Windhoek, Namibia
Start of the Second Game Labs

With three intensive days of working and playing, we have started the second round of our Enter Africa Game Labs. The first workshop took place at the Goethe-Institut in Windhoek, Namibia, with the aim to further improve the location-based game of the Namibian team and support the participants in using gaming and gamification for change processes.

 

Therefore, our game-thinking lead Bethlehem Anteneh has just travelled from Addis Abeba to Windhoek to conduct a consultation and guide the finalization of the location-based game. Together with the local Enter Africa team and the director of the Goethe-Institut Daniel Stoevesandt, they looked back on the first year of the project, on the challenges they faced and the successes they have achieved – and moved on to the next steps and future goals.

Hence, the workshop has not only focused on moving the Windhoek game another step further to its final version, but also on the development of the team itself and their future success. What are the strengths of a diverse team? How can we also turn possible weaknesses into an advantage? How can the creative thinking process be structured to deliver their visions through playing? And how do we turn future visions into actual experiences? How do we then empower participants to use their experience in the project to build something sustainable of their own when they want to?

Besides, as part of the workshop, the group went together to the Africhi Conference 2018, an African conference on Human Computer Interaction (HCI) hosted by the Namibia University of Science and Technology. Thus, the team could gain insights and professional skills as well as forge links to local businesses and networks in Windhoek. Thereby, they had the chance to improve their skills of communicating with future partners and convince them of the potential of their project, laying the ground for cooperation.  

With the second game labs, our local teams enter the final phase of the development of the location-based games. They strengthen the teams to keep up the good work and finalize their game designs. Besides, the goal is to enable the participants to independently develop similar projects in the future.

Enter Africa is project reaching out all over the African continent – its network has been growing constantly throughout Sub-Sahara Africa connecting people from 15 different countries. But at its core, Enter Africa is most of all a local project: In each of the 15 cities, diverse teams, such as the Windhoek group, are creating their games from scratch – dealing with their cities’ most pressing issues and engaging people to participate in the process of change. These young talents are the ones who make Enter Africa a unique, local experience – building networks in their cities and developing location-based games that take the players to places to portray and deliver the visions of these talents through playing. Therefore, these Game Labs are at the heart of Enter Africa – locating each team in the Enter Africa universe.

Throughout the first months of 2019, the Game Labs will subsequently take place in each of the participating countries, connecting the local and the pan-African perspectives of Enter Africa.