Game jams have captured the imagination of an industry. Hardly a weekend passes without one somewhere in the world. Every Friday evening, a quick scroll of Twitter reveals groups of developers hunkering around a chatroom or hashtag and preparing to spend the next 48 hours working on their outlandish game ideas. Many are organised between groups of friends, while others have become global events drawing the attention of tens of thousands of participants.
It’s not just the indies: game jams are also starting to creep into studios, with developers such as Double Fine and Ubisoft incorporating them into their work schedules. But just what is it that is so alluring about game jams? Are they a magic bullet of innovation? Or is this just crunching taken to its inevitable conclusion?
One of the 30-odd developers who took part in 2002’s inaugural Ludum Dare 0 was Mike Kasprzak, who today is one of the competition’s head organisers. “Geoff [Howland, founder] didn’t really have the time to keep running the event,” he explains. “But all of us who participated craved this. We were really excited [and] really enthusiastic about Ludum Dare, so we literally took it over for him.”
Kasprzak and a ragtag group of developers knew that Ludum Dare had tapped into something special, and they did whatever they could to make sure it continued to run. “It kind of floundered for a while before we got our act together,” he explains, but that all changed after Phil Hassey’s creation for Ludum Dare 8,
Galcon, became a critical success. Kasprzak recounts how Hassey was instrumental in finally getting the Ludum Dare competition a proper home on the web. “Phil was like, ‘Dude, I want to do this. I want this to keep going, because this is important.’”
Now, after 11 years and 26 events, Ludum Dare is perhaps the best-known game jam in the world. “Today it is super big and huge – thousands of games per event. It’s madness. The idea of Ludum Dare, to just make a game in such a short period of time, just resonated with people and created something else. It snowballed until we were able to make this happen all the time.“
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| Midas was created for Ludum Dare 22 by Harry Lee and Jarrel Seah. |
Ludum Dare isn’t alone in its success – thousands of games are produced at such events each year. One of the biggest is the Global Game Jam. Founded in 2008, the 2013 event attracted 16,705 developers from 63 countries, who produced a grand total of 3,248 games.
But why have game jams become so popular? What do they offer game
developers? “The thing that stops a lot of people making games is expectations about levels of polish, about a certain level of quality,” explains developer Anna Anthropy. “If you only have hours, you don’t give a shit about any of that. You just have to keep making it if you want to get it done. So in that way I think it helps a lot of people get over their insecurities about making shit. They just make it.”
Kasprzak also highlights the way that game jams offer a safe space for developers to create something that isn’t finely honed. “You don’t have time to create the perfect system. You’re running out of time every minute. It forces you to just sit down and do what you can quickly, which is a really good mindset to get into.”
Independent designer Harry Lee is a prolific jammer. At 2011’s Ludum Dare 22, his team’s game, Midas, won four medals. For Lee, one of the strengths of game jams is that they motivate developers to actually finish a project. “That helps a lot of people, since they fall into a trap of not ever finishing a thing, or even starting a thing, so that works really well.”
Lee also highlights the way jams work to help developers hone their craft, teaching them about their voice and how to set the scope of projects. “I have dozens of game prototypes that I’ve produced from jams, and I think that body of work is necessary for finding a style that suits you. Jams are about volume, about making a volume of work to hone your skillset and craft.”
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| Bossa Studios’ Surgeon Simulator 2013 emerged from this year’s Global Game Jam. |
Game jams give developers a reason to start a game, the obligation to finish, and the safety net to fail. But perhaps most importantly, they surround participants with others who are doing the same.
“I really like the energy of being in the physical room with the people,” says Anthropy. “You just shout out ideas at each other, and if I need sound effects I can just pull someone over and have them talk into my game. Yeah, the energy is real good when you do it in the same physical space.”
But even for game jams held primarily over the Internet, such as Ludum Dare, that sense of community is a driving force. “By [Ludum Dare] existing, it gives people enough extra inspiration to make that step, that extra push to sit down and do something, because you are participating in this event,” says Kasprzak. “I’m not just doing this myself. We’re all doing it together, and that’s inspirational.”
The traditional game jam model sees teams given a theme – typically a word or phrase – from which they’ll spend the next 48 hours prototyping an appropriate game, often at the expense of sleep and personal hygiene.
Lee, despite his own enthusiasm for jams, is concerned about just how passionately and uncritically this one model has been embraced by developers. “I think [game jams] serve a very important purpose, but I think it is a very specific purpose, and I think sometimes they are extended beyond their use. Every game jam, the way it is set up and the format it has, will directly lead to the kinds of games that come out of it.”
The concern is that only participating in a certain kind of jam means you can only make a certain kind of game. “When new people go into a jam, they are learning all these fundamental and important ideas about what games are, but that can also be really normative if they aren’t coming from an experimental angle,” says Lee.
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| Bossa Studios’ Surgeon Simulator 2013 emerged from this year’s Global Game Jam. |
When Anna Kipnis, senior gameplay programmer at Double Fine, casually tweeted that there should be a game jam to bring to life the outlandish ideas of Twitter parody account @PeterMolydeux, she sowed the seeds for Molyjam, one of 2012’s most popular and unusual jams.
While Molyjam still followed the traditional model insofar as teams had 48 hours to make their game, the nature of it meant participants knew the theme well in advance. For Kipnis, this was one of the jam’s major strengths: “I’ve always wanted to be in a public jam, but [not knowing the theme until you show up] was always really intimidating, in that often I would find out the theme was just one word like ‘extinction’ or something. It’s only enough to tip you in the right direction, but not enough to really push you towards something… So I thought, ‘Hey, I would totally be a part of [Molyjam], because even if I get stuck, I can just pick another idea.’”
Even further departures from the traditional jam model are The 7 Day FPS challenge (organised by Vlambeer’s Jan Willem Nijman alongside Sos Sosowski and Sven Bergström) and Fuck This Jam (organised by Vlambeer’s other half, Rami Ismail, alongside Fernando Ramallo). While traditional game jams might tempt developers to rely on normative ideas as a crutch, both 7DFPS and Fuck This Jam, much like Molyjam, force their participants to think beyond their usual boundaries.
Nijman had the idea for 7DFPS after he spent time working on Vlambeer’s own Gun Godz. “A lot of indies have this preconception of firstperson shooters being dumb, triple-A shit,” he says. “Getting indies to start making things in that genre gave it more new ideas than the last ten years of big budgets did.”
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