The Power of Play: Exploring Neocolonialism and Debt in Temitope Olujobi's Latest Game

Hypatia Sorunke

The Power of Play: Exploring Neocolonialism and Debt in Temitope Olujobi’s Latest Game

A reflection on Hands That Steal From "Other" Mouths by Temitope Olujobi

April 3, 2025

 
 

Photo by Hypatia Sorunke

I was surprised  to arrive at the nostalgic simplicity of a console with a joystick and a few buttons when game designer Temitope Olujobi invited me to CultureHub to preview Hands that Steal from “Other” Mouths, their newest game. Our similar views on the use of play as a vehicle to educate about the world have found us in a time where the political climate demands a type of participation– where games provide an easy on-ramp towards further engagement within heavier topics (like the neocolonial conquests of the African continent). 

Photo by Hypatia Sorunke

Photo by Hypatia Sorunke

Olujobi’s more formal introduction to world-building started with an Orange Man named Otto at Syracuse University, where they graduated with a B.S. in Architecture and focused their thesis on getting people to build worlds in Minecraft. After falling in love with the construction of digital space, they worked under Selldorf Architects, expanding their craft in the digital world by creating virtual reality environments for museums and buildings. While working in the big apple, they pursued an MFA in Game Design at New York University. All of this to say, there were many large and giggly greetings as the CultureHub residency served as a homecoming for Temitope Olujobi, a current Texas resident, and their longtime friends and family.

Photo by Hypatia Sorunke

Hands that Steal from “Other” Mouths is a three-part game, the second part of which was completed during their CultureHub Residency, that begins with a zoom into a pink screen and a greeting from an energetic warped voice. A vibrant and active cityscape with logos of Western corporations like Amazon, Google, and General Electric overhead becomes the playground for where “the hand” of player one, which represents the more capitalistic resource extractors, and “the mouths,” representing the community that is having its resources stolen, go to battle.

Photo by Hypatia Sorunke

The goal is for there to be a collision between “the hands” and “the mouths” that ends in an explosive button-mashing battle where the more speedy masher wins. This timed battle is perfect for the accessibility of the joystick-button arcade play of Meow Wolf’s Immersive Art Museum near Dallas, Texas where it is currently housed. The monopolistic analogy continues in the second part by tackling the mechanics of debt and how it is used by the West as a control tactic against the global south. When the curtains open across the screen for the final time of the night, we arrive inside a vibrant fictional town where the two players are now on a single team where they must work as “the hands” to service buildings with goods and tax their citizens to pay off the debts accrued by the imports.

There is also an option to save money but as the two players get into the rhythm of picking up and dropping things off at the appropriate parts of town, they quickly realize that it is impossible—one cannot tax the people enough or service the buildings fast enough to deplete the debt, represented by red coins with dollar signs on them. The dollar coins eventually fill the bottom and start frantically blinking before the game ends.

Photo by Hypatia Sorunke

Olujobi returns to the front of the room to explain further that the two themes of the people vs. corporations and the processes of manufactured debt are core characters in establishing the story of how the greed of the global north and the plight of the global south have become intertwined in an endless song and dance of unprecedented extraction and controlled consumption. 

After a brief history lesson accompanied by a list of reading materials and organizations that are doing work around these issues, the audience’s applause leads into an open play of level 2 and conversations.

Photo by Hypatia Sorunke

At the end of the weekend, Temitope Olujobi and I sat down for a conversation to talk more about the evolution of their artistic process and their latest work since our time in Austin, Texas. They spoke about how the process of designing a game lies in the feedback that the designer gets from the audience. Because there is a beginning and an end to the built environment that allows for certain types of controlled actions ( jumping, selecting, attacking, etc.), people are able to establish a type of logic in the world.

“I thought it was the perfect medium to get people to engage with things that I wanted to educate them on because it's not like things can go over your head—you actively have to participate in the thing to make it work…” Olujobi said. “Oh you picked this thing up and I want you to put it here but you put it there instead— you’ve already broken the logic [in the game and] that logic is always being tweaked because of how people interact with it.”

Photo by Hypatia Sorunke

However, when asked about how effective the thought of trialing the game in other countries would be, Temitope maintained that the focus of an open dialogue with Americans is crucial because “the United States has been steering the ship of the global economic order since World War II”--noting that these problems of homelessness, poverty, and debt are not individual shortcomings of a person or a nation as much as they are consequences of how the global north has established complex systems towards controlling populations around the globe. They end the thought with, “Global debt is 3 times the GDP (Gross Domestic Product)—no one is getting paid back.”

The third and final part of “Hands that Steal from Others Mouths” will elaborate on these themes and the unfair dance from a war/conflict perspective. Focusing on AFRICOM–one of the many global combatant commands of US military operations–the more action forward part three is set to be an “explosive” representation of their presence on the continent.

Photo by Hypatia Sorunke

Having come after other projects that work to teach the player about heavy yet important topics like restorative justice and personal discovery, this project, covering imperialism and exploitation, matches the rigor and vibrance of Temi’s portfolio while still having a fun and jovial tone that allows for (at least American) audiences to be able to button-mash their way into understanding the systems that make their everyday life possible. It almost begs the player to figure out what they can do in the real world to help mitigate the effects from generations unequal exchange.

 
 
 

Hypatia Sorunke is a New York-based photographer and collage artist based in Harlem. After graduating from The University of Texas at Austin, they received an Independent Research Award from Columbia University to further explore migratory histories, Black cinema, and art movements. Their artistic practice focuses on ideas of collective memory, relational aesthetics, and the preservation of Black radical traditions. Sorunke’s recent body of work examines fashion in the WNBA. For more information, visit www.hypatiasorunke.com or connect via Instagram @itshypatia.

 
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