Wednesday, 3 February 2010

Global Game Jam - making games in 48 hours


Story: Eevi Korhonen, IMP09 student
The last weekend of January was an interesting one for game-minded students here, because Tampere was hosting one of the jamming sites for Global Game Jam. GGJ is a worldwide event where game developers, professionals and amateurs alike, get together to make games within 48 hours. During this year's event over 900 games were created by almost 4,000 jammers in 39 countries! From the total 28 jammers in Tampere, almost half were Score members (including one IMP).

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Friday, 18 February 2011

Finns did well in Global Game Jam 2011

Rhythm of the Stars team

The Global Game Jam 2011 was a fantastic success for Finnish developers – a whopping number of four Finnish-developed games (with one strong runner up) from the total number of ten winners were chosen by Game Sauce for best of Global Gamejam 2011. The ten teams behind the games were invited to have their titles showcased at Casual Connect Europe in Hamburg on Thursday, February 10.
Story: Juho Korhonen

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Monday, 31 January 2011

The Finnish Game Jam

Story and photos: Emma Kiiski
This year’s Global Game Jam was launched with more participants than ever before. It was officially announced on Saturday that there were 7,000 jammers around the globe! In Tampere, Finnish Game Jam was arranged the second time in Demola. The main goal of this whole weekend’s global event is to create games in 48 hours at the same time with people all around the world.

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Tuesday, 31 August 2010

Score Game Jam 2010 created games in 42 hours!

Score Game Jam. Photo by Tuuli Saarinen
Story by Janne Jaakkola
Game Development Club Score decided to end the summer season with Score Game Jam 2010 event. This game development marathon, held in Demola, had 13 eager jammers and a handful of organizers. The point of the event was to brainstorm, team up and create a game in just 42 hours! In addition to the time constraint, all the games had implement the common theme. This time the theme was "Everything is different", which gave a very free reign to the designers.

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Tuesday, 24 January 2012

The Finnish Game Jam Pre-Event

Story and photos: Emma Kiiski.
Since the Finnish Game Jam (FGJ) http://finnishgamejam2012.com/ and the Global Game Jam (GGJ) http://globalgamejam.org/ are held from the 27th to 29th of January (this week’s Friday) in over 40 countries around the world, we in Tampere decided to arrange a pre-event in the New Factory a week before the actual jam. The event was organized by three active Score members and we provided the event with some snacks for everyone. This was the first time we ever had an event like this before the FGJ. The meaning was basically to hang around, meet new and already familiar people and to hear about some things like Score, ManseGames and Highscore. The whole event was streamed to the internet and could be viewed the whole evening. Some people have been following our talks all the night!
Score members, misters Andy and Lukas, preparing the snack for the event.
It was serious business.

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Monday, 30 January 2012

Finnish Game Jam 2012, Part 3

Sunday, 29th January
Story and photos: Emma Kiiski

Final day starting at Tampere.
The last day of FGJ 2012. All the time left was about finishing the game in time and prepare them for the judges. It didn’t take too long that the time finally ran out and the games were uploaded to the GGJ web page.

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Saturday, 28 January 2012

Finnish Game Jam 2012, Part 1

Friday, 27th January
Story and photos: Emma Kiiski
This is it. It’s starting. The largest global game developing event. This year we expected even 10,000 jammers to create games in 48 hours. It's a huge number of people! About 44 countries all over the world at the same time. Already in Tampere site, there were at least 60 jammers in the New Factory premises, ready to create the best games and have incredibly much fun over the weekend! Finnish Game Jam for the win!


All the jammers gathered in the early afternoon.

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Saturday, 15 March 2014

2014 Global Service Jam Tampere: Happy!

“ It was a true discovery of a creatively delicious jam, made of happiness, hard work and bunch of amazing people!”

Global Service Jam Tampere is organized by ‘Jam maestro’ Mikko Väätäinen together with Kolmas Persoona, and I got to hear about it through casual invitation. Without knowing much about it, I decided to join the event as the concept of ‘jam’ has always been fun. A ‘Jam’ session invites anyone to explore the sparks of creativity together (usually in a small team). Everyone starts from a different place, everyone learns at a different pace. It is much like what musicians do: get together and explore music without knowing exactly where they will end up.  

I love jamming because it is not about how far or fast you go, it's just about progress and exploration. And a great way to learn about working with strangers and making new friends! This jam event is focusing on Service Design, an emerging user-centered discipline in the design world which I have keen interest in.


Apparently we have 48 hours to change the world, so on a Friday evening, I showed up at Demola New Factory for the event and started with making 'I am' poster. The wonderful hosts made excellent efforts in breaking the ice, and we the jammers not only got to know each others' names and mental age, we also did hand shakes with our elbows, ankles, knees and shaky bon bon. We learnt how to use a rubber chicken for an emergency, followed by the revealing of the jam's theme, watching a video posted by the founder of GSJ (Global Service Jam). There were more than 100 locations with over 2000 Jammers on 6 continents doing the jam in the same weekend in their own time zone. 
Hand shake game / Emergency Chicken (photo taken by GSJTampere)

Within minutes, jammers were already churning out initial ideas and concepts. And within hours, three teams were formed and each team presented their own amazingly designed poster. I absolutely loved our team, the Coconut Apache! The team's overall idea was to connect people socially and bringing them out of their comfort zone. My team mate Tommi had a refined idea of Startup shuffle, which allows people working in startups to connect with each other for networking and working together. We left the idea stay brewing in our brain and decided to start working on it the next day.

Saturday morning started with couple of keynotes: "Dramatic Storytelling as a tool in Service Design" by Anne Kalliomäki, story designer from Tarinakone and "Dethnography" by Anna Kulonen, who are co-hosting the jam. A brainstorming session came in next, and with the Coconut Apache team, we managed to 'fire' before we were 'getting ready' and 'aim'. While still ideating, we started to create a prototype of an app with cardboard. We called it the 'Do You Dare' app. It is a service which challenges people to come out of their comfort zone to do something meaningful and socializing with other people. We adopted the 'shuffle' mechanism from Tommi's previous startup idea and then sketched out the persona of our targeted users. While figuring out the app features, our team also struggled with coming to mutual execution, whether to app or not to app.

Prototyping "Do You Dare" / Omar making good use of cardboard

After a nice lunch at the Tampere Kauppahalli (the market hall), the jam session continued with jam mentor, Juha Kronqvist from Diagonal Helsinki sharing the idea of Service Design. I learnt about customer journey from Juha. And later on with 'get-out-of-building' validation and facilitation, our team's idea direction was set and ready for presentation at 18:00. Each team presented their own idea, concept and prototype, with fun sketches and entertaining scenarios. Constructive feedbacks were gathered, and I am impressed by the dedication of jammers working wholeheartedly to the ideas. The evening was then filled by surprise-3-course dinner with the working space transformed into gorgeous 5-star restaurant accompanied by good food and live music. I had a good time catching up with people from the other teams and enjoyed the relaxing atmosphere after a day's work.

Live music performed by Sumupuu / Dinner served by 4 Vuodenaika, sponsored by Solita

With literally a zero budget, the organizer were able to pull off an amazing evening, thanks to the interior designers from KAIKAI. Most of us were blown away by the good quality evening and with good rest, the next day got even better: we were challenged by New York Jammers to make our own version of 'Happy' music video. What a Sunday morning happily dancing with all jammers!





The final presentation at 14:00 got everyone rushed to make sure each team present the final outcome of the jam. Our team was busy uploading files to the web platform of the Jam, and we managed to produce a video pitch presentation in two hours. A challenge to my storyboarding skills, acting skills and video editing skills! Other ideas include Creativity Jam for Kids and Spacial home decor with exclusive miniature model services.

The jam wrapped up with awarding each team with encouragement such as having the 'True Apache spirit' award. Our team gained the 'Rubber Chicken will like it' award and I am very delighted with our prototype and the jamming session. It really did let me explore further with rapid prototyping and creating user personas. Working in a small team surely deployed great communication skills and jamming definitely is great training to my brain work-out in such limited time frame. I sincerely thank the organizers for making such an amazing weekend, and it was great working in a team with Inka, Tommi and Omar. It was a great meeting all jammers!
Follow the tweets with #GSJam and #GSJTampere (photo taken by Tommi Tapio)


Global Service Jam is a non-profit volunteer activity organized by an informal network of service design aficionados, who all share a common passion for growing the field of service design and customer experience. The Jam has a staff of none and a budget of nearly nothing. 


Stories by Joanne nh Wong
student of TAMK Media

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Friday, 27 January 2012

Game Schools in Tampere and Around the World

Story by Johanna Lievemaa
A whole new course complex on games is starting at TAMK. I was thinking of game studies here and elsewhere.

Tokyo Game Show

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Tuesday, 5 February 2013

Game Jam 2013

2013 Global Game Jam, Tampere,  the event of mind wrecking timetables and passion, took place in Demola the previous week. Degree Programme in Media students were well presented like always.

Check these two videos to see how things worked out. The first one, time lapse by wwweDomenet,

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Monday, 7 February 2011

The first 1/8 of the IMP experience

Story and photos: Johanna Lievemaa
I’m almost sad we’re this far along, only 3 years and some months left of IMP goodness!

Experimental oil painting techniques

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