UAlbany hosts International Game Jam
Marcel the hamster plods mindlessly across a room filled with spikes, flying projectiles and precipitous falls. A floating box accompanies him, brushing away the obstacles as he makes his way toward the door. But one floating bullet gets through, and Marcel collapses with an erp that sends the room of gaming whizzes at the University at Albany into laughter.
This is `Fade,` just one video game created from nothing over the course of a weekend by a group of programmers and artists who gathered at UAlbany for the third annual International Game Jam, which challenges a global group of participants to put together original games in just 48 hours.
This year was the most successful yet in terms of participation, both for UAlbany and the program as a whole. Fifty-seven people of all ages and skill sets came to the school on Friday, Jan. 28, and worldwide, more than 6,500 participants were recorded at 170 sites in 44 countries. They created almost 1,500 games over the weekend.
Albany sported the 35th biggest site in the world.
`It’s neat to be part of that community,` said Jennifer Goodall, director of the school’s College of Computing and Information. `It’s gotten bigger every year.`
Each year’s event comes with a theme, announced on Friday evening. This year, international organizers chose `Extinction,` which resulted in a wide range of projects from more violent, dark titles to hopeful and even educational games.
The games spoke not only to the teams’ technical wherewithal, but also their creativity. In `Dodo Island,` the player controls a dodo bird that must eat as many poisonous mushrooms as possible before being caught by explorers and eaten.
Team Darwin designed a more cerebral game in which the player must select different attributes to give a neutral `poof` creature to best enable it to survive in different environments and situations. In `Fade,` the designers let the player phase the environment out of existence, rather than Marcel the hamster himself.
Though most of the games created were video games, this year’s Game Jam saw the introduction of board games and card games to the mix, which brought an entirely different class of designers to the table.
William Balch, for example, collaborated with others over the weekend to create a board game that pitted predators against one another on a changing game board. He also helped James Walsh build a card game that sees the player leading a civilization that has to deal with various catastrophes like asteroid impacts.
It’s this kind of collaboration that makes the Game Jam experience unique, said Mark Abrams, of the Albany Chapter of the International Game Developers Association, and it’s especially useful to younger participants. UAlbany’s event sees high schoolers turning out every year, as well as college students who sometimes drive hours to participate.
`They learn new software, they learn new materials, they meet a lot of new people,` said Abrams, who works for First Playable, a game design studio in Troy. `Most of these have never developed a game before; that’s the amazing thing.`
In between managing events for the weekend, Abrams created an educational adding game where the goal is to keep your number from going extinct.
For many of these youngsters, games may very well turn into more than a diversion. Video gaming was an $11.7 billion industry in 2008, which is more than Hollywood has collected at the box office in recent years. More demographics than ever are picking up the hobby with the introduction of `casual gaming` experiences like Nintendo’s Wii and cell phone gaming, leaving many to speculate the industry is far from topping out.
But for the Game Jam participants there are no immediate financial rewards, just the satisfaction of creation and learning something new. On Sunday evening, the participants took time to test one others games and hand out awards for special achievements.
You can find a list of the games created during the Game Jam (many of which are playable) at www.globalgamejam.org.
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