AFRICA GAMES WEEK
Lean Into The Friction
This post is a modified version of the talk I gave at Africa Games Week, held in Cape Town, December 2025.
When I tell people I’m an anthropologist, they often picture Lara Craft from Tomb Raider. A lot of times, I don’t correct them. I mean Lara is kind of badass and I’m ok with that. And technically, they’re not wrong. Lara Croft is an archaeologist (of sorts), one of the four fields of anthropology. Archaeology looks at artefacts and material culture, usually of past societies. Biological or physical anthro looks at human bodies, evolution and DNA. The focus of linguistic anthro is verbal and non-verbal communication. And finally cultural anthropology, which is my sub-field, studies shared and learned behaviors of societies. What people make, think, feel and do.
So the work I do is less Lara Croft and more David Attenborough. I say this because our method, that is, the way we gather data is called ethnography which is basically observation, presence, and patience. Except instead of whales, or forests, or insects, my world is Nairobi’s gaming scene.
In my ethnographic work, what we sometimes refer to as deep hanging out, I spend time with gaming people in places and spaces where gaming things happen. Over the past year of my dedicated hang-out time, I’ve found myself moving through five of these areas that I think of as nodes of the gaming ecosystem: Developers, educators, players, e-sports, and content creators. These nodes overlap, collide, and collaborate and shape what gaming looks like in Kenya.
In my title, I list ethnographer AND anthropologist because method is a big part of my work. Ethnography’s main tool is participant observation which means I don’t just watch, I take part. I’m embedded at a game studio; I play, very badly, but I play all the same; I attend e-sports tournaments; and I follow content creators across their platforms.
Ethnography is proximity. It’s being close enough, long enough that everyday life, people’s choices, rhythms, decisions, and desires start to come into focus. It’s about slowing down to be in and really look at how a world works from the inside. So like all ethnography, what I offer is a snapshot: a situated partial view of a part of this world that is shaped by who I spend time with and how I see things. It doesn’t represent everyone, but it offers a close, grounded look at how a particular community is living, playing, and imagining right now.
In anthropology, we use language like precarity, informality, and sociality to describe the kinds of things I study. But I think its clearer to write here about these things in a slightly different register. Three anchors that I use to think about and through gaming in Kenya are: conditions—how things are, practices—what people do, and possibilities—what people hope for.
Conditions
Many of us already live these conditions and plenty of them exist in what anthropologists like Anna Tsing call friction. Friction isnt’ just instability or difficulty, it’s the creative, often messy interaction between different people, systems, and environments. It’s not always negative—but it is always shaping what becomes possible.
Like I said, we live in these conditions. You build, test, deploy, play, and compete inside constraints every day. So, instead of describing these conditions, let’s ask some questions that many players ask:
- If I have only 200 shillings today, or
- If I only have 20 minutes before my bundles run out, or
- If my little brother is waiting to play on this device, or
- If I can’t make purchases on a steam account, or
- If I need diasporic connections to get console cloud gaming…
Will your game meet me at that point of entry?
This is where the frictions are. Not a list of problems, but real thresholds that shape how people play, how studios build, how e-sports tournaments come together, how content creators build visibility. In here are the decisions that shape how games are actually lived.
Practices
Here’s the thing: people in the ecosystem are continuously coming up with ways to navigate friction. Let’s take players for instance, for some of them they budget to play by the hour, by the data bundle, even by the shilling. They play in fragments—in the cracks and windows of everyday life. A quick 20 minutes on the commute home. Like Tim Campbell from Strategic Alternatives said yesterday about the more mature gaming cohort: there’s a lot of them who can’t do uninterrupted play time. The thing is, this doesn’t apply only to the old. For many players a game needs to be so that a player can pick it up, drop it, and come back to it. While also remembering everything they need to remember in order to get back into it. It’s not just an age challenge, it’s a life circumstance challenge.
Players also shift access. Constantly. From console, to phone, to PC. Stephen Lee from DECA games shared that being multi-platform gives players more touchpoints with your game.
People play individually, but more often its shared. Like Kirsten Naidoo from Landfall shared when speaking about the Friendslop genre, there is a pull in playing together. Less about winning than it is about sharing. Play is social. Players go where they are welcomed and where people know them. This could be online or it could be physical. And for women and girls especially, they go where gender dynamics will let them in. And as my collaborator Wesley puts it, where the vibe is good.
Where, how, and with whom they play is shaped by how greased the friction is. When you design for flexibility, players will meet you there and bring creativity. I think these practices are already signaling to industry what players and devs need.
Possibilities
My third anchor is where I like to spend most of my time because even within tight conditions and constant friction, people still imagine futures through gaming. Not fantasy futures. Not tech-utopia, but very grounded, very material possibilities.
For some, gaming is a path to mobility, a chance to travel, to compete, to be seen. For others its stability, a hope for income or simply work that feels meaningful. For others still, its recognition. Not fame, but legitimacy. “Our game was downloaded a million times, or even 2,000 times. We made a connection.”
Across this past year, I have also seen aspiration, ike play itself, is almost never individual. It is communal. Whether in dev teams, e-Sports squads, content crews, or the general ecosystem surrounding them. I hear a version of the same line in so many spaces: ‘If someone like me can make it through gaming, that means others can.’ And the inverse ‘if they can make it through gaming, that means so can I.’ Aspiration here isn’t abstract optimism. It’s a practice, a way of orienting themselves toward a future they’re actively building, even when the present feels uncertain.
The question, then, isn’t whether friction exists, everyone in the industry knows it does. The real question is what we might learn from it. What would it mean to design with actual conditions in mind, rather than with imagined seamlessness? What could investment look like if it paid attention to the subtle strategies people already use to keep their practice alive? And what would policy look like if it stopped assuming infrastructure that many players simply don’t have?
Friction isn’t the enemy. It’s a signal, an indication of where attention is needed, where innovation is happening, and where the real opportunities lie. If we’re willing to look closely, the ways people navigate constraint show us not just what is difficult, but what is possible.
And if there is one line I’d leave with anyone building, playing, teaching, or investing in African games, it’s this:
lean into the friction.
Not because friction is desirable, but because within it lie the truths of how people actually play—and the early outlines of the future they’re already shaping.