Stay Goofy: Shred the Meme

Some memes have been sitting in our group chats for years. We change the captions, send them around, and keep coming back to the same familiar templates. For this challenge, we’re putting those templates through the shredder to see what we can build from the pieces.

Stay Goofy: Shred the Meme is a new Playgama Sandbox challenge about rebuilding memes as games. Take a familiar joke, a painfully accurate gamedev meme, or your own ridiculous idea, and turn it into something people can play.

The joke survives, the format changes

A picture and a caption can say a lot, but a game lets players interact with the joke. They can struggle with its absurd rules, try to escape its setup, or experience the punchline through their own actions.

That’s the idea behind the meme shredder on our challenge page. Familiar memes go in, their old format gets torn apart, and developers get to imagine what comes next.

You can start with a classic internet meme, something only developers understand, or a situation your friends keep joking about. You can also invent an original meme directly as a game. Whatever you choose, think about how the humour translates into something a player can do.

From meme to mechanic

Take “it works on my machine.” As a meme-game, it could become a puzzle where every computer follows different rules. You finally fix everything on yours, switch machines, and discover that gravity has stopped working. “This is fine” meme could become a game about finishing an ordinary workday while the room catches fire. You’re answering emails and keeping your coffee topped up as maintaining your normal routine becomes increasingly unreasonable. These are starting points, not a list of required ideas. Choose a joke you want to rebuild and find a mechanic that makes it land.

Gamedev pain is welcome, so is everything else

There’s plenty of material in bugs that disappear when you record them, NPCs with questionable priorities, and projects that are always one fix away from release. But the challenge also welcomes memes about cats, procrastination, internet arguments, or any everyday situation you want to turn into a game. Your entry could be a tiny simulator, a puzzle, a platformer, or something harder to explain. It can look polished, deliberately crude, or revolve around a single absurd character. What matters is the connection between the joke and what the player does. A meme pasted onto an unrelated game keeps the old format intact; this challenge asks you to rebuild it through the rules, choices, and consequences of playing.