Bordergames Lavapiés was an initiative by Fiambrera Obrera which supplied design and programming tools to young North Africans from the Lavapies neighborhood in Madrid, so that they could create a videogame set in their neighborhood. The main idea was to avoid intermediaries, so that the youths themselves could develop the script, deciding which stories they wanted to tell and which aspects of their lives they wanted the players to experience.
In this way, a collaborative art project began, based on a working network built on the foundation of a series of workshops, an editor and an engine of free open-source games.
This experiment was repeated by others in cities such as Berlin, Barcelona and São Paulo, following the same participative model.
Bordergames is presented as an open game engine with which to build a joint narrative that allows us to visualize the day-to-day life of groups of people that tend to be ignored by the media. Above all, however, it is an engine and platform for change, as a tool for research and education regarding the negotiation and participation processes that take place in any kind of collective work.