is anyone else 'burnt' on gamejams?

etc
1

I get that gamejams are kind of this cornerstone for the indie games scene - but the past year or so I have been feeling pretty burnt out on the concept, and I wonder if anyone else feels like that too? It seems pretty odd to me that gamejams are essentially the only major sort of event/activity available in the space. There must be some other way to get developers to organize and do something fun and productive.

It also feels like they are pretty commodified now? It’s really easy to set up a jam page on itch these days so there are literally hundreds at any time now. The ludum dare used to be something people really rallied around and it kind of seems to have lost traction. and while I do like the general move away from competition-centric jamming I wonder what other motivational elements could be incorporated.

A lot of my hesitation with gamejams comes from my own mentality about making games, though. When I come up with ideas I tend to commit to them pretty hard. I also tend to work solo which usually means over-scoping for the time that I have. So while I see a ton of gamejams out there these days I just don’t feel great about throwing another unfinished thing onto my backlog to worry over. I’d much rather just keep obsessing over my extant unfinished projects, hahaha.

Anyways I’m curious what people’s hot takes on game jams are partly so I can think about types of events that would be good for a site like this. In part gamejams are just so traditional now it feels kind of boring, and I also think it would be too early to run one that would really get enough traction to have good results.

2

Yes. I have released four jam games (and one jam-sized game that I made on my own), and while these were excellent opportunities that I learned a lot from, I don’t feel like doing any more of them. I started my current project because I really wanted to do something bigger and more involved, and to spend more time iterating and polishing, rather than just throwing things together. The most important thing I learned from game jams is how to scope and finish a project, and I felt like I was ready to apply those lessons.

After Minerva Labyrinth is finished, it’s possible that I might do another jam or two before I start another big project, maybe as an opportunity to prototype, but we’ll see. In the mean time I haven’t really felt the need to jump into any more of them.

3

Ran into this today (Actually I had seen it once before but I didn’t really give it a close inspection then):

I feel like this is sort of in the direction I’m thinking where the goal seems to be to do a jam, but work towards a sum that is greater than the whole of its parts. I was a little confused what they meant by the jams being ‘anonymous’ - basically the games are uploaded to the itch account OF the jam rather than your own. And I suppose you send in a pseudonym to use too. It looks like it’s up to you if you want to announce or reveal yourself later on. There are some obvious downsides to not having the completed game under your name (for portfolio/visibility reasons at least) ~ but I kind of assume the point of the anonymity is to give yourself a reason to make a game where you simply don’t care how well it does, or if it matches up well with your ‘extant brand’

And of course in the end the product does feel to me at least a little like something where there is curation going into it (even if there isn’t) and all the games have a purpose juxtaposed together - which is one of the things I think is severely lacking in most huge, publicly available jams on itch.

Anyone else run into stuff like this before? I think it’s way way way too early for this site to do anything of the sort, but it leans more towards the direction where I think it would be actually worthwhile to jam

4

We usually don’t participate in jams. I do games for fun, and for the reason to make good games; I reject this, since I don’t need or want artificial deadlines, rules, or themes that reduce me in my possibilities and creativity.

I play many truly independent video games (guess I check out 3 in an average week), so I have a good base for comparison. Most games that were developed for jams have a not only under-average, but outright lousy quality - you can’t expect people to play this. People search for games that are creative, worthwhile, and fun; we should search for concepts that encourage people to realize projects they believe in.

5

okay i am jumping up on my soapbox rn to once again talk about this subject

i made a bit of a brief mention in a previous post on another thread a few pieces of uncomfort i get when considering jams these days - and i wanna make a point that i pretty much decided before the year started that i wouldn’t be doing any jams at all in 2024. and honestly i still feel pretty resolved about this going into next year however far off that feels

i think these are the issues i keep running into with regards to JAMS these days

  • there are genuinely so many that i’m not sure which ones are relevant uses of my time
  • the longstanding pillars of game jams have kind of eaten themselves up. ludum dare has given up on the idea of preservation despite being the launchpad for many of the most important indie games out there, and global game jam can’t seem to stop taking sponsorship money from dubious crypto/ai startups despite constant backlash
  • i can’t finish my own jam games - before or AFTER the jams even. i recognize that’s more of a skill issue on my end - but i think its a common narrative. many jam games present themselves as part-1 of some broader larger thing that won’t actually get any further work
  • i feel like padding out my portfolio with jam games ends up being way more underwhelming than just having fewer games with more pointed motives and presentation. mentioning ‘it was a jam game’ usually ends up robbing myself of merit with a project, or ruling it out from any useful critique/assessment from peers
  • if i could instead divert the scheduling and energy from what would be 2 months worth of jams (even allowing myself to pace things out) im pretty sure i could make something more than 2x as impactful. how to actually do so is beyond me - but that internalized feeling deadens the appeal of simply jamming.

i don’t want to be one to just rat on game jams though. they are really a foundational experience to anyone in the scene and id still recommend them. and i don’t think they only for beginners - though that fire-under-your-seat element is extremely useful for anyone hesitant about learning development. In fact there are some pretty good professional use-cases for them, like MegaCrit running their own internally to hype the team up for switching to Godot from Unity - or whatever it is exactly that doublefine does between major games.

but really the truth for me is that i just feel like something is missing about them now.

the last jam i actually participated in was the 0 hour gamejam - and these are the reasons why

  • 0hgj has some historic significance as a jam to me. its a pretty longstanding jam, over a decade old. i played a lot of the twinbeard/frog fractions 0hgj entries before i really got into development myself
  • the novelty of the premise, a gamejam set in the missing hour of daylight savings
  • spontaneity: i saw a few folks sitting in a discord call getting ready for it, and figured i wasn’t doing anything else with my night. plus i knew that i’d be in and out in a single sitting

i think that element of spontaneity is what usually drives most other jams these days, too. there are just a lot to pick from. you browse itchio and decide hey, this one is novel, and just take it from there. it happened super pervasively during the covid lockdown. from the looks of it you can pretty much indefinitely jam if you set yourself to it. and when i look at that chart im mostly faced with the question of why i’d really bother with any of them. i also think the idea of spontaneity falls apart when the jam’s set to go a week or even a month long. i usually develop for jams solo, so often i actually do need more than a weekend. but i also KNOW if a jam is a month long im going to spend less than half of it on a project that would have needed the whole thing to even resemble what i actually wanted to complete. (again, skill issue, i know lol). but it makes me wonder - why can’t i just pace myself out on my own terms and maybe actually complete that - instead of releasing something half baked and saying ‘well i’d like to return to this eventually’. one of the greatest mysteries of productivity…

Having failed to reach any kind of salient point yet, im gonna nail down some things that i really want to see game jams lean more into:

  • we need fewer, ‘bigger feeling’ jams that the indie scene can rally around. essentially re-focus on the jam as a cornerstone activity for any developer. i am pretty rose-tinted for thinking about this but it was nice when there was mostly just ludum dare because everyone knew what it was and when it was going on and which of their buddies were doing it. but when your friend tells you about their game they submitted to booberry crunch jam #14, the context is essentially irrelevant.
    • i also think it’s imperitive that they not come from content creators/youtubers. there are a myriad of reasons why but namely it kind of sucks that some of the most popular jams’ appeal today is ‘what if it gets shown on youtube’.
    • there are definitely still things that fill this niche. i was gonna point out trainjam but i guess that ended in 2020. location-based isn’t a great example because it’s so cost-prohibited. and most the cool ones are in europe and i lack a passport lol.
  • more offline jams - or at least off-itch jams. the idea of creating a ‘placeness’ to the jam (even if its a virtual one) might create some pull and really ground it as an event.
  • exemplify the collectivist aspects of the jam. really the essentially interesting part of jams is that so many people join in on this ridiculously difficult exercise simultaneously. when you just start and end a jam as an itch page it lacks any and all fanfare. i’m mostly in favor of the shift away from ‘voting’ and the ‘compo’ style jam but i also think it sucks that without it there really isn’t much reason to go return to anyone else’s entries after i submit to something.
    • usually i end up MORE inclined to go take to twitter or etc. just to pull any eyes even into the thing, rather than engage with the fellow jammers. admittedly i am not great at ‘joining discords’ and such, though. but i think thats common all around and when that’s the norm it begs the question why join THIS jam vs. any other that was on at the time
    • there are a lot of potential ways to focus on the community aspect of it, but the crucial part is they all take work not only usually from the organizers but the jammers. asking people to stick around and celebrate isn’t simple! what events can be organized that everyone is actually capable of joining, if it’s just some jam they walked backwards into out of boredom one weekend?
    • this is why i take a lot of interest in things like DOMINO CLUB (above) - which is a privately run jam. the ability to set things out far in advance with people who relatively know and trust each other - but also organize the final set of games into something that actually feels like a pointed statement or work - is my idyllic kind of jam to return to. I’d love to see more jam-like things that finish by presenting all the submissions as a collection
    • i want to feel like i was a part of something, not just that i joined or did something, i guess.

so in any case its probably not surprising i haven’t really intended on running a jam or anything for a site like this. id love to one day find some way to organize development into something cool but i just don’t really feel like jams are it, and things beyond that are a lot to invest into

6

i really like your write-up - i think it cuts at the heart of a lot of the issues i have with game jams, but also why i occasionally do feel tempted to join one.

my belief is that there’s a real creative spark to creating art under constraints - time constraints, creative guidelines, without certain tools or with a new tool - whichever!
ever since ive read several works from the french oulipo (a group of writers who would create works under extreme creative constraints, such as “no use of the letter e” or “write it all in second person”), and started using similar limitations on my own writing, i realised that when you’re given walls, you build around or through them, or break them down where it’s right.
it’s somehow both easier, and makes the truly unique parts of what you’re doing shine all the more. while i personally am not the biggest on domino club (just not my thing), i do recognise that those types of jams have a very similar character the way the oulipo did things.

as a positive case in point from my personal experience with jams: the 2021 Summer of Shivers jam organised by Haunted PS1 had my narrative designer friend conor walsh ask me to team up for a small rm2k3 game. together with leaf let for sound design, we finished a game in 3 weeks.

and that was excellent! conor and i brainstormed an entire night until we had a concept (sparks flew, it ruled), i outlined the basic level design and made the pixel art that was involved, and it all just came together so beautifully and spontaneously. “There Swings A Skull” is still my most-played game on itch, and its full version “Grim Tidings” felt like a natural extension of what we’d created.

(hell, even the title of the game had been sitting in my phone notes since 2016! it took that long for that little phrase to find its home. now it has!)

you’ll have picked up on the fact that i said “3 weeks” there, though - and that’s the crux, and really my main problem with the majority of jams; there is such a thing as “not enough time”, there absolutely is such a thing as “self-crunching”, and there’s a point at which the human body is actively harmed by enduring long work hours, lack of sleep, and sustained stress - read, all the things that are present in your average 1-7 day game jam.

(hell, in the global game jam 2019 i participated in, i forgot to take a sleeping bag, and my medication, with me to the venue. meaning i couldnt sleep for 3 days, and very nearly died! that was a formative event for sure.)

id be more permissive of that as an individual choice if it weren’t for the types of people that have recently organised these types of crunch-fest.
obviously you already rounded up the fallen titans of ludum dare and global game jam, but the newest breed of game jam czars are just “youtube man who farms content off your crunch”.

i hate the gmtk jam, i hate pirate software’s jam- i hate them all. our passion and labor are being exploited for a guy - game developer or not! - to farm clicks, support, and ad revenue on youtube dot com and patreon. due to the popularity and competitive nature of these jams, people run themselves ragged on them; i would not be surprised if they had the capability to kill. and all just for a maybe-spot in a youtube video, and an even slimmer chance at some form of recognition (be it monetary, or just clout).

the sheer density of games that are out there is, it feels like, reaching a point of criticality. finding things becomes harder and harder, and curating jams is a difficult task to be left with on one’s own. (there used to be people who would do it in the past, like sebastian standke, but they’ve recently stopped).

im not sure ill participate in a jam like this for the foreseeable future, definitely. it’s good they still exist, but i hope that the generally-accepted shape of them is still malleable and can move towards something healthier.

7

i had waited to reply to this since when joining, i was actually in the middle of a jam while reading this thread, and wanted to take a moment to get said feelings together in a way that was biased by having completed a jam game, rather than biased by being in the thick of it. you can never trust your own emotions in the thick of a game jam.

my context with game jams is actually kind of the opposite of that spontaneous “sure, i’ll do a jam” mentality. i do gbjam ever year as a matter of tradition. i have done gbjam with a handful of friends every year since 2016, and other than one foray into 7drl, which is fun but complex in its own ways, and one year where gbjam didn’t happen, i generally don’t do game jams. i choose gbjam for a lot of reasons, most of which is that it’s 10 days, rather than 2, and this is kind of the sweet spot. it’s a long enough period that i can spend time on mental health + not exploding, and it’s long enough the friends i make jam games with can show up and contribute in a very nice and casual way. this year a friend who’s never joined us before showed up for it, and he wound up helping immensely, and it’s nice. and because of this, i personally love doing gbjam every year because it is a time to do what i love with my friends and loved ones. and then gbjam usually wraps around the autumn solstice, where said friends and loved ones already have the tradition of watching high school musical 2, and it just works out nicely.

this sentiment reminds me of the old errant signal video about tf2 vs overwatch. the gist of that video is that tf2’s systems for getting into a game, where you more or less just pick a server, keep it bookmarked, and join that one server when you want to play, cultivated social spaces within itself, while overwatch invites existing social spaces in, by asking you to queue for games with friend groups that it’s assumed you already have. and in that way i do definitely approach jams in a more overwatch-y way than a tf2-y one, it’s an excuse to do things with friends i already have.

but at the same time, i’d be lying if i said i didn’t really like gbjam, too. it takes a while, but it’s in this yearly repetition and tradition of doing a jam where i really start to feel the community, seeing recurring names and faces, seeing who sticks around to do something that year, seeing who doesn’t, welcoming new faces, etc etc etc. i imagine this is the kind of thing that will start popping up as the big content farm-y game jams become more stable. i think the most charitable position is that while gbjam’s been going for a while, i remember clearly the first game maker’s toolkit jam wrecking itch’s shop, and building community around yearly events like that just takes time to get going. but at the same time, i also kind of wonder if the kind of perverse incentive set of “get your game on a big youtube channel” means it’ll have trouble doing that, since the “your game wasn’t mentioned” negative interaction can be devastating if your only reason for participating is parasociality with fuckin pirate software (a fate worse than death)

lots to think about.

8

and i hope none of my post comes off too aggressive about how others choose to do this stuff… i think my losing the spark with this is totally a hodgepodge of personal concerns, and recognize that generally gamejams are just fun and low-risk activities

=====

honestly i was a bit concerned about naming specific names but i guess we’re beyond this point, so i also want to throw in the Dunkey one which also happened essentially in the wake of the buzz of him starting a publishing company. conflict-of-interests aside, the air of ‘look at what we did guys’ when that concluded read wildly crass to me :/ . i haven’t really looked into it heavily, if this goes on with other publishers or not, but it feels like a line really needs to be drawn when publishers get directly involved in jams simply to keep people’s expectations in check and make sure teams aren’t betting the farm on this stuff.

hmm, catch me if im taking this concept and running totally amok with it but the lens of ‘tradition’ has got me thinking. im wondering if there’s a bit of a distinction between those who find game jams themselves to be a tradition, vs. the set of practices and cultural gathering towards jams to be a tradition. i think im of the opinion that the former isn’t quite so valuable, and chasing down the latter is where i’m getting tripped up recently

it might be that my feelings around the original jams being a sort of ‘town square’ activity is still a thing but has more caveats to accommodate an overall larger games scene.
:= there are smaller, localized town squares, now
:= engaging in them is an activity that takes effort on both ends, now

i don’t really know if either of those things are bad! im just Bad At Discord myself lol. and i think when i hear about an experience like that, with gbjam tf2 analogy, it does reignite some of those memories on my end. but i also still find it hard to parse then, which i should be looking for and ‘committing’ to. and i think if this site started running any, it’d be asking folks to consider that same question – i don’t really have a convincing pitch there

9

also: i poked around and saw the gbjam entry!! if you got it in you would love to see a postmortem thread >:)

10

I don’t know. I agree that the sheer number of jams on Itch creates a lot of noise, and many of those jams only attract a few participants, or none at all. Lonely jams aren’t much fun, since engaging with each others’ processes and results is part of the experience, I think. I always feel bad for the host when I see a jam that has ended with no submissions.

On the other hand, all those jams aren’t fungible, either. The range and specificity of so many available jams can open up opportunities or inspiration for more people.

Using myself as an example, the first game that I actually completed and published was for the I Can’t Draw Jam, which was specifically themed around having no expectations for art. Art was something that I was really hung up on not being able to do at the time, so I saw this as an opportunity to finally just forget about it and make something. It was also something like a 10 or 14-day jam, which appealed to me because I personally need more time than a weekend to make anything. This was an extremely popular jam with over a hundred submissions.

Another important one was the two-month RPG jam, which was the push that I needed to finally get an RPG off the ground. I’m still iterating on the tech and design that I built for the jam to make a better RPG. This HAD to be a pretty long jam; there’s no way I could have done what I did for it otherwise. Sadly, there were only five submissions, including mine. That was perhaps to be expected, since a long and labor-intensive jam probably has limited appeal, but it was exactly the motivation I needed personally.

I don’t expect to ever participate in Ludum Dare. I just have no interest in what it offers or expects.