“AND THEN the player gets attacked by the creatures of darkness and doom!”
“But it turns out they were praying to a false god!”
“And the only way you can be killed is by someone with a hat.”
That’s what you hear on the first day of a game jam. On the last day, it’s more like, “Well, at least you can turn on a lamp.”
In between are 48 straight hours of amateurs and professionals sprinting through the entire development cycle of a video game—albeit maybe one you wouldn’t immediately recognize as a video game. Frequently broken, incomplete, or experimental, games made at game jams are to Halo or Call of Duty as free jazz is to Nicki Minaj. But with a little spit and polish, these games have gone on to receive critical and commercial success. And the video game industry—and big-name game publishers—are starting to take notice.
“I’M A STRAIGHT-UP NEWBIE,” says Kora Wietrzynska. “I want to go into video games, so this was the perfect thing for me.” Wietrzynska is 20 years old and originally from Pozna, Poland; with a platinum blonde crew cut and a neon pink hoodie, she represents a younger generation of artists looking to break into the industry. For her, the 2016 Global Game Jam represents a chance to rocket from “I’d love to make a game” to “Yeah, I’ve made a game” in a very short amount of time.
She’s not alone. The annual Global Game Jam is made up of thousands of teams across dozens of countries. Various sites are set up that feature computers, snacks, and potential teammates. The Portland site I visited in January occupied a hallway of computer labs at the Art Institute of Portland, boasted a few dozen teams, and was organized by the Portland Indie Game Squad—AKA PIGSquad—a loose collective of developers and gaming enthusiasts.
No two jams are identical, but most feature a unifying theme and take place over the course of a weekend. PIGSquad provided a boilerplate schedule for teams to check their progress against: brainstorming should take no more than six hours, and a playable prototype should be done within 24. Twelve hours after that, the game should be complete.