Negative Game Jam Experiences

Many game jam studies have been focusing on the potential of the method and the positive sides of the jamming cultures [6, 24]. As a relatively young academic field, perhaps, the game jam scholarly community has been pushing the awareness of the subject towards wider academic audiences - through concentrating on the promise of the format. While there are many studies for game jams [10, 22], the field is still under-explored. This short paper explores game jams specifically from the perspective of the negative experiences – exposing what can be missing from the more optimistic views of game jams. For the purpose of this paper a small online survey was constructed and altogether 17 responses were collected. Additional depth has been drawn from the author‘s extensive experience on various game jams between 2010 and 2021. This study highlights the prevalence of social issues as a source for negative experiences in game jams, but also reflects on the possibility of wider spectrum of cases.