Development and Creation Process:
The game was developed in a series of co-creation workshops with designers and young people in Nairobi and designers from Butterfly Works. Similarly the testing was a collaborative process.
Background context and theories:
As the game was to deal with the themes leading to violent conflict amongst young people in Urban Kenya (specifically in slum areas.) the first workshop was held in Nairobi with a range of young people, policemen, teachers, community workers and parents. Together, the group listed the main issues in their lives, the types of regular conflicts they deal with and their causes, they then wrote scenarios on how these conflicts typically arise and do or don’t get solved.
Conflict Escalation
Informed with a number of theories on conflict escalation and specifically Staub and Pearlmans’ ‘Continuum of violence', including scapegoating, we started on the board game development. This concept session was held in Amsterdam and led by games designer Joris Dormans, using his game development kit, whereby we played a blank board game with blank counters and projected various scenarios and rules onto the board. What quickly surmised was that resources contestation was a good game dynamic and water was chosen as common good which needed to be shared and which could lead to conflicts. Inspired by the game Werewolf, we added a number of player roles to increase complexity, such as the thief, the arsonist and the land developer.
Following a workshop in Nairobi, again with young designers (all of whom grew up in the slums) served to fine tune the game rules and choose the game roles (characters) so that they were a true reflection of how things work in the slums in Nairobi. The designers also reviewed the draft game visual designs and suggested improvements. We first developed the board game and were kindly sponsored in the production of the boards by the German company Ludo Fact. 1000 games were produced in English language and 1000 in the Dutch language. The Dutch version was sold in the Netherlands in specialist game shops. The profit was used to cover the costs of the English language game.
The next step was to translate the multi-player board game rules into a single player experience suitable for the mobile phone. Game design is very much an emergent process, you can’t know before hand how the sum of the game rules will turn out as an experience, so you need to do a number of development rounds. We had to redraw all the graphics into small bitmap pixels.
Young people and downloads
The game targets young people in the age group of 15 to 28 years that live in urban areas, informal settlements and smaller towns in East Africa and specifically Nairobi and Kampala. A third version of the game targets young people in the Netherlands, but that game falls outside of this short case study. The mobile game was launched globally on September 21st, 2011 International peace day and was promoted in Kenya and Uganda, through Facebook, twitter, the online game platforms, GetJar and Nokia’s Ovi Store. In Uganda, city radio promoted the game calling users to text in for the game.
Although the game had more than 50,000 downloads globally in less than 2 months, and the 85,000 downloads in 8 months, the original plan was to reach 50,000 downloads in East Africa (Kenya and Uganda mainly). In fact there were only 5000 downloads from the online channels in Kenya and Uganda. The board game is played in 25 centers in Nairobi and 15 schools in Kampala. These are facilitated sessions called ‘Game Gatherings’ where a group of young people play together and discuss the issues that come out of the game. These sessions are organised by Tobias Ouma in Nairobi and ‘Reach a Hand’ in Kampala.
Social Impact
The learning goals of the game are to increase awareness and critical attitudes amongst young people in urban areas in relation to the bad conditions of people living in informal settlements and their relationship to conflict escalation.
And more specifically the goals are to:
- Raise awareness about conditions in informal settlements and how they can lead to conflict.
- Reflect on the responsibility of the individual to contribute to their community good.
- Raise awareness about the water shortages in informal settlements.
Board game versus Mobile game
Broadly speaking, the board game is more effective than the mobile game in reaching the learning objectives. This is due both to the multi-player nature of the board game and the space that affords for discussion and reflection. And it is also due to the better game dynamics of the board version. Practically speaking though, the board game is a much more expensive tool, due to it’s physical production and transport costs, while the digital version can be copied and sent for a negligible amount. There is also a Game Gathering kit for the mobile game, which has proved effective. It includes a phone with the game pre-installed and a booklet explaining the game and how to facilitate the ensuing discussions.
Lessons Learned
Below we present some of the outcomes of the recent game gathering event held in Kampala: More than 3/4 of participants played the game in pairs. Half of them enjoyed playing the game a lot and the other half just enjoyed it. All of the users discussed the game with the person who was playing with them while playing the game.
Conditions leading to conflict: Most of the users found the game’s situation similar to problems in their communities in real life. They named the stealing and lack of water as the main common issues between the game and real life. Before playing the game participants named poverty, corruption and child abuse as the main conditions that lead to conflicts in their community. Interestingly after playing the game most of the users also named misunderstanding as a main driver of conflict. After playing the game “over population” was also added to the list as an issue leading to conflict in the community.
Contributing to community good: All of the participants believed they could contribute to their community. Before playing the game majority of youth noted “friendship” and “helping people in need” as their contribution to their community. Few of them also named involvement in community works and guiding other people as their contribution. However, after playing the game participants also noted “building public toilets and community houses”, “protecting the resources like water” and “working together and cease revenge” as their possible contribution to the community as well as the other contributions they mentioned before.
Interestingly, the participants’ responses after the game directly reflect some of the options available in the “actions’ menu” in the game. The actions presented in the game are result of the collaboration with the youth living in the same context as the participants. They are facing the same issues in the game as they face in their day to day life and their answers show that the game had been helpful engaging the users to reflect on their community’s issues they face in their daily life.
