GameBling Game Jam!

Friday, February 11 (10-5 EDT)

Saturday, February 12 (10-5 EDT)

--Public Playtest: Saturday, February 12 (4-5 EDT)

What do you get when you braid together the interests of the Technoculture, Art and Games (TAG) Research Centre, the HERMES Research Team, and the Pleasure Consuming Games Workshop Series? The GameBling Game Jam!

What we will do 

Meeting over two days, we will form teams, and engage in a game jam designed to deconstruct and prototype slot machine games. Slot machine games have historically been understood as games of pure chance, where skill plays no role in the outcome. They have been dismissed by critical social theorists as uninteresting (Schüll 2012). Yet the widespread popularity—to say nothing of market share—of these games, alongside the transformation that has accompanied their development on digital and mobile platforms, calls for a fundamental re-thinking of what slot machine games are and might be. Convergence-part correlation between gambling and in game spending in gaming (King et al. 2020).

The GameBling Game Jam seeks to learn about what slot machines are, and what they might be, by developing games that enchant and entice users not to mindlessly plug coins (or credits) into slots, but rather to think critically about the visual pleasures, temporality, sonic and haptic feedback, and other affordances that have historically been associated with the one-armed bandit.

How we will roll

Anyone can join the jam, even if you’ve never made a game before! We will have programmers on hand! You can join as an individual or a team. We will help with team-formation. 

On Friday morning we will start with a discussion of game design theory, an introduction to slot machines, and then we will work on team formation. Game making will begin and go until Saturday at 4pm EDT. There will be a public showcase between 4-5pm on the Saturday where teams can present their work (process/prototype, does not have to be a finished game). 

Student participants will receive a $300.00 bursary. This is a no-crunch event. We will come together to think and brainstorm, and there’s no need to complete the jam with a finished game (in-progress ideas are fine!).    

We will be using Discord and gather.town as the platforms for the jam.

References

King, Daniel and Paul H Delfabbro. 2020. The convergence of gambling and monetised gaming activities, Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, Volume 31, 2020, Pages 32-36, ISSN 2352-1546,

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cobeha.2019.10.001.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352154619301044?via%3Dihub

Schüll, Natasha Dow. 2012. Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Further Reading Ross, Alexander, and David Nieborg. 2021. “Spinning Is Winning: Social Casino Apps and the Platformization of Gamble-Play,” Journal of Consumer Culture 21(1): 84–101.