Thanks to Serious Games Japan maven Toru Fujimoto for tipping us off to My Dream and Bank, a Japanese Flash-based advergame intended to teach high school students about the basics of finance and starting a business. The game was produced by the Japanese Bankers Association, and according to Toru 100,000 copies were distributed on CD-ROM to schools and home users, free of charge.

From what I can tell about the game, the player can choose one of four characters, each of which has a different personality and business goal -- internet entrepreneur, hair salon owner, coffee shop owner, and fashion designer. This initial decision sets the goals for the game, for example the net venture strives to go public. The game appears to have turn-based play where the player is presented with decisions specific to their current status. These challenges also slowly introduce financial terminology. According to the press release, the game's scenarios are designed to last around 40 minutes, specifically so that they can be used in individual meetings of high school classes.

The Japanese Ministry of Finance also has a flash-based game for kids, which you can play online if your Japanese is better than mine. Go!Go! Finance Town has very identifiably Japanese visuals and music (especially music). The gameplay is rudimentary, mostly taking the form of seemingly vaguely related mediocre minigames interspersed among the e-learning type slideshows.

It's always hard to see these games as a Westerner, not only because of the language barrier, but also because our cultural expectations are so different. I wonder if we could imagine a game in the US funded by a banking association to encourage smart banking and entrepreneurism among youth. I especially wonder if such a thing would get into the schools. In America, we seem hell-bent on churning out rat-race workers who we encourage to go into debt as quickly as possible so that they might become even harder workers to meet their debt obligations. The Japanese keiretsu business structure, which encourages transactions across horizontally and vertically linked companies. One could argue that such a deep financial and cultural structure as the keiretsu gives the Japanese a head start in thinking about the systemic relationships inherent in economics and finance.