Another game jam has reached the end and it is time to say thank you to all of the game jammers, and thank you to all of those that have made the jam possible: CodeMyst, TheDutchMagikarp, Brackeys, AquaXV, Duxez, Yilian .
I have been and I will continue to be both really happy to be a part of the game jam family, but also critical about how we are not always behaving in the best possible way. But the game jam family is still mostly a creative, helpful and respectful group of people, that just loves to make and play weird, fun, and amazing jam games. The Brackeys Game Jam is always a great start for the new game developers, but there is also room for some of us game jam oldies.
But like I have already mentioned is not everything perfect, and I do know it will never be perfect. I have in another post told some of the issues with jam culture, so I will here only come with a pretty brief synopsis.
There is from some jammers a bit too much focus on them and their games, and not on other peoples games. This often seen in comments/feedback given that mostly focus on making others playing their game. Actorly in many cases they don't even seem to be playing or rating other peoples games, but only focus on making other people playing theirs. The issue is also in some cases seen in the 'rate for rate'-posts, where there clearly is more focus on making others playing their games, then actorly on rating and playing others.
But there is also another issue, and it is that a lot of jammers do not play and rate games at all, or at least don't do it very much. In my opinion there should be more focus on the play, rating and feedback part of the game jams, because this is just as an important part of the jams. I believe that most of us want to have people to play, and talk about the games we made. To make this happen we all need to take part of the playing, rating and given feedback.
I can't say what the best solution is to those issues, but I have some ideas.
- Games that have already received 20 ratings shall not be able to be rated anymore, or at least before most the games has received 20 ratings.
- You can't get a final placement or perhaps even see your ratings, if you haven't played and rated at least 20 games yourself. (And if someone should just begin to give all the games a 1 star ratings, they should be disqualified from the jam.)
- There should in the jam introduction be more fucus on the playing, given feedback and rating part of the jam.
- People should be told that self promoting of your own games in other game jammers game pages is a no go. I would even like to see those game jammers get warnings not to do so, and in some rare cases I even want to see them get disqualified from the jam.
But anyway, now I am done with my old mad mans criticism, and I am happy to see that there is still a lot of great game jammers out there. And they are still making more and more amazing games. Some of you do do a great job playing, rating and even given feedback to other jammers. I also in the future hopes to a lot you fine people out their in the wild and crazy game jam world.
Finally thank you again to all of you, that have been fight for making this game jam amazing for all of us.