THE NEW ART EVENT IN THE DIGITAL AGE
Fresh PersPecTives Game jams can inspire participation from a wider demographic of people. Initiatives such as the Danish ‹Girl Game Workshop’ have successfully applied this model of creating and learning to empower young girls from marginal contexts. Their workshops on the West Bank at Anabta, Nablus and Balata (the largest refugee camp in the region), have succeeded in demystifying code among a group of young girls in Palestine. The outcome of these jams had similar ingredients to games made elsewhere – designed in PhotoShop, compiled in Unity, and music composed in Sibelius – yet these games were unlike any existing titles. The stories were fresh, the mechanics new. While learning valuable skills such as coding, designing and composing, these girls succeeded in showing and teaching others about their own lived experiences through an immersive medium. Locally, researcher Marion Walton is busy developing coding syllabi for mobile phones under the “Creative Code” banner. She teaches high-school students in Makhaza, Khayelitsha, how to code and design through remixing and re-skinning games, in his way relaying a number of creative literacies through a familiar and popular medium. Their first title, a Mario mod called Khazatown Blues, uses the famous platform to share the daily life of a high school kid who has to navigate homework, teachers, bullies and gangsters in the township.
doing iT righT These examples are great, but still pretty isolated. Games have the ability to communicate across social and cultural boundaries. To play, we have to trust our fellow players, we have to trust that they will abide by the same rules as us. It’s time that game development in South Africa takes up this spirit of inclusivity and expands the magic circle. Games do more than carry the ideologies from which they were born, or simulate experience and tell stories: they create models for collaboration and participation. As a games community we need to share our knowledge freely and move beyond our centers of privilege. Jamming, if done in the right spirit, can offset some of the thorny inequalities that keep so many gamers from potentially making the next generation of awesome local games.
Global Games
11.8. 2015– 17.4.2016
Maybe by jamming together we can change what it means to be a gamer and a game-maker in South Africa. Forget the existing models of what a gaming community should be, and get really excited about that.
The Interactive Exhibition at ZKM | Karlsruhe
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Invite Everyone. 9