You are high above a swath of land. Beside you are your friends. You are all smiling, laughing as you look at the brown earth below, full of potential. One of your friends asks you a question. You begin to think, your imagination swirling like a nebula. When you speak, the land responds. Green, lush vegetation begins to appear. A network of clay houses pops up like pimples on skin. Towers covered in solar panels like glass skin shoot out of the earth. A city is born in the shape of your imagination. A city of the future you would want to live in. A future you can make.
This is the premise of Kampala Yénkya, the game you now hold in your hands. Created by the brilliant Jo Lindsay Walton, a game designer, writer, academic, and activist from South Africa, Kampala Yénkya is a game of mapmaking and worldbuilding. About collaborating to create the future of a city — Kampala, Uganda. But it’s more than just a game. It’s a powerful tool.
Games are the most ancient and time-honored vehicle for education [1] and are a unique and powerful way to teach and engage with people about important topics like anthropogenic climate change and the overall sustainability of our way of life [2]. Games make it possible to think creatively, discuss ideas, formulate plans, try out theories, see the results of choices and reflect upon the results [3]. This is very different from traditional learning in a textbook or from a lecture or even watching a video. Games don’t just provide prescriptions of what to think, they provide a framework, a model of reality or a system of interconnected parts that can teach us how to think.
Games are also a form of storytelling — both in their design and in playing them. In making decisions during the game, the players tell themselves a story about the kind of world they want to live in. This is especially important for young Africans. Africa has contributed a negligible amount to [4], and yet is suffering major significant impacts of, climate change [5]. Thinking about ways to not only mitigate the impact of rising temperatures and sea levels, coastal erosion, extreme weather events, habitat loss, and the other impacts of climate change, but to move beyond that and begin contributing to the global discourse on new design philosophies, new technologies, new economic models, new ways of organizing the world to make sure we take an active role in preventing climate change. To ensure that we don’t just survive but thrive. This, the imagining a better future is an act of storytelling. It is an act of science fiction, and it can change how we think about the environment and our place in it [6]. I’ve long argued for the power of science-fiction storytelling as support to social and technological development [7]. I believe that we need more stories about Africans making a difference in the world through science. That we need more stories about the coming African technological renaissance and the kinds of technology that could drive it [8]. That we need to be able to imagine the future before we can begin to create it. Lobby our governments for it. Tell our industrialists about it. Work together to put our efforts of activism towards it — this future we want. This game supports that act of imaginative storytelling by providing framing stories with the game, adding in elements of collaboration (learning to do it together) and simulation (learning to think through potential impacts of what we imagine).
These five framing stories, all set in 2060 and featuring young adolescent protagonists dealing with the after-effects of real-world climate change, are written and illustrated by Dilman Dila, one of the continent’s finest storytellers. They are infused with a folktale sensibility while remaining grounded. They also highlight the intersections of past and future, conservation and utilization, nature and technology, practicality and spirituality, without disregarding any. All of which are important aspects of our humanity and therefore important aspects to consider when playing Kampala Yénkya.
Telling stories and learning by experience in a limited, accessible and simple way using games like Kampala Yénkya can help students and the general public engage organically with challenging conceptual questions and decisions about our cities, our environment and the way we want to live with each other. Questions like those that come up every day in real life policymaking and technology development. That’s the value of this game, this tool.
Card and board games have become a major industry [9] and there have been many of climate change-themed or environmental education games in recent years and they vary widely in terms of their commerciality, goals, features, formats and intended uses. As an African who is also an avid game player, engineer and science fiction writer, I see the intersection of the imagination, education and action that games like Kampala Yénkya offer and I hope its message of imagining better and working together brings more of us closer to that intersection too.
Wole Talabi,
Feb 2023.
Bio:
WOLE TALABI is an engineer, writer, and editor from Nigeria. His stories have appeared in Asimov’s, F&SF, Lightspeed and several other places. He holds two patents for his inventions and has edited three original anthologies: Africanfuturism (2020) which was nominated for the Locus Award, Lights Out: Resurrection (2016) and These Words Expose Us (2014). His own fiction has been a finalist for the prestigious Caine Prize (2018), the Locus Award (2022), the Jim Baen Memorial Award (2022) and the Nommo Award which he won in 2018 and 2020. His work has also been translated into Spanish, Norwegian, Chinese, Italian, Bengali, and French. His first collection of stories Incomplete Solutions (2019) is published by Luna Press. His debut novel Shigidi from DAW books arrived in August 2023. He likes scuba diving, elegant equations, and oddly shaped things. He currently lives and works in Malaysia.
Notes:
- Tasnim, R. (2012). Playing Entrepreneurship: Can Games Make a Difference? Entrepreneurial Practice Law. Volume 2, Issue 4 Autumn. 4–18.
- Bakhuys-Roozeboom, M.; Visschedijk, G.; Oprins, E. The Effectiveness of Three Serious Games Measuring Generic Learning Features. Br. J. Educ. Technol. 2015, 48, 83–100.
- Dieleman H, Huisingh D (2006) Games by Which to Learn And Teach About Sustainable Development: Exploring The Relevance Of Games And Experiential Learning For Sustainability. Journal Of Cleaner Production 14: 837 – 847.
- DeFries, R. S., Houghton, R. A., Hansen, M. C., Field, C. B., Skole, D., and Townshend, J. (2002) Carbon emissions from tropical deforestation and regrowth based on satellite observations for the 1980s and 1990s, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 99, 14256-14261.
- World Meteorological Organization (WMO). (2022) State of the Climate in Africa Report 2021.
- Vint, Sherryl (2021): Science Fiction. The MIT Press.
- Talabi, Wole. (2016) Why Africa Needs to Create More Science Fiction, Omenana Magazine.
- For a listing of African Science fiction stories, please see the African Speculative Fiction Society Database: https://www.africansfs.com/resources/list-of-published-african-sff
- Dutton, Zoe (2023) Can board games teach us about the climate crisis? Game creators say yes.
Kampala Yénkya 