Indigenous Ghanaian folk games: Interactive visual stories

Abstract

Folk games and storytelling is an integral part of people's culture, that manifests itself in various aspect of oral tradition. Cultural values and norms represent the core beliefs and system of ruling in most Akan societies in Ghana, and for that matter, across the world. These social customs are on the brink of extinction due to the lack of practice of these traditions especially among young people. Therefore, it is important to bridge these dying cultures with the interest of Ghanaian youth, not only to encourage them but also to create awareness of the fact that savvy lifestyles and fast-moving innovations may have rendered some of these traditional customs obsolete. Several folk games have been identified including their game mechanics to support this study, which primarily focused on creating the foundation to develop an immersive and expansive game, with several dilemmas and branching stories, that propagate the rich cultural traditions of Ghanaian descent. The subsequent chapters highlighted several Ghanaian folk games that have been conceptualised as a game to run on various platforms. This included the mechanic and art style that gave a general sense of how the finished game would look. A survey was conducted to understand young people's views on merging folk games and storytelling in a mobile game. Even though, there were challenges pertaining to finding respondents of a certain age group which this survey targeted the most, the few responses proved that the concept is unique and interesting for most of these respondents. The project is considered broad and therefore would have required proper resources such as like-minded experts to support the programming to be able to meet completion. Besides, the limitation of time compelled this study to be used as a proper foundation to build a game that addresses the problems raised. In view of this, the study has prepared a game project that outlines the various mechanics to be used, the art style, game characters, game platform as well as testing and iteration process.