game jams & hackathons

What you are now reading is a unique initiative created by people who love game jams, study game jams and organise game jams. No other book like this exists. While the idea of a game jam and its predecessors can be traced back decades, the term itself is barely twenty years old, and formalised scholarship around it is not even ten. We are ecstatic to bring you the first comprehensive volume on the origins, development and contemporary practices of game jams. Within these pages, you’ll learn the game jam origins, how jams are made and where they are going.

Recently, I had the honor of representing the IGDA Global -Game Jam team at the Game Education Summit North America. Taking place on the University of Southern California campus June 15- 16, the summit featured a diverse set of talks and panels covering topics from curriculum management to video game ethics. Our presentation was called "Learn by Doing: Global Game Jam lessons for the classroom." In the talk, we outlined 10 aspects of GG] that can directly benefit university-level game programs.

Since their inception at the Indie Game Jam1 in 2002, a significant part of game jams has been knowledge sharing and showcasing ideas and work to peers. While various licensing mechanisms have been used for game jams throughout the years, there has never been a licence uniquely designed for artifacts created during a game jam. In this paper, we present to the community the Game Jam License (GJL) which is designed to facilitate that sharing and knowledge transfer, while making sure the original creators retain commercial rights.

In less than a year’s time, March 2022 will mark the twentieth anniversary of the first documented game jam, the Indie Game Jam, which took place in Oakland, California in 2002. Initially, game jams were widely seen as frivolous activities. Since then, they have taken the world by storm. Game jams have not only become part of the day-to-day process of many game developers, but jams are also used for activist purposes, for learning and teaching, as part of the experience economy, for making commercial prototypes that gamers can vote on, and more.

In this case study, we consider the implications and observations of SLO Hacks 2020, a 36-hour hackathon with 358 attendees held on February 28 – March 1, 2020 at the California Cybersecurity Institute. Eight corporate sponsors were involved. Although students may attend hackathons with the intention of releasing a publication, launching a startup, or experimenting with the newest technology, we evaluate the activity with particular interest in workforce development.