The whole world has been exposed to a technological revolution in almost all aspects of human endeavors and changes are almost spontaneous and occur without warning.
Unfortunately, the majority of African countries are slow in catching up with this rapid pace, it's so bad in some cases that it almost seems insignificant.
Ghana, which has it's share of problems and setbacks is also aware of this evolution and things seem to have started falling in place.
In the past, electronic gaming centers were almost non-existent (1985-1997). Games were seen to be something non beneficial and a sign of childliness and hence little attention was paid to it. Very few people were privileged to have owned game devices, prominent among this period was the Original Gameboy.
This period soon passed away and was replaced by the "New-GameShare-Era".
During this time games were made commercially available because of merchants noticing interest in electronic gaming and retailing them at competitive prices.
Sooner, more retailers jumped aboard hence making situations simpler. It was during this perios that we saw the advent of the SNES(Super Nintendo Entertainment System), Sega Megadrive and other exciting consoles. The popularity of these consoles grew rapidly into the 2000's, when a major change occurred.
After March 2000, game centers sprung up all across the capital.In areas such as Labadi, Osu, Madina, Haatso keLzville 01, East Legon and other areas. These new developments had double implications:
Merits:Games became more popular.
Individuals who couldn't afford consoles could have a feel of new games with little cost.
Electronic gaming begun to recieve notice
Demerits:The authorities had no means of controlling this phenomena.
Children often flank school lectures and literally "lived" in these centers.
Game deployment was shabby and not well organized, these centers were usually in pretty deplorable states, racing health and safety issues.
Game DevelopmentLittle has been done to develop computer or video games on the whole in Ghana, it still has almost zero recognition, anyway there are a few efforts. Computer gaming is not recognized as a sport and few african countries even place in the international game competitions held annually.
There are some commendable efforts though to make this a reality,the main is the development of web sites to help make this phenomena a reality like; games.kelzportal.com. This site reviews and hosts computer gaming competitions locally among college students, notably Shooting games and Strategy games.
There are plans to broaden this dream with game development. A team of programmers are currently working on a game using microsofts .NET framework and pixel shader 2.0 for a new title.
Maybe someday, game development may reach noticeable levels with national and sub-regional competiotions occuring in all areas. Till then game exposure would continue dormantly among the ghanaian youth
