Understanding a Community: Observations from the Global Game Jam Survey Data

The Global Game Jam® is the world’s largest game creation event, a physical jam that is held annually for eight years now. The 48-hour activity brings together game design enthusiasts in over 90 countries around the world for a weekend of experimentation. The organization facilitates tens of thousands of jam registrations every year, and thousands of responses to its annual survey. In this paper, we analyze Global Game Jam using multiple largely unexamined sources of data. We produce and discuss some key observations supported by the evidence.