THE PHILOSOPHY OF LEARNING: "YAKUZA" and spatial learning

How our experiences shape our understanding of our environment. Posted on April 18th, 2024, by Omar Said

Hi everyone, this blog post is the first of a series of posts which falls under the category titled “The Philosophy of Learning". This a section whose focus is primarily on taking the time to really think about what it means to learn and the multitude of ways by which the human mind can pickup and apply information, even within nontraditional mediums.

Today, we're going to be discussing the ways in which we humans learn to both memorize and navigate 3D spaces, and the cult-classic videogame series Yakuza will be our guide. Yakuza is a series of games all set in the fictional Japanese town of Kamurocho. They star Kiryu Kazama, a young man of 20 years old, as he navigates the intricacies of the ever-changing Yakuza lifestyle over a period of four decades. Now, at first glance, it might seem that this series of games that I insist on bringing up hold little relevance in regards to our topic today of spatial learning. However, through my own personal experience, I have gleamed some pretty amazing insights through these games about how our brains learn to process and understand spaces—information that you might find useful along your own academic journeys. 

As I said prior, while the Yakuza series holds a staggering eight mainline games, all eight of them surround the fictional town of Kamurocho. This is essential in allowing us to see how this town evolves over four decades, but it also plays a key-role in building a real familiarity with the layout of the city. I speak as someone who is quite unskilled at navigating maps in my day-to-day life, I'm even worse at following navigational instructions without a visual aid. Yet, even with this said, I woke up one day to realize to my shock that I had somehow memorized the entirety of Kamurocho, every street and every alley. Over the span of just a few short months, I had become more in tune with this fictional town than I am with the real-life campus I frequent almost everyday for school. How this was the case was beyond me, but the question gnawed at me enough that I decided to do some research into the neuroscience of spatial navigation and what I learned explained everything. 

The part of the brain that navigates as well as memorizes spaces is known as the hippocampus. It does many things beyond that as well such as transfer short term memory to long term memory. For our purposes, just look at it as the part of the brain that deals with memory and navigation. Here is where things get interesting, according to an article posted on Psychology Today regarding how our brain remembers the places of our past, our "recall of events is directly linked to the geographical firing of neurons activated as we navigate through specific places"1. In other words, our brains remember spaces through memories linked to these locations. Once I realized this, it all suddenly made so much sense.

Figure 2. Map of Kamurocho. 2D map of fictional city of Kamurocho as portrayed in Yakuza 1.  https://yakuza.fandom.com/wiki/Kamurocho

Across the Yakuza games I had played, I had witnessed gut-wrenching story moments, fought in climactic battles, witnessed hilarious side quests and played weirdly intricate minigames all across this city. Over eight games, I had seen the best and worst of Kamurocho and seen it on while navigating the mean streets. These are streets where I both found joy as well as heartbreak, witnessed the highest of highs, the lowest of lows, and everything in between. No wonder I had managed to memorize these streets so quickly, every corner of the city was home to a cherished memory, a cherished memory that would compound my internal map of the city, growing more and more accurate as I experienced more and more stories. Being honest, learning that this was the case only further endeared me to these games.

My point? The spaces we understand and have mastered mean, inherently, more to us than we may at first believe. We learn and internally map different locations through our memories, our internal stories. So next time you find yourself mindlessly being able to perfectly navigate a street or a set of halls, know that you’re also walking down the spaces where memorable moments in your own life have taken place. -Omar Said

Works Cited

1.      Bergland, Christopher. “How Does the Brain Remember the Places of Your Past? | Psychology Today Canada.” Www.psychologytoday.com, 30 Nov. 2013, www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/the-athletes-way/201311/how-does-the-brain-remember-the-places-your-past#:~:text=The%20hippocampus%20is%20responsible%20for. Accessed 16 Apr. 2024.