Game Jam as Feminist Methodology: The Affective Labors of Intervention in the Ludic Economy

The Many Labors of Feminist Intervention Within the Ludic Economy

In this analysis of these game jam events, their organization, and their impacts, I am responding to the challenge laid down by Harvey and Shepherd (2016) in “When Passion Is Not Enough” and the work of others who have argued for a need to recognize, evaluate, and (in some cases) better reward “affective” labor in feminist interventionist/action research (Oksala, 2016).

To do so, I will be treating these all-female game jams as affective projects that are dependent upon a specific form of feminist game design practices and labor in their implementation:

Affective labor is theorized as an important subcategory of immaterial labor. It is the labor of human contact and interaction, which involves the production and manipulation of affects. Its “products” are relationships and emotional responses: “a feeling of ease, well-being, satisfaction, excitement or passion.”

Affective labor is thus immaterial in the sense that its products are intangible, even though it is usually corporeal and mixes with material forms of labor. (Oksala, 2016, p. 284)

Oksala outlines the predominant conceptualization of affective labor that has proven to be critical in examining highly gendered forms of often invisible and unrecognized work. I want to extend this definition of affective labor beyond the idea of producing affects to one that captures the extent to which these projects are themselves dependent upon labor which is material of course but also “affective” in that it depends upon emotional and imaginative investments. Oksala, while highlighting the importance of this conceptual framework, problematizes the ways in which a theorization of affective labor might lack precision as a means to fully recognize the complexity of labor in feminist activist projects:

[B]y treating very different kinds of experiences, activities, and services as the same, the notion ends up obscuring the forms of oppression and exploitation at stake and leaves feminists unable to formulate concrete proposals for forms of resistance against them. (Oksala, 2016, p. 288)

In this article, I am arguing that a valuable way of extending the impact of illuminating affective labor is to “flesh out” this work to return it to the subjects in play in the initiatives I am considering. This (re)turn to the subject allows for greater complexity and richness in the detail of the affects that are activating and activated through these projects from conception to delivery, and reflection. To address the challenge indicated by Oksala, I examine in some detail the way that affect is the animating force in this activist and interventionist initiative. I argue understanding the operations of a hopeful affect as “anticipatory” is critical in relation to the examination of feminist activism in general and this particular project more specifically. For the feminist researching subject, for instance, it is the hope of a “different future” that animates and sustains the often deadening but vitally critical work of applying for funding to support feminist work (Coleman, 2016).

Two other approaches to examining labors at play in a specifically creative field such as games are relevant here. While neither of these specifically draw on the theories underlying affective labor, they are connected in that both indicate a future-oriented emotional or passionate investment. These are Tiziana Terranova’s conceptualization of free labor and Kuehn and Corrigan’s analysis of hope labor.

Terranova’s (2000, P. 103) concept “implies a privatization of the wealth produced by free labor that takes the shape of an impoverishment of potential users’ appropriation of the fruits of such labor.” This concept of free labor has been usefully applied to other forms of digital labor ² particularly as it relates to processes through which the wider forces within the creative economy ensure “the extraction of value out of continuous, updateable work, [that] is extremely labor-intensive” (p. 92). Terranova’s influential analysis of the exploitation of this freely given labor within the creative economy is the critical backdrop to these initiatives, and an attention to the political dimension of her insight is key to a reflexive approach within feminist interventionist work in relation to the games industry. Coupled with the precarity of work in the creative sector as a whole and the dire working conditions and expectations of labor within the games industry in general, we have a potentially highly toxic environment which we might more obviously choose to caution against rather than promote (Conor, Gill, & Taylor, 2015; Jenson, & de Castell, 2013). It is the ongoing “hope” for, “anticipation of,” and belief in the possibility of a transformed games design, games development, and games culture that underpins and critically sustains these projects through these messy contradictions. ³

The framework of “hope labor” refers to the positive engagement in very low-paid or indeed unpaid work which may provide additional experience of access to new networks and connections in the anticipation of gainful employment in the future (Kuehn & Corrigan, 2013, p. 10). Within Kuehn and Corrigan’s analysis of a particular form of this unpaid labor (the provision of online content), they note:

[H]ope labor is ideologically positioned as a meritocratic investment in one’s employment prospects. Whether social production leads to a future career or not, hope labor’s work in the present is already done. Conducive to the new spirit of capitalism, social media firms have already effectively valorized this form of leisure—and hope—for the purposes of capital accumulation. (p. 21)

Within games production cultures, these are already familiar forms of labor, the freely given and the hopeful, have always been evident in the realm of “bedroom” production from the very origin of games to our contemporary moment of the veritable explosion of amateur creativity across a range of platforms.

Drawing on these frameworks, I argue there are four transecting forms of affectual labor within the ludic economies of feminist interventionist games research:

The hopeful labor of the feminist academics, researchers, and activists frequently although not always in secure employment but with a commitment to improving access for others within their field or in relation to their particular object of study. They are not necessarily individually experiencing the exigencies of the issues they are tackling, but their hopeful activism depends upon a vision of a collective and better future. They will often work willingly beyond their contracts to deliver additional emotional labor to their context-specific “intervention.”

Games and the Mobility of Creative Labor

The initiatives that this article describes have a relationship with a much broader landscape of creative practice. Although these game jams are small-scale, localized, and temporally bounded events, they are a node within a topology of monetized and highly valorized activities beyond the realm of games alone. The “talents” and labor that underpin the games industry is often situated within a highly mobile workforce, migrating across contexts beyond those of games alone—designers, animators, artists, researchers, and coders are part of a wider cultural precariat that follow the funding and freelance work opportunities often from project to project. Scholarship that directly engages in the sociological, economic, and discursive analysis of this industry is relatively scant in comparison to that on other industrial practices and domains—although there are highly influential analyses of creative industries and labor (such as Conor et al., 2015; Gill, 2002; Hesmondhalgh, 2010) and within the games industry (Banks & Deuze, 2009; Preston, Chastine, O’Donnell, Tseng, & MacIntyre, 2012).

Historically, there have been few systematic studies of the experiences of women working in the games industry. Gill’s (2002) analysis of new media freelancers is however entirely relevant to this field. Her own research has shown:

Clear divergences between men’s and women’s experiences, and they have no language to make sense of this, except in individualistic terms which inevitably construct women’s relative lack of success in terms of individual failure (couldn’t hack it, wasn’t good enough, not committed enough, etc.) [.] [U]ltimately its individualism, […that] conceals (and renders difficult to speak of) the serious patterns of inequality that are emerging in this new field. (pp. 85–86)

Gill also examines the ways in which her research respondents avoided, denied, and disavowed any gendered dimension to their experience and certainly did not have any interest in or alignment with feminism or feminist goals, intentions, or politics. This makes it harder to gain traction on the most appropriate means of supporting these women who have so clearly accepted, adopted, and internalized this discourse of individual failure if they do not succeed.

Game Jam Ontology

A game jam is a short, intense event (usually between 48 and 72 hr) at which designers, programmers, artists, researchers, and sometimes scholars come together to rapidly prototype games (including nondigital games such as board games, card games, and street games). Participants often work “around the clock” to a specific “theme” or challenge. ⁴ Preformed teams are sometimes allowed to participate, but more frequently participants are encouraged to form teams with those they meet for the first time at the event. Although the format may have a much longer history, the shared naming of these events as “jams” emerged in the early 21st century. ⁵ Game jams are now a key component within the amateur, independent, and more commercial sectors of the games industry. There is now scholarship dedicated to the study of the form, and 2016 saw the first dedicated academic conference. ⁶ One of the most significant game jams now approaching its 10th year is the Global Games Jam (GGJ)—which recruits participants to sites all across the globe. In 2016, there were over 30,000 participants across more than 600 sites within 90 countries. Games design and development courses across the world regularly use the game jam format as a means of rapidly introducing students to the field while building the student community. ⁷

The imposition of a strict time limit and a competitive framework is intended to foster innovative thinking, rapid problem-solving, an iterative approach, and the development of a strong team dynamic. They have proven to be a highly valuable method for stimulating innovation and new ideas within the games industry—again across the academic, independent, and commercial boundaries.

The intensity of these activities and the widespread perception of these as technologically driven events coupled with the requirement to commit 2 days of time has contributed to their image and reality as male dominated. GGJ has attempted to counter this in their publicity and has recently set up a diversity scholarship as well as a safer space policy as part of their guidelines to all sites.

Game Jam as Feminist Play Space—Computer Games an Act of Production in Their Playing—The Game Jam an Act of Playing in Their Production

In what follows, I examine the intentions and partial outcomes from two game jams—one in 2012 and the other in 2016. In 2012, I was awarded a small grant to adapt the game jam format to design an all-female event as an initiative to improve women’s participation in games. At this time, game jams were clearly becoming a critical tool for generating participation within the games industry—to the extent that many describe these events as “rites of passage.” Furthermore, I wanted to adapt the format sufficiently to address some of the barriers to participation which were evident in the standard form and to allow young women access to the particular pleasures and benefits of the game jam experience. Gorm Lai argues for the transformative potential of the game jam that “[m]any people, beginners and experts, say doing their first jam was a life changing experience” (cited in Batchelor, 2017, online). I sought to make this transformative experience available to women aspiring to a role within the broader games industry.

The research element of the project at that time was to test several assumptions:

That an all-female game jam could open up the format to women who might not consider attending a mixed group jam.

This was set within a context in which industry and advocacy group reports and academic research continued to demonstrate the lack of equity in women’s access to key creative and technological roles within the games industry and at a time when Jo Twist could assert that “only 7% of developers are actually female in this country” (XX Game Jam 2012, https://vimeo.com/61886636). Ordinarily wary of single-gender events, Jo Twist brought UKIE (United Kingdon Interactive Entertainment) on board to support the event and provided publicity and access to different potential communities of support for the activity. She framed UKIE’s support for wider diversity as follows:

We want a diversity of workforce, because when you have lots of people, with different stories to tell, with different experiences, and they bring them to a creative product, you get far more diversity of games made. Which in turn encourages more people to play games, because we’re a diverse society. (Jo Twist, XX Game Jam, October 26, 2012, Mind Candy, Shoreditch)

The play-like but highly competitive nature of the game jam environment allows certain skills and aptitudes to surface and be showcased. They provide a context in which new ideas can be posited in prototype form—extending existing ideas, possibilities, and providing new creative resources for the participants when returning to their everyday environments.

Global Game Jam make this appeal to skilled/unskilled/novice/expert explicit on their website:

Although having computer skills is helpful, experience is not necessary. Designers, developers, artists and anyone is welcome to try their hand at making a game during the GGJ. Even if you have no experience at all, you can still participate by contributing ideas, playtesting, and giving moral support to your team. You could work on a non-digital game, and then there’s no need for code! (https://globalgamejam.org/about)

The event involved 24 women who participated over 24 hr, an intentionally less-demanding time frame, and we were granted the use of the colorful Mind Candy offices in the creative hub of Shoreditch. The theme was Clockwork, and this captured the imagination of the participating group of women immediately. The 24 women swiftly aligned themselves into five groups and proceeded to work energetically and collaboratively to produce their games from Friday evening at 6 p.m. to 6 p.m. on Saturday. The judges then played the games and interviewed the teams before making their evaluations and determinations. The event concluded with a prize-giving event. ⁸

As part of our intentionally inclusive approach to the redesign of the game jam format, we had made some funding available to support transportation, accommodation, and childcare costs which was received very positively by participants and potential participants. We also had enough funding to avoid the usual pizzas and beer approach to jam catering and were able to provide a range of nutritious meals and snacks throughout the event. It was clear that we could have more than doubled our numbers for this event as our event coordinator and leading woman in games, Debbie Rawlings reported:

I’ve had so many requests to go on a waiting list or to tell them when the next event is. I’ve got about 40 names now, ready to sign up for the next one, as soon as we can make that happen. (INTD31 ⁹ )

It is the rule-bound playfulness that provides the valuable system, that is, the “game jam” in which temporary differences and real-world problems can be marked off for a special time and place of playful creative design practice. As noted above, all game jams share this playful temporary suspension within a tightly rule bound structure and enjoy the bracketing off of differences, the all-female game jam however adds an “otherworld” utopian dimension by entirely removing the normal gender ratios, roles, and norms.

At least, part of our intention in the construction and delivery of these spaces for the practices of game design, development, planning, coding, drawing, and producing is that the participants will engage in behaviors “as if” they were skilled practitioners in this domain and as if there were no barriers to their occupation of these subjectivities. Their participation can be seen as a hopeful performance or a ludic self-production—played at during the event.

In interviews, participants describe signing up as a leap of faith or a risk, “I wasn’t sure I had anything to offer,” “I didn’t think my skills would be relevant,” “I was worried because I don’t know any code,” and “I am really glad I took the risk of signing up” (Survey Monkey [SM] 3, 5, 9). The intensity of the context set by this format brings with it specific affordances, as these embarrassments, self-doubts, and feelings of inadequacy are swiftly overshadowed by the force of the game jam rule set and play world. The constraints and affordances provide an unnatural but forceful energy that fuels their creativity, confidence, and drive.

The provision of these female-only spaces sets up a false but necessary condition for the participants to “become” these creative subjects. As organizer, researcher, and facilitator in these environments, it was easy to notice the energies shift in the room, the moments when the “strangers” form a team with shared vision and shared goals, and an aura of confidence takes over from the hesitancy that initially prevails. Responding to a question about the value of these events, the following is a particularly illustrative example of participant reflexivity about the power of an all-female game jam:

I think a large part of it is the support, and knowing that we can get together and do these events. Although this is my first game jam, I know that I’ve been talking to a lot of people here and they feel that—I don’t know whether due to sexism and the fact that women are often the minority at events like this—it’s very easy to get shut down towards what contribution you can make. I think that this event’s obviously beneficial, so that we can really come at it at an equal basis and really see what we can do without that sexism getting in the way of creating games, doing what we love. (INTE)

The participant is responding to some commentary that had occurred in response to the press coverage which offered the challenge that an all-female games event is segregationist and problematic (see http://hollymakesgames.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/xx-game-jam.html). Another XX Game Jam participant responds to the blog post with the following:

I was beginning to get dragged down by the same old crowd who usually crawl out of the woodwork whenever something like this happens, crying “but we don’t have all-male game jams! You’re segregating yourselves!”

For the intentional feminist impact of this event to be meaningful, there is an assumption of the durability and nonephemerality of the actions, agencies, and affects evidenced during the high-intensity but short-lived “jam” environment. I describe this assumption as founded on this future-oriented affect of hopefulness and a pragmatic (and resilient) optimism. The force of the utopian dimension has this potential to spill over in to a continued relation with the other participants (once strangers), now fellow veterans of a highly charged, competitive, and challenging but also pleasurable virtual and material experience. These are temporary playful affective communities, and the feminist intentions underlying the construction of these spaces depend upon a hopeful belief in the transferability and potential legacy of these moments. It is hoped that these events provide the images, feelings, and stories that can be returned to and “played over” in their imaginations and out loud to their peers so as to provide strength and sustenance to counter negativity, invisibility, and exclusionary practices encountered elsewhere.

The establishment of these events need to be read within the macro context of not just the national but also the global games industry, wider games culture, and the dispiriting evidence of women’s lack of participation and negative representation within the industry; the systematic abuse many have experienced as players, makers, or commentators in the sector. Any activity developed to support women’s participation in this field does so in recognition of these unpalatable truths about the current “state of play” within the sector. Between the two game jams in 2012 and 2016, there was also the toxic cultural slurry that is/was #gamergate, a controversy clearly impacting upon how the industry and wider game culture is perceived by any aspiring participant in the field.

To counter this, I would cite the fact that an overwhelming majority of the XX Games Jam 2012 participants have gone on to flourish within games or games-related industries. Many of them are working for critically minded and innovative independent game studios with an eye to transformative or experimental practices. Four of the participants have in different ways set up initiatives to support other women—two of them forming an alliance to form LadyCade (http://www.ladycade.org) and another two setting up a network and series of workshops to support women in games in Bristol (https://grrrlgames.wordpress.com).

XX+ Game Jam 2016—Four Years Later

In 2016, drawing on new funding available through ReFIG, I set out to stage a minimum of five all-female events in the United Kingdom. The events were geographically dispersed: one took place in Leamington Spa, once a major cluster of small and independent games companies, many of which then merged leaving a long tail of much-smaller microbusinesses and lone practitioners. Arch Creatives was an initiative set up to provide resources for this constellation of talent through the provision of highly affordable desk space, networking, workshops, and business support (see Crogan, 2018, this issue). Run by Alex Darby, this is an environment that seeks to be visibly inclusive, and Alex leapt at the opportunity to be involved in the delivery of an all-female game jam in that space.

Another site was Brighton, United Kingdom, which is a key “hot spot” outside London for small- and medium-sized games companies. As a vibrant creative city, it also features a relatively lively range of grass roots, community, and activist groups focused on supporting women’s access to the creative industries.

Bristol, United Kingdom, has a similar clustering of games companies, creative start-ups, and small organizations developing innovative and speculative technologies. Bristol is also the site of an initiative supporting women’s access to games that was launched by an alumnus from the previous 2012 event—Constance Fleuriot (https://grrrlgames.wordpress.com).

In London, the two events took place in quite different environments—although both university premises one was more informal/creative lab space (SouthBank University) and the other a beautiful old academic room with wood paneling and the remnants of a library furnishing the shelves around the room (King’s College London).

As briefly outlined earlier, this second set of interventions was intended to draw on the learning from the first event in 2012 and to revisit the methodology of an all-female game jam in general as an interventionist/activist methodology for providing support for women in games. The five venues also extended the sense of a wider “community of practice” for the participants, and this was supported by a social media for the exchange of game designs, prototypes, photographs, and further resources both before and after the event.

Along the way, there were some surprising difficulties, as we had some very negative feedback from potential partners regarding the naming of the event. There was a sense that this name could be seen as essentialist and exclusionary, given the reference to the XX chromosomes. This was something that had come up in 2012 as well, and we had worked hard to ensure that the call for participation signaled the inclusivity of the event and our wider political agenda as organizers. The title is intended to be a playful allusion to the indeterminacy of sex and the determining nature of gender in women’s participation in the games industry. In 2016, we added the + to reflect the changing context within which these events were taking place (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer events in the United Kingdom had also for a while been using the + sign). The call for participation signaled the inclusive nature of the proposed events:

Calling all women who like games: have you ever wanted to make one? ReFIGuk are delighted to announce the XX+ games jam, 24 hours of fun and games design for women, transgender and nonbinary people funded by ReFIG. UK sites will be running in Brighton, Bristol, Leamington Spa, and London.

Timed once again to coincide with the Ada Lovelace celebrations in the United Kingdom and taking advantage of the King’s College London Arts and Humanities Play festival, we had over 150 applicants for the event from as far afield as Brussels, Paris, Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. ¹¹

We had deliberately chosen a political theme: borders. We also prompted critical dialogue with follow-up details on the theme—borders between peoples, between genders, between cultures, and between nations. Many responded to this political context, particularly in Brighton and Bristol. The participants explored themes of migration, difference, mental health, safety, and freedom of movement through their game projects, which included board games. Across the whole group, there were only five women who had participated in a game jam before and a similarly small number had ever experienced a woman-only event.

In the feedback from our respondents and through observation, it becomes clear that the atmosphere of the jams is either noteworthy or of significant importance. Respondents across the sites commented upon the feel of the room, the space, the mood, and behavior of the organizers and helpers as well as other staff, supporters, volunteers, judges, and visitors in setting this atmosphere.

In industries oversaturated with men it is nice to have safe space and an environment where you can contribute and not feel intimidated and not feel like you are in the wrong space. (MTK)

Some of the responses reflected very clearly the UK context within which these events took place—a context where there is not the same level of visibility for women’s networking events and informal learning activity related to the games industry as there are in other countries within the ReFIG partnership.

I had no idea what a games jam was three weeks ago. Even so, a huge reason why I signed up is because it was women only—frankly, I would have found a mixed-gender event off-putting. (BL4)

As in 2012, we were able to offer some limited funding to support travel and accommodation but also discovered during the event that one of the universities had supported the participation of four of their female students (paying for travel, accommodation, and loaning them laptops to facilitate their engagement). The participants came from many different backgrounds in each location including these four who were students and they were all very positive about their experience and recognized the value of this event and the provision of a “female-only” environment—a ludic space in which they had a new freedom to explore their creative subjectivities.

Conclusion

These two case studies sit within a much wider project that aims to create effective means to bring about critical transformation within the games industry and games culture (http://www.ReFIG.ca), and as such they will inform the development and instantiation of further such events and activities. The experimentation with the form of these interventions will of course continue within and beyond the lifetime of this project. What these two case studies have demonstrated is that the addition of an explicit (and explicitly feminist) research framework brought about a really valuable layer of self-reflexivity among the participants. Being explicit about the questions, the intentions, the curiosity, and the genuine passionate commitment to transformation in the field of games at the outset played an important role in setting the tone and atmosphere as well as being key to helping to “recruit” the participants to a sense of shared endeavor.

Participants were invited to consider and review their preconceptions and to consider the value of these events in addressing the barriers that they believe exist: practically, socially, culturally, and personally. As a form of feminist action research, the participants were invited to consider themselves as co-researchers—reflecting upon the activity as it took place and being invited to contribute their views and ideas with the authority of their experience paramount. This authority is expressed most vividly when these participants go on to blog about their participation or embark on their initiatives to support other women. All the contributors have helped to shape the series of follow-on events that will take place between 2018 and 2019, each of these developed in response to the participant feedback.

As I indicated at the outset, the game jam format itself is a problematic reflection in miniature of wider industrial practices around project work: intense pressure, nonstop, or well in to the night working, temporally bounded, and poorly compensated creative labor in the service of innovation within the wider industry. The format we developed over these events mitigated a number of these factors to provide transformative, nurturing, and enriching spaces of self-discovery and empowerment.

As I have argued, however, these are spaces through which empowering and creative subjectivities can be experienced and expressed. These moments of imaginative, transformative self-reinvention have the potential to provide resources for participants to remain hopeful as they encounter challenges on the treacherous pathway leading to the precarity of employment with the games sector. Many leave the session armed with a network of other women with whom and from whom they can draw strength as well as an important sense of being part of a community of practice. Feminist activity is also urgently needed from the other end of the horribly named “pipeline” as well in order to transform those spaces of creative production and to work from within these to create pathways of inclusion through which to engage, recruit, support, and develop a more diverse talent base.