How The Most Expensive Game Jam In History Crashed And Burned In A Single Day

Here's an interesting article about something that happened this past weekend. It seems like a simple and pretty good concept: Organize and film a game jam to give folks a view into the ups and downs of indie game development. If you don't know what a game jam is, it could perhaps be summed up as an event in which game developers gather (often in one physical location, but not necessarily) and design and create a game in a short period of time (usually between 24-48 hours (a weekend) to 7 days (a full week)), often based on a theme or idea. They're mostly a non-competitive, fun, coding challenge almost like DonationCoder's own NANY, except done over a week(end). It's a great outlet for creativity and experimentation, and the short time limit liberates you from worrying about it being an utter failure or total crap. And many game jam games have been further developed into full fledged indie titles that are relatively popular.

Personally I found the first several paragraphs of the article hard to follow, as if the author was trying too hard to wax poetic and write prose rather than trying to describe what happened. But once he starts describing the events that took place, it becomes an interesting read about how one person when given too much power, can ruin things for all involved.

That natal idea, and one of the themes central to all 11 developers agreeing to travel to Los Angeles for the shoot, was the production and filming of a game jam for a televised audience (or at least a YouTube audience) with the intent to document the ups and downs of actually developing a game – hopefully sharing that experience with a viewership likely ranging into the hundreds of thousands, possibly millions. More importantly, it would be an opportunity for the group to share the closely-knit spirit of togetherness unique to indie development, presented through the lens of popular YouTube personalities with massive, mostly younger built-in viewerships. A slam dunk, you might say, created in earnest to shine a kind of light into the often misrepresented world of creating… or at least, that's what everyone thought.

At some point GAME_JAM outgrew itself, attracting the attention of major sponsors as well as a couple of our "high creative" production executives from the adjacent office down the street, and over the next four or five months the show began phasing into something less documentary and more docu-tainment. A sort of competition, held between four teams of "Jammers" (the developers), and "Gamers" (the YouTubers), as they battled it out to see who could come up with the best game combining both development and entertainment skillsets. Plus to see who could win a healthy array of branded prizes, generously procured by said sponsors and totally un-vetted by anyone who actually understands game development. At some point which remains unclear, the show wholly dipped into a scripted reality slant and became less about making a game and more about creating drama for sake of the audience, less than one day out of the four blocked off for shooting available to sit down and jam. The rest of the program, as it turned out, was filled with arts and crafts, physical challenges, and competitive gaming – once again, totally unrelated to game development. But that wasn't communicated to anyone, and through Polaris' local contacts the developers were signed up and flown out to Culver City, where they awaited their first hurdle in Maker's legal department.

-http://indiestatik.com/2014/03/31/most-expensive-game-jam/

It's a pretty good story about how standing up to and being united in the face of what essentially equates to bullying can really change the outcome. That is to say, from my perspective, I think that a lot of the developers here have a bitter taste in their mouth from the experience, and yes it's true that the game jam was cancelled, but it could have been a lot worse if it had continued on the path it was going down. The event may have been a failure, but I see this as a general success in doing the right thing in the face of adversity.

Read the article here: http://indiestatik.c...-expensive-game-jam/

And it's also worth reading about the experience as described by three of the developers who attended:

Robin: http://soundselfgame.com/?p=302
Adriel: http://msminotaur.com/blog/?p=187
Zoe: http://www.beesgo.biz/reality.html (She was contractually obligated not to write about the specifics, so it's a little less directly related)