Exploring African Indigenous Music in Video Game Programming: A Descriptive Case Study of the Lefa Game

Abstract

There has been limited use of African indigenous music in video games programming in Africa. Within the rising call for the use of indigenous African music in African-themed games, little is known about the pedagogical strategies for realising this practically. Employing Participatory Culture as a theoretical framework, this study focuses on the utilisation of indigenous African music by undergraduate game design students at a South African university, who employed indigenous African music to embed cultural aesthetics into a game prototype, while attempting to imbibe participatory culture. It employed a practice-based, single-case descriptive pedagogical design, drawn from a cohort where students were tasked with transitioning from passive consumers to active creators. Data were collected through a focus-group with the design team, unstructured interviews with four independent peer-reviewers, and a multimodal analysis of the selected Sesotho song, Kulenyane, and the game Lefa. The use of Kulenyane – A Sesotho song, in their video game design, though thematically thin, is an appropriation of its sonic/aesthetic value and cultural familiarity, indicating students’ ability to bridge technology with their cultural markers. The use of the instrumental introduction of Kulenyane in the opening scene, and the vocal part in the last scene, is a testament to an understanding of the use of gradual transition from a sparse instrumental texture to a fuller, vocally driven section supported by layered instrumentation, in creating immersive experience. Practically, this study implies that computer science and game design curricula in Africa must move beyond purely technical instruction to include multimodal cultural asset integration, necessitating the development of accessible indigenous soundbanks for student developers.