Welcome to Zoud GameLab: Your FinLit Journey Starts Here is an informational jam webinar led by Zoud, the National Financial Wellbeing and Sustainability Initiative, and the Global Game Jam.
Summary: Zoud GameLab is a financial literacy game jam from Zoud and GGJ. This initiative seeks to make finlit and money management fun. Jammers won’t just build games about finance, they’ll practice it too, managing real project budgets as part of the jam itself. From budgeting/saving, scams and fraud, borrowing and debt, investing and risk, and trading/trading simulations, there’s no shortage of finlit topics to tackle. No dev experience or financial background required, just motivation and a willingness to learn.
Big Idea: Financial literacy shouldn’t be a skin or feature tacked onto a game, it should be baked into the core design. A quick test devs can use: If you remove the financial literacy element and the game would basically play the same, finlit hasn’t been integrated deeply enough. Done right, finlit should shape the mechanics, choices, progression, consequences, and story itself.
Playable Takeaway: Financial literacy breaks down into distinct areas (capability, enablement, empowerment) and shows up differently across life stages, cultures, and even household silence around money. There’s no single “correct” mechanic for a FinLit game.