KevCon in Kanagawa: Oct. 7th & 8th, 2007

KevCon in Kanagawa on Sunday & Monday Oct. 7th & 8th


Featuring some Games Workshop Game Tournaments

Play Starts at Noon on Sunday, October 7th and finishes on Monday
evening.

We will hold the following tournaments:

Warhammer 40K, & Lord of the Rings on Sunday and Monday.

Plus please bring your own games as open gaming of all kinds is
encouraged!

New people welcome!

The above tournaments will be ongoing over the two days, so you can
join in other games as well, then play your next opponent as the
tournament unfolds.

Warhammer 40K will be held at our Tsukahara School.

Lord of the Rings will be held at our Anne School (Kevin`s House).

Everyone welcome!


When:

Sunday and Monday October 7th and 8th.
Monday is a national holiday.

Cost: Free

What to bring:
Your armies, favourite games, and a sleeping bag.

*Please help with cleaning up before you leave.

Where:
In Minami Ashigara City, near Odawara, Kanagawa
http://www.odawara-living.blogspot.com

Venues:

Warhammer 40K Tournament:

Contact Chris Zanella by Email to play or if you have any questions:

Email: themrcz@hotmail.com

Kevin`s English School (Tsukahara Station)
2659-5 Tsukahara
Minami Ashigara Shi, Kanagawa 250-0122
http://www.eikaiwa1.com

For Lord of the Rings (GW) and Open Gaming Contact:

Kevin Burns by Email: greatpowers@yahoo.com

LOTR & Open Gaming will be held at Kevin`s House:

Kevin`s English School (Anne) --also Kevin`s House
Address: Iizawa 242-23 Minami Ashigara City, Kanagawa
Email: greatpowers@yahoo.com
http://www.eikaiwa1.com

How to Get There from:
Tokyo, Fujisawa, Atsugi, Machida, Yokohama or Sakhalin:
Take the Odakyu Line to Odawara and be sure to get into one of the
first four train cars as the train splits. Take a Kyuko (express
train) it has red kanji on the side usually next to the door up top.
It takes about 90 minutes.

*The Tokaido line also runs to Odawara.

For Tsukahara School:
Get off at Odawara Station and transfer to the Daiyuzan Line. Get off
at Iiwahara Station, it takes 10 minutes from Odawara. Take the only exit.
Cross the train tracks. Take your first left. Walk straight past the
golf driving range on your right, then you will see the white
house-like building on your right, across from the Fuji Supermarket.
The Tournaments are up on the second floor.

For Anne -- Kevin`s House:
Get off at Odawara Station and transfer to the Daiyuzan Line. Get off
at Daiyuzan Station, it takes 24 minutes from Odawara. Take the only
exit, walk straight out to the main street out in front and head left
down that street through the traffic lights (under the covered
pedestrian overpass). Over the bridge and you will see our green
roofed house with "Kevin`s English School" signs plastered all over
the place.

How to Get There:
From Shizuoka, Nagoya and other points South: Take the
Tokaido line or the Shinkansen and get off at Odawara. Transfer to
the Daiyuzan line and follow the directions above (for Tokyo).

**The Shinkansen also stops at Odawara. You take a Kodama Super
Express. It takes about 40 minutes from Tokyo. Costs a little over
3,000 Yen one way.

Take a break from the city and see some mountain views and breathe
some fresh air.

Feel free to pass this on to interested people. Games of all kinds
welcome. Bring whatever you would like to play, chances are, others
will want to play it too. We have three guest beds and some futons.
Bring a sleeping bag if you`d like. It is a nice area as well.
A great break from wherever you live with a great bunch of people!

Kevin Burns
http://greatpowers1.googlepages.com/jigg%3Ajapan%60sinternationalgamersguild
http://www.jigg-greatpowers.blogspot.com

The Magic the Gathering Bar in Tokyo

You know a game has hit the big time if they make a bar for it! The Oz Cafe in Tokyo
is also known as the Magic the Gathering Bar. Check out the link:

http://mtg.takaratomy.co.jp/bar/index.html

Make & Take Day at my School

One idea to bring new game players into the hobby is to have a model day.
I know a lot of you are teachers, and many of you teach children.
This is what one of our teachers did on Saturday. Our students had a
lot of fun, and though we used Gundam models, you could just as easily
use Rackham, Games Workshop or others. Chris taught them how to make
the models and how to paint them using felt pens--like sharpies.

You will note a couple of girls in the group!

The next step might be to teach them how to play a game. You could
incorporate some English into it, to make it a bonafide English
opportunity.

Have them talk about what they will do on the turn or have them ask a
question in English each turn.

I have regularly incorporated games into my English classes. Many of
them are games designed specifically for English students--Speaker
Friendly and Rock Talk. Others are The Japan Game, but I have sometimes
used regular board games like China, Settlers of Catan and others,
while requiring the students to speak English.

On the other hand, I think half of what we do as English teachers, is simply expose Japanese to another culture. We open up a new world for them. Playing a game in a relaxed atmosphere, is another way of doing this. Perhaps at times, relaxing the requirement for English production, and just "hanging out," together, arguably is a good idea, and may well help us down the line in terms of getting our students
to engage in the tougher English activities we ask of them.
What do you think? I would be interested in hearing your comments on this?

One of the JIGG members, a university professor, commented at one of the KevCons that there is a lot of pedogogical evidence in support of using games for teaching.

Indeed it makes for an interesting class and a break from the everyday
English class.

For more on our model day, see the following link:

http://odawara-living.blogspot.com/

Announcing the Games Workshop Club for Japan

An unofficial club for arranging to play Games Workshop games in Japan.
Post what games you like to play and arrange to play with others.

We will announce GW events in Japan as well!

If you are new to GW, our members can teach you how to play.
If you are a veteran of
GW games then come and enjoy!

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Games-Workshop-Japan/

Kevin Burns

The So-Called Evils Of Roleplaying Games: Courage, Opportunity, and Friendship

by: Claire Cruver


I was never a normal child. My parents split when I was eighteen months old, and, living with my mother, we always struggled with having "enough" - enough food, enough clothing, enough for bills. My stepfather had no desire to help raise us three children, and as my older brother hit the seventh grade, my stepfather uprooted our still very young family and moved across the city.

In the fourth grade, having just moved schools, I was friendless. Because of some oddly placed school district line, I would have to attend another school in another district after that year. With this knowledge, instead of trying to be social, I turned to the books. That year, I found out that I was able to do complex algebra. By sixth grade, I was into factoring multiple-page geometric formulas; I switched schools again from elementary to middle school to attend seventh grade. I was on the fast track there, taking every excelled course that the school would allow me to take.

By the time I reached 10th grade, I had a 4.0 GPA, a high IQ, and no social skills. I could count my friends on one hand. I was living in a family situation that was less than desirable; my mother was divorcing my stepfather and my brother was moving away. Again, I poured myself into studies, graduating two years early and going to college on a state grant. Though my history may sound like the typical, run of the mill social misfit's background, mine was given a light when I came across a multi-user dungeon called "World of Darkness".

Despite its cheesey title, I had hopped aboard because I was an angry teenager, and I just wanted to chop the heads off all the little, text-based fanged bunnies, but I found that the community provided by the game was something like a chatroom mixed with a video game. While I was gleefully lopping off limbs on dwarfs, I started speaking with my groupmates, and found that I was not precisely the odd one out when it came to problems. The online world effectively introduced me to the notion that other people had problems, too.

The older generations believe that chatting and being part of an online community exposes you to the evils of the internet world - the evils that are the people purposefully choosing to hurt others by misrepresenting themselves and their intentions. What is often overlooked is that, for people like me, it is much easier to speak freely with your peers if you do not have the physical awkwardnesses that accompany speaking to them in person.

In gaming, I also relearned how to interact with people. Gradually, I made friends, switched games, and fell upon a game called FiranMUX after a random search for something new and original, for something that required more brainpower than typing "Kill Bug" fourteen times in a row to level up. FiranMUX, written and run by the husband and wife team of Stephanie and Adam Dray, is an original-themed text-based roleplaying game with heavy leanings toward the Greek and Roman periods in our own history. The characters, storyline, and playerbase have been the spawn of this original story ever since. FiranMUX became my new escape from the ordinary and my vehicle to speak with people like me, who actually cared about me and my hopes and dreams and problems.

For once in my life, I felt truly accepted. Acceptance is one of those feelings every misfit strives for throughout their adolescence, and a feeling that few people actually find. At the risk of sounding egotistical, I was too advanced for my immediate, school-aged peers, but the people I spoke to online accepted me without seeing my face and judging me based on age or IQ. They accepted the important parts of me - my mind, my feelings, my personality.

With their ready acceptance of me, the struggles of my real life melted away. I had people with whom to speak. My parents' divorce, my lack of a normal college life, my frustration at the world holding me down because I had not reached that perfect age of 18 and therefore only semi-employable, my constant fights with my siblings -- everything melted away. Call it an addiction. Call it me deluding myself. Call it turning my back to the world.

I call it finding an audience. As my new home, I soon found that FiranMUX hosted an annual event called FiranCon, where all able players congregated in real time on a hotel in Maryland for one three-day weekend of laughter, stories, amazingly strong friendships, and three long evenings of insomnia. Although I had missed that year's Con, I did make the next one. Then nineteen, I found what would turn out to be my first love nearly a year later, a new home in the world, and more opportunities to better myself than I could ever hope to count in my little town across the country in Washington State.

Con was held in May; by September, I had packed up myself and my belongings into a car purchased from the estate of my dead grandmother, and moved across the country into a better job, a better city, and a chance to start again. Now, three years later, I am still very much a part of what the Firans term "Firan Culture" as well as an active member of the local social group. I have a job that pays me three times what I could ever hope to earn in Washington State, creating a comfortable living for myself. I have a home. I have friends who care about me, and whom I actually care about. I am gradually achieving the goals that I set out three years ago to achieve.

The old cliche is that hindsight is 20/20. If I had known that gutting elves back in my World of Darkness days would lead me through romance, heartache, friendship and tears, I am not sure I would ever have had the courage to ever meet the Firans in real life. Online roleplay communities are not the evil that they are made out to be, but windows to alternate futures and betterment of oneself.

In truth, FiranMUX changed my outlook on life by changing my outlook on people. The game helped build my social skills and gave me the self-esteem needed to shed the walls I had so firmly put up around myself. In improving myself, I improved my abilities to make my world better. I shed the once angry aura and gained enough belief in myself to leave everything I knew behind for a chance. In short, the online community presented to me the leverage needed to foist myself from the hole that my life began as.

Looking back at where I have come from and what I have built for myself, I can honestly say that without games like the World of Darkness and, very specifically, FiranMUX, I would probably be a depressed word-processor, stuck in a bad neighborhood with few, if any, friends. As a person, my personality has warped into that of an optimist, always looking at the bright side instead of allowing circumstance to drag down my attitude. Instead of hiding from troubles, I face them. I could not have done it without an audience to listen.

I was never a normal child. In all honesty, I may not yet be a normal adult, but I am definitely a better person than the abusive, introverted, angry child I was once. Blame this turnabout on the supposed evils of chatrooms and text-based games. Blame this turnabout on the ability of a seemingly harmless online game to create and promote such an outstanding sense of real-life community that FiranMUX has achieved. Regardless of the reason, the fact that online gaming can impact even a single life in such a way is an incredibly geeky notion, but perhaps not one so far-fetched in this new age.

By Claire D. Cruver, of FiranMUX (http://legendary.org/firan/)

About The Author
Claire Cruver is a young author/designer/roleplayer who currently resides in Maryland.