Game Jams & Amnesia Fortnight

While considering the topic of civic hacking I was drawn to thinking of it’s equivalent in the world of video game development which is the game jam. A game jam is usually a one or two day event in which developers, both professional and amateur, get together and make very small rough and ready games based on a given topic/subject. The scale of these jams vary with some that happen across the world, like the Global Game Jam [1] which has people getting together at over 400 locations worldwide just to make games. Other jams are about a specific theme like Molyjam [2] (aka What Would Molydeux) the premise of which was to make games inspired by a parody Twitter account of well known game designer Peter Molyneux.

It feels to me that the main point of these game jams is to have fun while exercising the creative side of people and they can be used as a form of networking between developers. For some a weekend isn’t enough and within game development companies it’s becoming a trend to set aside a week or two to have an internal game jam of their own in order to help the staff unwind from whatever projects they’re working on (especially long term projects) and also potentially get ideas for new games that could be made. Not a lot is usually known about these jams as they tend to be private to the company in question. But at least one company has decided to go public with their internal game jam and that is Double Fine Productions [3].

During the development of Brutal Legend issues arose with the publisher which stopped the production of the game and while the company attempted to find a new publisher Tim Schafer (founder of Double Fine) decided that instead of the staff just doing nothing until the issues were resolved he asked them to pitch ideas for games that could be prototyped in two weeks. This became known as Amnesia Fortnight (the amnesia relating to forgetting whatever projects that are currently being worked on) and out of that first Amnesia Fortnight four games were prototyped, two of which have gone on to be developed into full and complete releases: Iron Brigade [4] and Once Upon a Monster [5]. Other full games coming from an Amnesia Fortnight prototype are Stacking [6] and Costume Quest [7].

In 2012 the Kickstarter funded project was into development at the time and it was also being documented by 2 Player Productions [8]. Because of the success of their Kickstarter campaign and that a documentary crew is already embedded into the studio Schafer decided to make that years Amnesia Fortnight a public thing, allowing people to pre-purchase the resulting prototypes and letting them vote on the pitches made by the staff, deciding what actually got made while documenting the whole process with live streams and daily video updates. And less than a month ago they started the whole thing again with Amnesia Fortnight 2014.

As someone who wants to get into games development these sessions are very inspiring and while being involved in something of the scale that Double Fine does is very unlikely at this moment in time, the spirit of what they’re doing is very much still present in the more normal weekend length game jams and I have to seriously consider getting involved in one or more of them in the near future.

References:

[1] http://www.globalgamejam.org/

[2] http://www.molyjam.com/

[3] http://www.doublefine.com/

[4] http://www.ironbrigadegame.com/

[5] http://www.onceuponamonstergame.com/

[6] http://www.stackingvideogame.com/

[7] http://store.steampowered.com/app/115100/

[8] http://www.2playerproductions.com/

Data

The internet is made up of data. But what is data? There isn’t a single answer for that. The definition I like the best is “facts and statistics collected together for reference or analysis” (source). The typical thought of data is as information but really it’s information that has not had anything done to it to show what it means or what it is. Data becomes before information and the internet is full of it at all levels. Computers are passing large amounts of data across networks every second of the day and for the most part we have no idea what is actually being passed around and that can be a concern.

The sharing of personal data is a big issue in the current era of the internet especially with social networking sites, and the biggest of these sites draws the most concern. Facebook retains everything you ever enter into their site, even if you delete it from public and private view. It’s hard to imagine how much data Facebook has gathered in it’s lifetime when you remember that it keeps everything. And what worries most people is that the people behind Facebook are always looking for new ways to make money out of your personal data, from selling it to advertisers to allowing other corporations to use it as sample data for some product or other. It does seem to be the case that Facebook starts a new feature, which then turns out to have other hidden features which border the ethical use of personal data and when challenged they make a convoluted way to opt out of being involved in the latest data mining operation that the average user doesn’t know how to find. And the cycle continues.

The Data Protection Act does exist to stop the sale without permission of personal data. Permission being one of the key factors there which is why there usually a pre-ticked check box at the bottom of a terms & conditions page regarding the sharing of information given because most companies realise that a lot of people won’t read these pages and just click the accept button. In other cases these permission pages are even more hidden. There are people who are fighting against the likes of Facebook and their privacy policies, such as europe-v-facebook.org who are trying to fight a legal battle with Facebook regarding the EU privacy laws. But a lot of this will come down to money and power and Facebook as more of both.

Mapping

There are all kinds of mapping and cartography related sites on the internet. The most well known is Google Maps, especially their mobile application version. A large part of why it’s popular is that Google allow people to embed a version of the map onto their sites to give their users useful and accurate direction data. But at the end of the day it is a closed source system in that Google itself is responsible for the updating and management of the maps. They do have ways of allowing some user generated content, especially in areas where their own mapping systems aren’t as fully developed but this just comes down to people submitting a change or amendment and then it goes through various stages of peer review before appearing on their Map Maker site. Eventually with enough reviews from Google moderators the amendment may appear on the full Maps site.

So while immensely useful, there are downsides the biggest of which is inaccurate or missing locational data. These are mostly not huge problems but sometimes a place you’re searching for cannot be located through Google Maps for one reason or another. And so you may want to try other mapping projects, ones that are more open and reliant on crowds to update and maintain the maps. One such site is OpenStreetMap and it seems to be a very powerful and robust site for the task and well maintained. I’ve even made a couple of small edits myself, to see how the site works. Of course the down side of crowd sourced sites is that the data is only as good as the moderators and editors abilities and desire to verify the data. But it is still a very useful site and will give results you won’t get via Google maps.

The idea of using crowds in mapping projects is a growing one and there is a lot more to it than just accurate location data. One project of note is the Ushahidi platform and more specifically Crowdmap. Ushahidi (the name comes from the Swahili for “testimony” or “witness”) is a company from Kenya that created a site in the aftermath of the disputed 2007 presidential elections in Kenya that collated reports of violence from emails and text messages and placed these locations onto a Google Maps map. Since then they created a platform that allows other people do to the same kind of thing and that brought about Crowdmap. A large part of what Crowdmap is about is geolocating crisis data. Essentially people can make a base map site for a particular crisis, like an earthquake somewhere, and then users from around the world can make reports of incidents to the site and once authorised this data is added to the map. Of course not all data submitted is accurate and so a verification stage is also used to keep the map well maintained. The original sources for the map data is usually social media sites like Twitter but verification is usually done by people actually on location when possible. While imperfect this sort of thing is a fast way of attempting to help as many people as possible in really bad situations and projects like this will only get better and more used as time goes by.