mid-jam report

Mzansi Climate Justice Game Jam gets down to business!

Session 1 | PLAY

The Mzansi Climate Justice Game Jam kicked off on June 7, 2025, with a joint hybrid session between participants in Johannesburg, South Africa, and Utrecht in the Netherlands.

Project leads, internet teapot (Adriaan Odendaal and Karla Zavala Barreda), and the South African team, Mxolisi Xaba and Zamanyuswa Nyuswa, gathered a diverse mix of creatives to challenge their thinking on climate change, justice, and the role of games in climate activism.

Dr Stefan Werning, an associate professor for Digital Media and Game Studies at Utrecht University, kicked off the event with a presentation focused on eco-games, sharing his expertise on how games can be used to shape, challenge, and spread awareness about climate issues. To bring this to life, participants then played and discussed some of these eco-games (such as The Climate Trail and Half-Earth Socialism). This was a great way to introduce participants to the topic of eco-games, start exchanging ideas between participants, and have some fun (it is a game jam after all!). Playing these games also allowed participants to start considering how game-making can be used as a medium to explore and communicate deeper cultural and social meanings.

From here, things got really exciting. Participants formed teams and started working on some original ideas for climate justice games. The intense brainstorming generated a range of climate topics and some ideas on how these can be used as game concepts and content. On location in Utrecht, participants came up with bold initial concepts, like a game played from the perspective of a mycelium fungi-system, a game where the player experiences the changes of one specific location over a period of centuries – moving away from human conception of time towards a geological timescale of the earth, a game about politicians, policy-making, and privilege, and much more.

In Johannesburg, the brainstorming session revealed concerns about the role of individual choices, land and home security, recycling, doing what is right vs wrong, and broader cultural practices. These ideas showed up in various thematic forms, such as conservation, appropriation, the balance of development, resource management, the role of technology, and political leadership in the climate justice arena.

Session 1 (Johannesburg). Kieran Reid helps facilitate the brainstorming session & participants work on their concepts

The most critical aspect of session one was the development of the paper prototype. After a day of conceptualising, it was time to start turning all the inspired initial ideas into actual games. As part of this process, the six newly formed teams were each assigned a mentor. The mentors team is made up of Mxolisi Xaba and Adriaan Odendaal, Kieran Reid from Two Name Games, sustainable development specialist Tebogo Suping, Susannah Montgomery from the European Institute of Innovation and Technology – Culture & Creativity, and eco-game researcher at Utrecht University Dr. Laura op de Beke. Throughout the month-long game jam, the mentors will play a major role in providing support to the participants, as well as guiding them on how to reinforce the justice element in their games. Climate change is an issue, yes, but the crucial part of this game jam came down to how justice is also an integral part of dealing with this issue.

Session 2 | TWIST

In the week leading up to the second session, the teams really got to work fleshing out their ideas and refining their concepts before things literally got turned upside down. Session two, titled TWIST, required participants to take their original ideas and find ways to subvert them! The essence of this challenge came from taking what they thought was a game-changing idea and figuring out how to challenge conventional ways of game design in their projects.

This session went in hot with peer feedback between the Dutch and South African teams. The variety of perspectives gave each team a new take on their concept and design execution. The 24 individual participants come from varied parts of the globe, each with a different experience of climate change. The inherent collaborative nature of this exchange means each team got to analyse and share new perspectives on possible far-reaching effects of these climatic issues. This diversity of participants, especially in terms of their backgrounds and skill sets, is a crucial element in creating innovative game concepts at this stage. Working with someone new, who might have another way of thinking, offers an opportunity to create something altogether otherworldly.

To help participants explore climate issues even further, the teams were challenged by our first guest speaker, who joined the session remotely from Zambia. Environmental scientist Mulako Kabisa from the University of the Witwatersrand’s Global Change Institute spoke about her research on African-informed transformative change, and prompted participants to think beyond the climate crisis and try to imagine other possible climate futures.

Joining on location in Utrecht, Assistant Professor of Interactive Media, Screens, and Interfaces at Utrecht University, Dr. Laura op de Beke shared her knowledge on creating unconventional and subversive games. Using tactics that upend players’ expectations, she explained, can allow game designers to create impactful moments of reflection and awareness-making. Dr op de Beke joined the rest of the work-session in Utrecht, helping teams explore some new game mechanics and twist existing ones.

Session 2 (Utrecht). Dr Laura op de Beke presents & participants work on their playable prototype.

In Johannesburg, Professor Nthabiseng Motsemme from the Sociology Department at the University of Johannesburg, was on location to interact with the groups. Her work is deeply rooted in uplifting black communities by reviving lost narratives, re-imagining the future for indigenous people, and challenging systematic injustices. Through this lens, Professor Motsemme guided participants in refining the stories they were trying to tell with their games, providing them with ideas on how to improve their narrative approach and emphasising the importance of storytelling as a powerful tool for educating society on important issues.

The diversity of stories being explored and told through the different games that are being created by participants – both digital games and analogue games – is at the heart of the Mzansi Climate Justice Game Jam project. This game jam is designed as an opportunity to humanise the effects of climate change and create games that are not only fun – but also awareness-raising and thought-provoking. Too often, climate change is converted into stats and policies that are hard to relate to for ordinary people.

Session 2 (Johannesburg). Prof Motsemme talking to one of the teams.

Eventually, when all the actual fun and games are over, the final versions of the games will be released to the public in July. You can keep abreast with the exciting developments and exchanges by subscribing to our newsletter at the bottom of this page. You can also follow us on Instagram @internetteapot.