hanafuda, a numberless deck with flowers designating the different suits.

From the creation of the hanafuda deck, still with 48 cards organized similarly to the Portuguese deck, though now with very different art, we now fast forward to the Meiji Era, in which Japan sought to leave behind the old days and become a modern power. Many bittersweet stories are told of this time of loss and renewal, some historical (in 1876 the remnants of the samurai were banned from carrying swords; in 1877 the last samurai rebellion occurred, was eventually stamped out, and the era of the samurai was ended), and many imaginary tales, as it is a common setting for Japanese period fiction.

In these storied days, not long after Japan had moved its capital from its ancient seat in Kyoto to what is now Tokyo and just after telegraph lines had begun going up, a young entrepreneur named Fusajiro Yamauchi started a company selling high-quality hanafuda cards, which the government had finally decided were far enough removed from the original gambling cards to stop banning them.
Mr. Yamauchi opened his first hanafuda store in 1889, named "Nintendo Koppai."

Therefore it was that, 340 years after Portuguese playing cards were introduced (unintentionally) by Francis Xavier as he sought to establish a foothold for the church in Japan (and did see many Japanese accept Christ, though the history of the church in Japan has been a largely tragic one), the Nintendo company was founded to sell an updated Japanese version of those cards.

It was managed well and expanded rapidly, and after 1959, when Fusajiro's grandson Hiroshi acquired the rights to put Disney characters on Nintendo's playing cards, it became Japan's most successful playing card company. Following a trip to the US, however, feeling underwhelmed after his visit to the world's largest playing card manufacturer there, Hiroshi realized there was little future in remaining solely a playing card manufacturer. The company began experimenting with different product lines, finally settling on toys, then by the 70's, early electronic games. (Some of you will at this point be familiar with Nintendo's history, with the Game and Watch device coming onto the market in 1980.)

In 1983, Nintendo began selling the Family Computer (Famicom) entertainment system in Japan, then from 1985-1987 in the West as well, where it was known as the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), and came bundled with a game featuring everyone's favorite princess-saving Italian plumber. The Game Boy handheld system followed in 1989, bundled with a little Russian game that had recently begun gaining popularity in the US, called... "Tetris."

The rest, I think, you know. (Though you might not have known that Nintendo still sells hanafuda cards)

So, next time you play a Nintendo game, remember Francis Xavier, first Jesuit missionary to Japan.
Today, Japan's percentage of believers is less than 1%, and it remains one of the world's most secular countries. Early efforts to bring the gospel to Japan resulted, by the vagaries of history, in the export of Nintendo to the world. Maybe it's time for the world's Nintendo generation to take the gospel back there.

TL;DR: The founding of the church in Japan led to you having Nintendo games.
Next time you're playing a Nintendo game, pause it, and pray for the church in Japan.