A Manifesto for Manifesto Jam:
THIS JAM IS FOR COLLECTIVELY UNCORKING OUR UTOPIAN ENERGY IN 2018
In times of crisis, uncertainty, conservatism and even just standard personal disappointment people overwhelmingly retreat to saying “be practical!” This doesn’t necessarily imply a way that is meaningfully better than any other but instead coerces you to chirpily go along with the way others are already comfortable doing it, or comfortable with you doing it, and keep and alternatives or resentments on priv.
Manifestos are important precisely because they are impractical. Whether positive or negative, whether embracing potential worlds or outright rejecting the one you’re in. They are visionary, they demand, they refuse. Manifestoes can be of any scale, defining your personal aesthetic or how to fix the entire world, but they cannot be satisfied.
Is it too prescriptive to start a manifesto jam with a manifesto? When a manifesto asks a question, you know it is always rhetorical and the the author has already made up their mind. Putting all the cards on the table about why I’m doing this is why I’m doing this.
The jam form, in videogame creation, has gone from its borrowed musical roots in collaboration and impulsivity to become almost the opposite. Ratings, prizes, and the implication of making portfolio pieces over the possibility of genuine experimentation, which comes with genuine failure, are all connected to the runaway capitalist dream of quantifiable outcomes over all else. The push onward that shuts down the possibility for crafted writing or critique, that sees critique as functional only, to moderate public trust in the output of giant corporations, to laud and demystify rather than to converse, complicate, and imagine alternatives. Of course there are only jams for making games, not writing about them, because writing, in this cosmology, is not valuable in itself but only so far as it creates cultural clout for a medium that, even when it’s not being made by all-consuming tech monstrosities, is still highly directed by their boring-ass ideas of what is marketable and therefore desirable and therefore good.
Against this, everyone is invited, to write something about how to make a videogame, how to respond to a videogame, what the field of videogames could and should be. Write a manifesto to free up your mind to move forward. I want videogames created with vision rather than received wisdom that both fail and succeed at meeting that vision. I want uncompromising, unconventional writing to respond, recover and reshape. I am done with games trying to do something right and done with essays about what they do right. We go on like this in public and then privately grow more and more dissatisfied. There must be something more urgent to write.
THIS JAM IS FOR COLLECTIVELY UNCORKING OUR UTOPIAN ENERGY IN 2018
MANIFESTO JAM RULES:
- Write a manifesto!
- Upload it as a text file, pdf, or any other format
- Add a title if you wish and submit it to the jam
(sub "rule": Please, don't just republish something you wrote beforehand. I mean, I won't be a cop about it but if you wouldn't do it in a game jam why do it in a writing jam?)
MANIFESTO TIPZ n TRICKZ:
- Robert Yang compiled a list of videogame related manifestos and first floated the idea of a #manifestojam in this blog post.
- You can also find a list of art manifestos to explore here.
- This jam is about energizing your existing games writing and also making it more accessible to people who have never really written on the topic before, so write your manifesto from any perspective, from someone who makes games, someone who studies their history, critiques them, or simply enjoys playing them
- Follow whatever form you feel gets across your manifesto in the most appropriate way (plain text? Carefully arranged? Written by hand? Recited? Playable? anything)
- If you have any further thoughts or questions get in touch with me on twitter: @netgal_emi
- ~*~HaVe~FuN!~*~