Most of the jams I've been involved with have been
fairly typical affairs, where a bunch of people arrive with laptops or use lab
machines at a university. I've organised and hosted some really strange ones
too though; Nat Marco [ http://www.honeyslug.com/
] ran one a few years ago in which people made games out of paper and rocks:
The year after that, we did "Jam Game Jam: A Game
Jam With Jam", which involved throwing jam around on the deck of an East
German fishing trawler:
The same day, Jonathan Whiting [ http://jonathanwhiting.com/ ] ran a level
design workshop in which people defined rules, stuck bits of paper down onto
the deck, and pranced around:
He'd initially approached me saying he had an idea
with scary spatial requirements, and I replied that I generally read
"scary" to mean "exciting".
Those examples might seem esoteric compared to the day
job you spend at a tablet or keyboard, but there's a lot of value in them.
Games are fundamentally about rules and behaviour, and when we bind those to a
given type of hardware, we're also binding them to a lot of established
convention.
The technology we use isn't the pinnacle of games,
it's just another branch of stuff we can express them through. Play and games
have a history stretching back thousands of years, all of it relevant to the
things we make.
Sure, few if any of the weirder avenues point in
viable commercial directions, but that's not what jams are about. They're
increasing your skills as a designer, artist or programmer, they're a way of
hanging out with other developers, and if you happen to make something amazing
that's probably too weird for an existing audience or platform, there's a
growing throng of festivals and events worldwide that might still be
interested.
A game jam is a perfect place to experiment with the
strangest ideas you have. That's because beyond tech (or the intentional lack
thereof), the best thing about a jam is the time constraint it imposes. It
creates a space where it's okay to try something new and perhaps fail horribly,
knowing that the project won't drag on.
Some of the best things I ever designed, way back,
came from speed mapping contests run by the Unreal Tournament mapping community.
The results were never pretty with a four hour time limit, but they were an
excellent way of getting a good, solid sketch done.
Without such constraints, it's easy to get attached to
something then sink too much effort into it, and I've seen even established
developers do this. A game jam is above all a focussing tool. You might still
become myopically attached to a duff idea, but that deadline is going to come
in nice and quick to finish it off instead of letting you toil at it for
months.
Photos by Natalie Seery [ http://www.natalieseery.com ] and Jessica Bernard [ http://www.ph0t0.co.uk ])
