The Bristol Digital Game Lab hosted not one, but two game jams recently at the Bristol Digital Futures Institute. Both built on our toolkit around game jams as a research method and demonstrated the value of thinking with and through games.
First up, Priscilla Lo and her team led the Impaired Technologies jam. Broken screens, crackly speakers, and glitchy controllers acted as a design provocation for thinking about and designing for accessibility in games. Takes on the theme varied from a platformer where characters can only move in certain directions to an Egyptian escape room made challenging through visual overlays. Blackout won both the people’s choice and judges’ award. This mini game was inspired by playing Split Fiction on a cracked screen and the challenges of not being able to visualize gameplay in the moment. The premise? Take on your adversary on an entirely blank screen, interspersed with narrative fragments and moments of light where characters are frozen and players have to memorise the game state.
It was also a great pleasure to welcome back co-founder of the Game Lab, Dr Xiaochun Zhang, to talk about her latest work in game accessibility, including her work with Meaning Machine on AI Audio Description.
Second, Frances Pickworth and Richard Cole ran a game jam with Classics and Ancient History students on rethinking Rome in videogames. We used the Bristol Digital Futures Institute’s Reality Emulator to visualize digital reconstructions of Rome, and spent an afternoon coming up with innovative takes on existing genres, with a Rom(ance) game and Sims-like being amongst the most entertaining and critical takes.
If you want to run a game jam with us, please do reach out!
A huge thank you to Scott Hazell for capturing the energy of the Impaired Technologies jam.