Students in Japan spend many years, mostly without success, studying English, in spite of the ever-increasing need for international communication. The reasons for their failures are many, but among them are teaching styles that don't encourage communicative use of the language and a lack of opportunity to apply the language they have learned in realistic or quasi-realistic situations.

The purpose of this project is to develop and distribute a communicative computer-based game that takes advantage of the Internet connections that are becoming common in Japanese schools, but are little utilized.

The game is (tentatively) designed around team-based competition to gather information by traveling virtually around the world while searching for a secret message. A master game-robot server will be located at the University of Aizu and client machines will connect to the robot to upload and download information. The game-robot will maintain the state of the game and pass information about rival teams to each competitor.

The game is based around a scenario of making a voyage by sailing ship to various countries. The sailing ship metaphor is useful because is facilitates the constraining of communication to electronic means which can be satisfactorily simulated by computer. It is not possible to simulate, convincingly, voice conversations by computer and thus this obstacle is sidestepped. It is also not possible to parse uncontrolled text messages, but the narrow context of the game restricts information passing to a few well-defined domains in which intelligent guessing may pass for real dialogue. For example, communication by email over single sideband (SSB) radio is now possible from ships and this clearly can be simulated by computer. Similarly the receiving of radiofax or even voicemail can also be fairly convincingly emulated.

The game involves the receiving and sending of information, which includes news, weather, health, food, geography, geology, and astronomy. It also involves the reading of maps, setting of goals, determining of routes, searching of location, asking questions, and interpreting of data. To the extent that these tasks involves using English for real or virtual communication, this project will make a contribution to English education

The game is currently being prototyped in mTropolis 2 (an object-oriented multimedia development program) in order to allow multiplatform compatibility.