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On the Importance of GAME_JAM

Last week, Jared Rosen, writing for Indie Statik, broke the story of GAME_JAM, a $400,000 reality show production about indie game development that crashed and burned. I wasn't there. My knowledge of the events comes entirely from what I've read in Jared's report and the extraordinary personal testimonies of participants Robin Arnott, Adriel Wallick, and Zoe Quinn. I'm not writing this because I have any personal insight to share. I'm just writing this because I think that the story of GAME_JAM is an important one, and that it has lessons for all of us about where games are, and where they're going.

To sum up the events that occurred: the project that eventually became the "reality show" known as GAME_JAM started out with the concept of a documentary-style production meant to show people the process of game creation that happens at game jams, which are gatherings where people collaborate to produce games very quickly. Some seasoned indie developers were motivated to participate by the prospect of sharing that creation process with an audience, some of whom might have then been inspired to try their own hands at game development. It could have been wonderful.

But the production changed as sponsors got involved, and as attempts were made to artificially ratchet up the drama, "reality show" style, to attract bigger numbers. This shifted the production away from the spirit of camaraderie and creativity that it had initially been meant to celebrate, and in a more competitive and corporate direction. Beverages other than Mountain Dew were banned on the set. And a brand consultant for Pepsi named Matti Leshem pushed too hard in his attempts to create artificial drama between the participants, asking questions of participants like "Do you think the teams with women on them are at a disadvantage?" That's when the developers walked and the production crumbled. And more power to them.

To participate in a piece of entertainment that treats the question of whether are not women are a liability in the field of game development as a legitimate question worth asking is to reinforce the notion that women are, at best, secondary, that gaming is not really a space where we belong. For a long, long time, games were overwhelmingly seen purely as products, and, what's more, products that were intended primarily for men. Now, the industry is experiencing some growing pains as creators emerge who believe that games can be more than just products, that they can be made on a multi-million-dollar budget or no budget at all, that they can be an avenue for explorations of all kinds of topics, and that they can be for all kinds of people. There are those consumers of games who feel threatened by this, even though such indie games typically represent no more of a threat to AAA games than art house foreign films represent to the next Michael Bay blockbuster.

And there are those who cling to outdated ideas of a monolithic, male-dominated gamer culture, as evidenced by Matti Leshem's sexist questions to the GAME_JAM participants. But while it makes sense for some movies--those that are unabashedly mainstream consumer products--to have tie-ins with sodas or Happy Meals, it would be absurd to expect those films that are more interested in telling human stories to have a line of action figures. Everybody understands that cinema is a multifaceted medium and that different films can have wildly different aims, and are no less films for it. But in gaming, some are still holding tightly--too tightly--to certain ideas: that games are always consumer products and never art, that games need to be about fun, that games are primarily for men.

GAME_JAM could have been a very good thing, giving people a look at the process of game design and creation. There's a chance that it could have inspired some people--including women--who have previously thought of game design as a field that was off-limits to them to give it a closer look. But it collapsed when one man (who was hired by other people) completely failed to grasp the spirit of the endeavor, and tried to treat this process of game development the way that people have so often treated it: purely about the creation of product, a place where men belong and women might be a liability simply because they're women.

Games are at a cultural crossroads. We can honor and celebrate games by acknowledging that they can take all kinds of forms and can be made by all kinds of people. Or we can hold them back by trying to pigeonhole them into certain formats, or by suggesting that they should only be made by certain kinds of people. It's time that we all accepted that games are multifaceted, that there's room for all kinds of games, and all kinds of people under the umbrella of "gamers." Reinforcing the idea that games are a place where women don't belong holds all of us back, and it holds games back from being everything they can be. I hope this is something of a wake-up call. We should all be as brave as the participants of GAME_JAM were, to take a stand against these ideas, and fight for a more diverse and inclusive gaming industry.