Rice Games is excited to share that founder and CEO Julian Rice was invited to speak at GAME AiCON Seoul 2026 with a keynote speech titled:
Held in Seoul, South Korea, GAME AiCON Seoul brings together game industry professionals, publishers, developers, partners, speakers, and studios from across Asia and beyond. For Rice Games, the opportunity to speak at an international industry event in Korea was another meaningful step in sharing the broader vision behind Shujinkou® and the studio’s approach to game design and development.
During the presentation, Julian discussed how language learning can move beyond traditional localization and become a meaningful form of game innovation. Rather than treating language as just translated in-game text or a separate, mandatory educational layer, the talk explored how language acquisition can be woven into a game’s character and world-building, combat systems, progression, character design, optional learning tools, and overall player experience.
This philosophy has been central to Shujinkou, Rice Games’ flagship title. At its core, Shujinkou is designed first as a full-scale role-playing game: a deep JRPG with turn-based combat, dungeon-crawling, narrative progression, characters, great music, quests, systems, and worldbuilding. Around that foundation, the game also includes optional Japanese language-learning elements for players who want to engage with them.
The presentation highlighted several of these systems, including language rooted in character names and lore, Kanakae Orb mechanics connected to enemy weaknesses, the Kanban system for learning about Japanese and in-game lore, the Moji Kiroku writing practice system, Blue Text vocabulary review, and language-focused minigames tied to grammar, verb conjugation, radicals, counter words, sentence structure, and more.
A major point of the talk was that educational mechanics can be powerful, but only when they support the game rather than replace the game. Most gamers do not necessarily want to play a learning-focused game first, after all!
Julian also explored how similar ideas could be applied to other languages, including Korean and Arabic, showing how writing systems, phonetics, roots, history, and cultural context could potentially inspire new mechanics, stories, and gameplay experiences that diverge from the dungeon-crawling vibes found in Shujinkou.
This talk follows Julian’s recent lecture at Waseda University, where he gave a talk on “Shujinkou™, JRPGs, and Innovative Language Acquisition Elements in Video Games,” as well as Rice Games’ recent showing at BitSummit 2026 as first-time Bronze sponsors.
Read about those posts here:
Together, these opportunities reflect the slow-but-steadily growing momentum behind Shujinkou as both a video game franchise and an educationally relevant creative IP.
Rice Games will keep pushing hard in both academic spaces and game industry events to show how ambitious and legitimate JRPG design and optional language learning can come together.
More exciting news will be announced soon!
Team @ Rice Games