A couple of weeks before heading out the US I met up with Ryan Jenkins. We had met on twitter through our mutual interest in creative learning, and finally managed to meet in person. I mentioned the flat-game-jam that I had recently coordinated with Mark Wonnacott. Ryan loved the concept, and two weeks later on a sunny afternoon in Oakland, we are in a workshop in the Temescal district running a flat-game-jam with a group of local artists. Flat games were developed by Dreamfeel, and are kind of like a cross between ad video game and a zine. They use the video game conventions -they are made in unity3d, you control sprites and the camera view. But they depart from a video game in the way that you explore the game space without collisions, and in how ideas are expressed like they would be in a zine or comic book, they are often poetic, and tell personal stories.
We set-up the space with craft materials. Part of the flatgame format is to make IRL before making in digital. Nicole (Ryan’s collaborator) made cookies.
The session was attended by artists, game designers, and programmers, and by people who were none of those, and just wanted to play. At the end of the session we shared games by playing them of course, and then I got some really useful feedback about the process. It turns out that people really (really) liked making collisions happen, and so it would be good to adapt the format to allow for this. The group also had some ideas about how the workshop could be expanded such as into a week long session for young people. Or, there were suggestions of collaborating with a writer or poet to explore the expressive side of the format. Or collaborate with a musician. I’m hoping to run some more workshops in the UK, so the feedback was really helpful.
Ryan wrote about the jam on his blog.
