The Diani Beach Road Game

The Diani Beach Road Game is an early-stage, narrative-driven exploration game set along a real coastal road in Kenya. Experienced from the perspective of a driver, the player moves slowly through everyday environments — villages, beaches, junctions, small towns, and informal roadside spaces — encountering moments, conversations, and choices that emerge naturally from movement and presence. Rather than focusing on speed, challenge, or competition, the game treats the road as a living social system. Small-scale local commerce is embedded as part of the environment itself: roadside stalls, services, and informal exchanges appear alongside larger, familiar commercial spaces, not as rewards or objectives, but as lived structures that shape attention, decision-making, and social interaction. In this way, the game deliberately equalizes visibility between small local economies and dominant commercial landmarks, reflecting how value is experienced on the ground rather than how it is marketed. Developed as a work in progress, the project approaches the road as a contemporary archive — a playable record of everyday life, movement, and economic coexistence that is rarely represented in games. The intention is not realism for its own sake, but a reflective, experiential encounter with place, where small moments accumulate into a broader understanding of how people move through shared space and how meaning, survival, and connection are negotiated along the way.