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During spring 2009 and fall 2010, a few folks here from GLS formed a group, MadDesigners, and helped to run and participate in a series of game design jams. Taken from the industry as a way to practice rapid prototyping, game design jams are events in which small groups of individuals get a game design topic and, over the course of a short time span (in our case, one hour) design a “playable” game. At the end of the hour the participants get together and play the games that they’ve created, often providing feedback and pointing out the “bugs” in the game. Overall, the jams were successful – participants reported having fun and we were only once, asked for more instructions more explicit then “you have one hour to make a game that’s playable.” Because of scheduling conflicts, however, we have stopped running them regularly, but hope to resurrect them at some point (in perhaps a different format) in the near future.
Soon, we’ll be publicly discussing a few lessons that we’ve learned from running these sessions. Before we start hitting up more formal venues, however, here are some brief thoughts on what we learned from the jams. Though we haven’t quite figured out why it’s particularly important to do them, I/we suspect there’s something interesting happening here.
1) Game design is it’s own skill set. One thing I’ve seen, time and again, is the assumption that designing a game and learning how to use a medium (e.g. a programming language) can be done at the same time. While I’m sure that some talented folks out there have come up with a good way to teach this, I am becoming more convinced that separating them out is immensely helpful for novice game designers. People would probably have a hard time learning how to write a (good/creative) poem or a novel while learning to write in a new language, and in the same way, learning to express an abstract concept in a new programming language while simultaneously learning the language will be difficult, if not impossible. The answer to grappling with problem is to separate out game design from other skill sets, and to use the least common denominator. In our case, that meant using paper and pencil. Which leads me to my next point…
2) “Old fashioned” non-digital games work. In an education era that places a high value in technology learning and digital experiences, it probably runs against the current to argue for the use of old fashioned tools. The essence of game design, however, can be authentically captured in a non-digital medium, and more importantly, a lot of the educational benefits that people are claiming digital design experience provides is still evident in non-digital game design. The jams fosters motivation as individuals intently work to complete a (creative) game in an hour and provides some good “old fashioned” fun as people play the games at the end of the session.
3) There is no “right” way to design a game, except that there is. The right way, in these jams, means meeting the time/topic constraints. Having an infinite number of possibilities available to design from is intimidating, and having an indefinite amount of time can cripple the process. The constraints of the jam are what define it, and meeting those constraints is half the fun (the jam is quite nearly a game unto itself). Other than keeping to the time constraints, the jammers were successful in designing games each in their own ways.
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