Futuregames and Elimu Goal’s 96-hour intercultural jam brought together senior developers across two continents, yielding three new titles and a vision for a deeper African-European game development partnership under the ‘Be Ubuntu’ moniker.

When the final hour of the cross-continental game jam ticked over, sixteen studios across Africa and Europe had done something quietly remarkable: they had made games together. Not as vendor and client, not as mentor and mentee, but as peers, mixed teams of senior developers working shoulder-to-shoulder across time zones, cultural references, and artistic traditions, united by a shared belief in the power of play.

The initiative, championed by Futuregames and Elimu Goal, brought African and European studios into a 96-hour sprint of collaborative development. The result was three new game concepts, each blending cultural influences, visual languages, stories, and themes drawn from the lived experiences of the people who made them. All three will soon be available on itch.io.

The jam produced a trio of titles that speak to the breadth of what cross-cultural collaboration can unlock in game design. The selection reflects a conscious curatorial instinct: food, music, and family, three domains where culture both divides and unites, where African and European perspectives find common ground while retaining their distinctiveness. 

Ubuntu, the southern African philosophical concept often rendered as “I am because we are,” provided both the moral framework and the working methodology for the jam. Teams were deliberately mixed, pairing senior developers from African and European studios to ensure that neither perspective dominated and that knowledge transfer creative, technical, and cultural flowed in both directions.

The jam drew participation from a diverse constellation of African and European studios, each bringing their own aesthetic sensibilities and technical specialisms to the mixed teams. Supporting the initiative were partners whose remit spans games, culture, and diplomacy: SpielFabrique, the Video Games Poland Association, Dataspelsbranschen / Swedish Games Industry, Africacomicade, IGDA Incubation SIG, Darko Petrovic, and Games for Change Africa. The initiative also received the backing of an honorary partner with particular symbolic weight: the UNESCO Chair on Intercultural Competences.

The results of the cross-continental collaboration will be presented at the Games for Change Africa Summit in Nairobi, which is a fitting stage for work that was made in the spirit of games as a vehicle for social and cultural connection.