Davide Di Staso and co-authors win best paper award at the International Conference on Game Jams

A paper that discusses an approach to express societal problems through serious games and open data received the best paper award at the International Conference on Game Jams, Hackathons, and Game Creation Events (ICGJ 2024). Davide Di Staso and co-authors Lærke Christiansen, Fernando Kleiman, Marijn Janssen are the proud winners.

The paper is titled “Articulating Social Issues with Open Data: Exploring a Game Jam Approach”. A game jam is an event in which a video game is made from scratch. Game-makers can think through a social problem, the housing crisis for example, during their creative process. At the same time, the game itself - the way it needs to be played, its rules, and the challenges it sets – can convey an argument about the social issue.

Game jam format

The authors developed a game jam format tailored to beginners (non-coders) and issue-experts. They then organised three game jams using this format and tested whether: (1) the game jams resulted in greater knowledge about the social issue for participants, (2) the game prototypes articulated social issues, and (3) the game jams motivated participants to collectively explore a social issue. Successful features of the event format include the short duration of 7 hours and the broad theme given to participants. What still requires attention is a lack of game references for participants to use in the brainstorming toolkit and the expectations regarding the polish of the prototypes was too high. Read the paper here.