Adventures of the Witch’s Garden (AWG) is an adventure game designed with the purpose of fostering play as care, while preserving African stories of communal growth and resistance. The project is based on real stories gathered through research conducted in Ghana to examine technological surveillance as violence and power that creates inequalities in motion, illustrated through the lives of three friends.  The game’s narrative follows the story of a fictionalized non-binary traditional priest who is on a journey of renewal, after experiencing spiritual depletion due to violent political events and extreme surveillance against gendered minorities in their country. AWG makes the connection with Ghanaian traditional spirituality within a world where the encroaching forces of modern technology are represented by dark creatures, choking wires and dense, and brutalist architecture. 

I began designing the game as an experiment to advance technological experiences based on what communities shared in solidarity rather than what is forcefully extracted. In times of overwhelming struggles for digital rights technologists and activists, I asked, what kind of connections and technologies could become a playful outlet, allowing us to reflect, laugh, and tend to each other through solidarity? 

To create AWG I closely learned how community gardening practices can be used to design technical infrastructures that embody digital societies based on care, shared support, and social benefit. Just like many community gardens, the project centers play as a subversive and imaginative medium that reclaims our digital public spaces as joyful, while protecting vulnerable communities and our knowledge. 
Each challenge within the game reflects regrowth, and renewal, through planting, spiritual guides, and destroying artefacts of surveillance and extraction.

Researcher, game designer, and project lead: Mardiya Siba 
Filming support: Zanele Sokatsha 
Videography: Sithembiso Mdlalose
Developer: Glen Henry 
Illustrator: Nikita 
Operational support: Miriam Dogo 
Community Art Mobilisation Project (CAMP): Continues to hold space for our play community convenings

With support from: Association for Progressive Communications (APC) provided initial funding to implement this project under their feminist tech joy grant program

Mardiya Siba Yahaya (GH) is a multi-genre technologist, researcher, and technology community movement builder. They run the Flowers and Gardening Studio, co-creating communal technology infrastructures and archiving knowledge through play, creative data work, and visual imagery. Their work is guided by collective calculated refusals against regimes of surveillance and extraction. Mardiya has received grant awards from Mozilla/ GIZ, APC, and the University of San Diego's Kroc Institute of Peace and Justice, and has been featured in Bloomsbury Press, Feminist Africa, and Chatham House. 

Adventures of the Witch’s Garden (AWG) uses subversive play as a communal channel to unveil the impact of surveillance technologies on sexual minority communities. The Garden is metaphorical for imaginaries around queer opacities centered on healing, joy, and repair. This is a counterbalance to an onslaught of digital media flooded with dehumanizing stories of queer individuals. Grounded in speculative non-fiction called the Sexuality of Technology, Ghanaian traditional spirituality clashes with a brutalist environment of digital surveillance infrastructures. Adventures of the Witch’s Garden is open access, accessible offline, and does not collect any data, embodying queer practices of survival and thereby reclaiming a sense of self in a heavily surveilled digital ecosystem.