Thank you for writing this. For the past few days I’ve been pondering how a writers retreat style gathering could be done for game designers, and this article helped tremendously. I’m more determined now to pitch this to a few of my colleagues/designer friends, and they’ll need to read this.

We haven’t done another one yet. We are starting to think more seriously about it now; we’ll see when the next one is.

Your fan,
Chris

I looked through the comments entirely to point out that this is like a writers workshop (with the setting of a retreat).

I found your reference to Brian Moriarty’s Psalm 46 lecture just today & listened to it — wonderful. Brian was another key games industry figure with an interest in the Glass Bead Game all those years ago. I met him at a Chris Crawford gathering the day before one of the CGDCs, in Los Angeles as I recall. Anyway, thanks for the pointer — I just spent a wonderful hour or more immersed in Moriarty & Bach.

I was at a couple of the CGDCs in 96 or 7 or thereabouts, too, and was also a bit of a fish out of water. I remember my first session was led by Scott Kim and I discovered the guy sitting next to me – amazement – was Alexey P of Tetris. I talked with him a little later, said I was working on making Hermann Hesse’s Glass Bead Game playable (or something along those lines) and after we’d got past the bit where his Russian ear couldn’t understand my Brit accent he waved a hand at California and said, “You hope to build Castalia here?” in a tone of sheer disbelief.

Well, yes I do. And I’m not entirely naïve in thinking the impossible can be achieved. I had a mentor when I was a kid who took on the S African government in person as a white school teacher / priest, and lived to keynote his friend Mandela’s first Inaugural.

In any case, that was way before Serious Games or Games for Change were happening, and with a few exceptions like Mike Sellers, Chris Crawford and Johnny Wilson, almost nobody thought games could go the full distance to “serious” – despite the fact that Huizinga had published Homo Ludens in 1938, Wittgenstein made something of a big deal out of games in Philosophical Investigations, and Hermann Hesse won the Nobel for Glass Bead Game in 1946. Sadly, there was a disconnect between the two ends of the “game interested” spectrum.

No matter, times are changing, and we’re ripe for some more depthful games.

Like you, I guess, I favor games with something of a contemplative quality to them, being something of a monkish personality myself, and my (our) games are designed to tap into the natural creativity of players, regardless of age or cultural background or purpose (play, education, brainstorming, therapy, contemplation) – see The crackling energy of a Sembl move

They’re also geared for dialog, non-linear discourse, group facilitation, conflict-resolution – a topic which relates to your jams and Michael Yacavone’s comments above. We’re a ways yet from delivering the full spectrum of possibilities we’re aiming for, but the key in every case is mapping humanly-perceived analogies on a board with ongoing player comparison and discussion of their merits.

On the one hand, mapping analogies is very much in line with work by eg Koestler, Hofstadter, Lakoff, Fauconnier and Turner – and on the other hand it’s the basic move in the arts, whether you call it rhyme, counterpoint, match cut or whatever. So we’re aiming to bridge that damn arts and sciences “two cultures” divide.

Which brings me to my almost last point – just to thank you for a comment you made on a video talk I saw: “and because we’ve got so much benefit from science, we’re a little bit overdosed on the objective view of the universe…” Oh, yeah!

Last but not least – a friendly shout out to Justin, if that’s Howard Rheingold’s old buddy there. You gave us blogs, Justin, and I for one am deeply grateful!

Also, was the Indie Game Jam at all inspired by the Berkeley All-Nighters Group? I’d like to think that something good came out of what was otherwise a total failure…

Appreciate the response! I use to love adventure games in the early 90’s which is one reason I’m excited about your game. I tried to play some more modern ones but they are horrible. It seems tough because part of what was great about those games was there wasn’t a strict mechanic, there was more surprise and discovery. However it seems to come at a cost since they don’t flow very well and were often too hard.

For what it’s worth, it seems to me that all games are built around systems, including adventure games. It’s just that adventure games’ are usually convoluted in a certain unpleasant way. From area to area, the rules change an awful lot so the things you learned for previous puzzles can’t be used in new ones. A friend of mine picked the word “heterological” (different logic/diseased logic) to describe this kind of game system.

It’s hard to make a general statement about this, because it is sort of a case-by-case thing. Different things are best for different games.

However, it’s very easy to see things NOT to do. If you put a fricking sliding tile puzzle into your adventure game, you are probably doing game development wrong. (Similarly if the game is some kind of click-the-background-fest, as you allude to.)

I’m curious what you think are other ways to improve game design for adventure games. In your adventure game you use puzzle panels to clearly indicate interactivity. It seems like a problem for 3d first person adventure games is that you can’t make everything interactive but having some things interactive is arbitrary. Having a system on top of the environment like your panels or a portal gun seems like one solution to the problem of players not knowing what they can do.

I’m just wondering what your thoughts are on this since I’d like to see lots more modern adventure games in 3d environments but without the ambiguity. Do these games need to be built around systems?

+1 I like the idea of different disciplines doing different jams in a similar format.

Jon has been very inspirational to me in my career decisions. If it weren’t for him beating some life into the cold heart of video games. I’m not sure I would be trying to put my voice into the mix. It’s very easy to lose faith in the value of interactive experiences when most of those experiences are just pulling triggers and watching people’s heads explode.

http://fourm-designbuild.com/artwork/2480931_The_Witness_Geology.html

Anyway, thanks, it’s a great format.

The idea of a silent day in the middle is excellent. Omega Institute’s week-long programs (which run from Sunday dinner to Friday lunch) have Wednesday afternoon off for nature, reading, café, etc. If you did this I would extend the retreat to five days, so you have a pair of jam days on either side of the internal day.

Finally, if you try an odd number of participants (as opposed to a number of odd participants), I would be interested in the difference between having a four-day retreat with a silent day and a five-day retreat with a silent day. Think about the time-cycles of three people doing, say, two hours each on the first two days, then silent day, then either a wrap-up day, or, a “re-entry” day and then a wrap-up day – vs four people doing the same. There will be a very interesting difference in tone and quality of the post-silent day depending on what follows it, and how much ‘competition’ for mindspace accompanies it.

I think all of these principles could be utilized in a jam for visual designers. Radically changing the visual look and tonal texture is often fluid in the hands of a skilled designer, in the same way algorithmic changes are ‘easy’ for a programmer. In some ways, further differentiating the various game jams into disciplines or perhaps ‘tracks’ of jams could extend the value of that particular format to more people over more time. Agree completely that everyone has to have similar stakes in participation and outcomes.

Finally, I think one way out of the “value fatigue” associated with attending conferences et al is to focus on contribution to others. If you can find a way to gauge (if not measure) the value others get from one’s presence or lecture or session, it can make it easier to ‘justify’ the time and engage in the real work it takes to prepare a session. No one owes anyone else their learning, it’s a gift, but it’s also a choice the presenter makes trading-off against other demands or opportunities.

I say this simply because the only reason I got interested in games at all was watching the author’s presentations on YouTube. They are inspiring, thoughtful, and deep – terms I had never previously associated with games. Since then I have been “typing my game into the computer” as they say, and we’ll see what the world thinks about it someday soon. None of it would have happened if Jonathan hadn’t taken the time to think about what he thought, write it up, travel to a friggin’ beige conference hotel, stand before his peers, and accept their feedback in the wake of it. It’s a big commitment. It has a ripple effect. I’m glad it happened.

(Cross-posted from Gamasutra.)

yes. What about your comment?

I feel the horrible need to butt-own people for being wrong in teh internet.
Although this [comment edited for unnecessary ugliness — moderator] it was the, what do you call it? The starw that broke the camel’s back?

If someone is wrong in an internet argument you can bet both your balls I’ll be there to deliver their asses right back to them!

yeah! I sure taught hima! Now he will never act a jackass on teh internetz again

Capccha: sad question

Was that internet potshot really worth the time it took to type it out (miniscule as that may have been)?

But how were they being superior? They were just working on their games and trying to talk with intent… They invited close friends that had games that needed to be worked on and could help each other’s games. No elite club here just not a club at all!

I think you’re just mad because you like to be part of a community that thinks making little half-assed games is fun or cool or maybe you’re just mad because you don’t have friends to help you make games or mad that you can’t work at a beach house for 4 days or idk wtf is wrong with you!

Maybe if your interested we could get some money and work on my game or your game or both and then we would be a sort of elite not like these nerds here

Capcha: ign lies

lol

Ditto @ jb

The good news is that you are free to go do whatever you feel is a better version of this event, then write about it on the internet like we did.

As long as it is genuinely focused on depth and generates interesting results, I am sure many people will be interested in hearing about it (us included).

Only random thought I had is whether it’s a good idea to have all four people participate in each discussion slot. If one (rotating) person sat out each slot, the different mix of personalities would probably lead to a greater variety of perspectives. I know I can sometimes talk over other designers if I get excited about an idea, so rotating voices would ensure that each participant can go deep on each of the games. As a bonus, everyone would get a block of time to do nothing but code.

But actually, I don't wash dishes.

Had any of you experienced that? You came through an experience you thought would be genuinely bad but you got something out of it in the end?

“I’ll try something similar for my next game.” Wow wow wow Hamish… What’s your first game?

This format makes a tremendous amount more sense than the other formats.
I really like how it focuses on improving a current project.
Rapid prototyping is great for fun, but for serious development, I would chose doing so in this way every time.

I will definitely attempt doing one on a future project.

Also I would love to hear about future iterations of the Jam.

Also I assume the “Big Problems” addressed are design problems. At the moment I can only see this working with a focus on design. Is this correct?

1st Hour: Everyone gets a chance to rely on the group to brainstorm/solve a design, game dev or biz dev issue. Crowdsourcing our professional development, yo.

2nd Hour: Playtest games, give feedback, criticism, hit the white boards and system design the shit out of a problem

Folks who come in each week with “hey, how do I sell this game to everybody and make a bazillion dollars?” quickly get sick of us.

For us this is an opportunity to keep pushing each other and maintaining a weekly focus of “what needs to happen to improve play?”.

I do agree with the need to be a designer/programmer though (which I surely am not). If the problems or ideas could be tackled with simple prototypes, maybe a less technical person could get by, but if one were looking to nail down late stage ideas and design choices, real technical chops would likely be a must.

Maybe approaching the jams holistically could allow for a more diverse group of attendees, I wonder. But perhaps that would transition more into a traditional jam environment. Actually that sounds horrible for anything other than prototyping or critical discussion, not legit get’er done work.

Very cool though, we actually were discussing the idea of jamming out some aspects of FRACT after David and Henk got back from ToJam – food for thought.

I think game developers would benefit from more start-to finish development writeups, which would discuss game design and application development/architecture.

There’s plenty of stuff out there – mostly written by people who haven’t seen a game through from start to finish. It promotes over-design, over-technicality, strict inheritance-based OOP and all sort of “conceptual”-phase, feel-good stuff that never results in games being made.

Given this, can you blame novices for limiting themselves to an “A for effort”?

I’m currently experimenting with game development patterns. Rapid is better. Enough with the pseudo-progress and hyper-theoretical ideas and more results.

If it works out, I’ll try writing some start-to-finish game development tutorials for HTML5/JavaScript and Flash. Until then, here’s the lecture that convinced me to use components/messaging: https://archive.fosdem.org/2012/schedule/event/game_entities.html

Depth jams sound interesting when you are stuck on big problems and want high level feedback.

“Daniel and I played some intense frisbee on the beach every afternoon, Jonathan did t’ai chi and kung fu on the patio, and Marc read.”

I mean I admire you all so much so this image is just surreal. Seriously though, thank you for sharing the details of this with us, as jealous as it makes me :P

Other than advertising or charity, most game jams just aren’t made for expert developers. That doesn’t mean they can’t participate, but they surely aren’t going to learn as much.

As an amateur game developer (and professional non-game developer) I probably don’t have much perspective on it, but the depth jams seem like a really good idea. Getting good feedback on your idea can be really, really hard. Fans are likely to say it’s good just because they’re a fan, and haters will say it’s bad just because they don’t like you. Somewhere in the middle are some people telling the hard truth, but they’re very hard to pick out from the rest.

With a group of game developers, and a qui pro quo situation, the feedback you’re getting is probably as close to the hard truth as you can get. The calendar days thing worries me, because as you said, sometimes it isn’t a matter of hours… Answers just come when they come. Sometimes 4 days isn’t enough for me to come up with really insightful advice for a project, and especially not if there’s 3 projects and I’m worried about my own, too. But that’s not all the time, so probably isn’t a major concern.

Thanks for sharing this idea, and I hope to one day be in a position where I can benefit from these Depth Jams.

IGJ sounds very similar to online-only precursors like speedhack, which were around quite a while before it. I think you may be overestimating the significance of IGJ. (Also focusing on a technical problems seems like a bad idea even for 2002; did it really produce any good results? LD seems to have a better track record in terms of producing interesting work.)

TIGJam isn’t about completing a game within the Jam time; most people there seem to work on their own ongoing projects and just use the Jam for socializing, getting playtesters / feedback / discussion, mini-talks, etc.

Also, apologies for the Twitter tirade on the writing in Braid a couple weeks ago. Bit out of line of me to say!

Just quickly on the “feel good” nature of jams, I think that it is important not to undervalue that community aspect. Things like the Depth Jam require a very large minimum amount of community to happen, so I think that the feelings nurtured in Jam spaces is really important. That being said, I also completely agree that successful participation in a Jam can hardly be considered “success” in any real way. It is very helpful to achieve various complicated ends, but participation in itself is far from an end.

Now on the specific way that this went, lacking any real substantive knowledge of the interactions that occurred in the space of the four days, it is hard to make any real judgements on the value. It sounds, from everyone’s write ups, that it was very helpful for all of you.