It took 30 days in the spring of 2014 for Alonso Martin to kickstart the role-playing game Heart Forth Alicia (raising $232,365) that has become a beacon for computer coders across Mexico City.

Among those who responded to the call to join in the quiet revolution of indie and social gaming that is emerging across the city was Zura Guerra, a young coder.

“I got involved in the general coders’ side because of Dev F, a programming school,” said Guerra, when we met at a Mexico City “hackathon” in June. “The first thing that amazed me was the empathy everyone felt towards teaching what they knew. There, I met some other people and we began to hang out at different meetups.”



In the capital, young people are turning to informal learning spaces such as Dev F, with its philosophy of “rather than develop technology, we develop people”, to join hackathons, meetups and code-clubs as part of their social infrastructure. Here, coding is a way to meet people – and code is their social media.

But how can writing lines of code be a social activity? Well, being creative has always been a social activity. In Mexico City, the shared activity of making food is apparent: people make food together, everywhere. Today, shared making is just as important a social activity.

Robotic engineer Octavio Martinez tests out his prototype to measure REM sleep. Photograph: Centro de Cultura Digital

The British Council’s creative economy team know this – it’s why I was invited to take part in UKMX, a cultural exchange between the UK and Mexico led by the curator of the V&A museum in London, Irini Papadimitriou, who has spent the past five years exploring collaborative digital making activities around the world.

Our project started with a two-day collaborative hackathon at the Centro de Cultura Digital (CCD), a gallery and community space in the heart of Mexico City. With more than 70 people involved, I was struck by the equal division of gender – and the fact that almost everyone present was under 30.

The energy and enthusiasm for social change could be felt across the room. The conversations were very different in nature from those at hackathon events in the UK – where the ideas that surface are typically celebrations of what technology can do. In Mexico City, the tone was much more serious – not so much what technology could do, as what were the social issues that needed to be tackled, including some that were very challenging.

Jacinto Quesnel, the champion of the event, is convinced that gaming can be a tool for social good. “When used properly, we could use them as some sort of ‘plug-in’ to our societies and make the changes we want in a very effective way,” he said.

“Some may even regard games as the most effective tool for social engineering. As with any tool, they can easily be used for both good and evil; it’s up to us designers to take responsibility for what it means to design a game.”

Video: the CCD hackathon

When I asked why so many young residents of Mexico City are prepared give up their weekends to take part in events that explore social gaming, Quesnel said the creative industries are relatively new to the capital and young people get involved as a way to take charge of their personal lives, as well as to explore how they might make a living out of what they love to do.

This pragmatic approach seems to have evolved from a wish to get involved with gaming in a way that does not depend on the large gaming corporations. Young Mexican coders want to do something that feels more relevant to them, and which explores the world on their own terms.

Miguel Aejandro, one participant who stayed at the event coding throughout the night, said he had been motivated to explore social gaming by the lack of attention he felt was paid to issues that mattered most to him.

3D printing on site. Photograph: CCD

“Mexico is a country that has many social problems due to lack of awareness and education, and social gaming could be one of the answers to help change this,” he said. “Since our mainstream media tends to ignore or outright censor what is going on, it [gaming] absolutely is a good alternative to trigger social change.”

Alejandro created an early prototype of a classic fighting game in reverse. Set in a high school, Don’t Touch Me gave superpowers to victims of bullying. His prototype was the outline of something with future potential rather than a fully developed game (as is often the case at a hackathon, it is about the expression of ideas rather than the development of final products). For him, it was a way to “bring awareness about certain social issues and problems in a different and new way”.

While bullying is a subject I wouldn’t be surprised to see tackled at any hack event around the world, I was surprised to see ideas that tackled issues of child kidnapping, rape and gender inequality. There was a purpose to the code, beyond the search for an idea or a future employment opportunity. These young people clearly see coding as a way to address some of the hard realities they live with.

In Mexico City – and the country more generally – there is clearly a hunger for an “indie approach” to game development – where collaboration and experimentation are fundamental ingredients. The ethos pushed by informal learning platforms such as the Dev F school is feeding through into homegrown coding practices and meetups.

More than 70 people took part in the 48-hour hackathon. Photograph: Centro de Cultura Digital

Zura Guerra’s collaborator Victor Borja has been programming for more than 15 years. He said he had noticed that “a lot of people are now interested in learning programming because of the emerging startup ecosystem – and that has led recently to the formation of some very interesting communities”.

Both Guerra and Borja regard code as an important new media. “Software is the medium of our times, and art tends to express itself in the more massive mediums,” said Borja. “Mexico could benefit a lot from this: art is no more exclusive to museums, it now belongs to computers too.”

They describe their work, Perceive Me, as a social experiment in prejudice, where users are asked to confront perceptions of people through online content.

At the Mexico City, event a sense of doing good emerged partly through the strong gender balance in the groups, where difficult subjects were not shied away from. The participants’ “make do and mend” approach offered a way of expressing the need for societal change among (young) people who clearly feel they are not being listening to in the way they want and need.

I came away thinking that in the UK, too, our government could learn a lot by giving diverse young people the opportunity to define the future they want using the digital practices that are native to them. To allow them to hack the system to make for a far more inclusive social future.

Jon Rogers is professor of creative technology at the University of Dundee





