E S S AY
Having a Game Jam? B y A n j a Ve n t e r
G
o to any games meetup in Cape Town and you will see the usual suspects: young white men who have had all the privileges our unique South African history has afforded them. White women are slowly inching in on the pie, but the participation of people of color in the games industry in South Africa leaves much to be desired – and nowhere more so than in the city of Cape Town. As a PhD candidate researching creative cultures and technologies at the University of Cape Town, I started with this informal research question three years ago: Why is the creative industry in Cape Town so damn, well, white? In 2012, I explored the video gaming ecologies in Ocean View, a previously delineated “Coloured” township on the Southern reaches of the peninsula. Despite space, time, and money constraints, it was obvious that young people enjoyed an immersive and locally well-networked gaming culture. Yet few of these young people participate in global gaming communities or become gamemakers in their own right.
Black games, whiTe guilT In African game development, the majority of titles either feed into global gaming trends led by white African men, or fall into the “games for good” or “serious games” repertoire – yet another Euromericanhatched idea to foster “developmental” goals in the African context, well-funded by international development agencies.
aParTheid is sTill alive In this way, the segregationist modus operandi of Apartheid is still alive in 2015. Alternative voices in creative production are muted before they even have a chance to emerge. And this happens during the most formative years: only 1% of young people in South Africa are able to study visual arts and information technologies until a schoolleaving level. After that, the fight for economic survival is often more pressing than expanding one’s visual and software literacies.
Such games do more to appease global white guilt and promote ideological assimilation, than actually inspire and sustain participation from actual Africans. Exceptions such as Kuluya (Nigeria), Maliyo Games (Nigeria), Kiro’o (Cameroon) and Leti Games (Kenya) are still far and few between. Increasingly, it is becoming downright unacceptable for the industry to continue on this trajectory.
Today, representation of Black people in games remains entrenched in offensive stereotypes (the jive-talkin’ thug/hooker/victim/slave is pretty common) while most of the protagonists are white. Many factors play into this tired media trope, but to a large extent this can be explained by how few Black developers there are in the industry. Only 2.5% of industry developers globally are people of colour. As a result, most games are written and designed from a western male perspective. These games are then developed and played on software and hardware that originate from these contexts too.
The magic oF game jams So what can the existing South African games community do? How do we get more people making games, sharing knowledge and not simply consuming western titles that don’t speak to the lived reality of local players? How do we decolonize gaming? The answer, I think, might lie in game jams. The game jam shares much in common with music jamming, in which you have a professionals or amateurs contribute to a central musical theme. Improvised, in-the-moment and loose, this mode of production offers a “bring what you can” attitude – compose while you learn. It has a wide range of incarnations across most global cultures dating back thousands of years – from Jazz, Djembe drumming, Indian Raga, and any form of modern/post-modern remixing. This mode of knowledge production exists in informal learning practice too. Communities of Practice (COP) and the Guild model are two examples of peripheral learning. By applying certain skill sets within a creative genre, newcomers learn from old-timers, becoming Masters on their own terms and often challenging existing paradigms and forming their own distinct signature. Through this hands-on informal mode of learning-throughdoing, n00bs become l33t, applying the knowledge learned, and in turn, attracting their own apprentices to pass knowledge on to. Jamming also invokes the Scandinavian tradition of “co-design,” which fundamentally changed the structure of Scandinavian industries. By scrapping any notions of hierarchy in their workplace systems, this incarnation of jamming dictates that all participants have their own knowledges to contribute, and are experts in their own (albeit nonaccredited) fields. It’s very Ubuntu, really. Sharing knowledge and expertise, and hearing divergent voices, whilst moving towards a central design goal has an unprecedented emancipatory effect – furthering the ideals of equality. This mode of jamming leverages the cultural, emotional, spiritual and practical needs of participants to point at emergent ways of creativity, and by extension, of being and belonging.
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