How The Most Expensive Game Jam In History Crashed And Burned In A Single Day

[Bored of Canada]

Here's a pretty fascinating article.

Game-Jams are popular these days. If you're unfamiliar, they're much like 48 Hour Film Festivals, or a more official organisation of Musos coming together, given a theme, and having to create new music in a time-limit. I'm not sure if that's a thing done in such an official manner, other than just normal jams, but just like normal jam sessions, it's the same general concept. It's all about working together as a team, and using your limitations and improvisations to be creative and make cool stuff.

So people decided they should get a documentary crew and film one. And things went properly wrong.

The article's long, I recommend you read it, but if you don't have the time, I'll give you the basics of what happened.

They came up with the idea to make a small documentary about a game-jam, and as it went along, corporate sponsors got involved. Heavy amount of corporate sponsorship, and it also got turned into a grubby scripted reality TV show.

Organisers brought in cool indies, like Zoe Quinn who made Depression Quest and the insane Super Street Fire thing, Robin Arnott who did that Deep Sea game Theremin tried in the Horror Game thread, where you wear the Gas-Mask and many more, all to make some cool games.

But they're indies, who're just looking to make games, have fun, network, and bring games to a wider audience and such. They like game-jams, and that's why they're there.

Unfortunately, this thing is turned into a 'scripted' reality TV show. So they try and make the indies sign a contract stopping them from communicating on any social media or anything for a period of time during and after the show, so they can have exclusive power of the message.

The contract was full of corporate legalese. There were clauses about being allowed to misrepresent us in any way on any topic for "dramatic effect"."

Which they obviously weren't happy with. Because they're indies, and all they have is their name, and if you drag it through the mud via submitting to some contrived and blatantly misrepresented editing for dramatic effect, you're fucked.

Also, the Mountain Dew and Pepsi sponsorship is being dictated by people with ear-pieces with bizarre restrictions:

"Davey was forced to take off his nail polish because he couldn't hold the can with it on. Zoe had to take off the buttons she usually wears on her jacket, but shouted down a PA who tried to make her cover her tattoos. The Arcane Kids were screamed at for not holding bottles right, while the entire group was lectured on how to properly smile like you're enjoying the product – a product that everyone was enjoying less and less. The slow train wreck of faces flipping into scowls marked only the beginning of what would soon turn into an utter shitshow."

They weren't allowed to drink water or coffee, only the branded stuff. Which is kinda rough for a game-jam that would be run on cups of coffee.


And in the article, it explains how the director try and brew tension between the teams. Trying to get a rise and create tension.
And there is tension between two of them, so they leave the set to politely discuss it, whilst the cameras follow and try and egg them on into getting into a full fledged fight. But as these are just normal indie devs who are there for a game-jam, and not the kinds of people who actively seek to be famous on reality TV show by doing this kind of shit, they're just met by uncomfortable silence.

They try and separate them and attempt to get them to slag each other off, but again, is met with silence. Unable to get any 'exciting' footage, the director starts to really, really, really get drama out of it.

He starts asking the male groups "Do you think the teams with women on them are at a disadvantage?", and is sort of met by awkwardness at the shittiness of the question, before someone responds in an incredibly honest and empathetic way, to which the director gets pissed off.

He then starts to further try and get a rise,

"Is Zoe off her game? Are women coders a disadvantage to their groups? Point by point, the questions were shot down, until he reached Adriel's team and asked if they were at any sort of advantage by having a pretty girl with them."

He's saying this to a human being who made satellites for Lockheed Martin.

"She erupted, and Matti once more pulled back his camera, making sure to privately half-apologize that he "marched with the women in the '70s" with "flowers in his hair." Finally, he cornered Zoe with a camera as everyone left for dinner, trying one last time to get a rise out of her. She told him to go fuck himself and marched off set. And that is precisely when everyone else realized something was wrong."


Basically, from here. Almost half a million dollars goes down the drain as the production is just entirely fucked, and all the devs just say fuck it, go home, whilst everyone else loses their shit.

I'm sorry if people here don't find this interesting. I think it's absolutely fascinating, and leaves me feeling super grubby.

[MojoJojo]

Yeah, fairly interesting, although I do think it's pretty heavily padded out - it is fairly simply a case of one bloke fucking up a project by managing to piss off everyone there. BTW - from my reading of it he wasn't officially the director - it didn't seem to be organised along those lines. He was just a shouty prick who managed to wrangle his way because he was on good terms with the sponsors.

"Zoe" was at the centre of this business - http://indiestatik.com/2013/12/13/female-game-developers/

I know the whole misogynist troll thing has been talked about a lot here, but I'm still a bit surprised by things like this? Was it really just because she is female and released a game?

[Bored of Canada]

Yeah, fairly interesting, although I do think it's pretty heavily padded out - it is fairly simply a case of one bloke fucking up a project by managing to piss off everyone there.

It's also interesting to me in that it shows the ethics of the reality TV makers, as they attempt to create aggression between people, but without the terrible people desperate to do create any drama to get in the spotlight. It's just really inhuman kind of stuff. Trying to get people to turn on each other, trying to get people to betray each other's trust, all for our amusement. And these people just refuse to be a part of it.

I find that immensely interesting.

And Ah, shit. Zoe. Forever the bane of my existence messing that up with every Zoe/y I know.

I know the whole misogynist troll thing has been talked about a lot here, but I'm still a bit surprised by things like this? Was it really just because she is female and released a game?

Probably a better thread in itself than my glorified reddit post. I think yes, a huge amount is to do with the fact that she's a woman. I think the criticism would mainly build at first from the Not a Game people, who become savage towards people who make "Not a Games", and upon discover that it's made by a woman, they fine-tune their abuse to more personal aspects and go fucking nuts.

The aggression in the gaming community is utterly perplexing. People in the film industry don't get rape threats for making non-action films. I don't understand why people hate women so much. The reaction to the Anita Sarkeesian stuff in itself was absolutely ridiculous, and some or the more horrific abuse I've ever seen hurled at someone. I felt uncomfortable seeing the rape threats she was getting, imagine being in her shoes for receiving this for an incredibly innocuous series of YouTube videos.

[Thursday]

I don't really know the full story, but with Zoe Quinn's abuse it seemed to spiral out from a forum of depressed male virgins feeling like a woman isn't qualified to write about depression because her having boyfriends and any kind of social life should disqualify her from that.

Not being able to get sex is the source of a lot of their frustration so she wouldn't know what it's like to feel their depression. Then I guess there's other random nihilistic 4 chan/redditors joining in because they think it's funny.

I'm not defending them at all, but I would say there's not really many support systems for people like that, there's nobody to really represent them and so they end up blaming women for their problems.

[KLG-7DD]

Sort-of finding myself agreeing with Jonathan Blow's assessment: https://twitter.com/Jonathan_Blow/status/450770754972307456

It took one person to make them realise that the ridiculous cynical heavily-branded show they signed up to wasn't a good thing? Methinks they'd be fine with such a horrible thing if they were able to use the show to promote themselves successfully without damaging their reputations.

I'd hope they're just naive and that they've learned something from this and warned others by example, but I'm not massively sympathetic here. They were fine about selling out to do something obviously rubbish until it stopped being good for them.

[syntaxerror]

A bunch of socially awkward nerds, media tosspots and dead-behind-the-eyes marketing cunts all fell out? lol

[Thursday]

It apparently wasn't a reality tv show when they first signed on, but it does seem incredibly naive that they didn't realize how shit it was going to be.