What’s your New Year’s Resolution? Ours is to stop opening these Climate Replay blog posts with a couple of irrelevant sentences and instead get straight to the point for onc… aw, dang. OK, fine, well our new New Year’s Resolution is to point and laugh at the January blues, by defying this depressing month and hosting Climate Replay’s first ever Game Jam!
Game Jams are collaborative events where a bunch of creative types spend several days making cool things together. What better way to kick off Climate Replay’s second year? It’ll begin on January 22nd and run until January 30th, and if you’ve never taken part in a game jam before, this is the perfect place to start, as this is not a competition. It’s going to be a community event where ANYONE can take part. If you’ve got some game-making skills, great! But we also want you to get involved if you’re an artist, writer, musician, tester, or even just an enthusiast who wants to contribute as a cheerleader. Never underestimate how helpful someone yelling “YOU GOT THIS!” while waving pom-poms at you is for the creative process.
Over on our lovely Discord server (click here to check it out), you’ll find some new game jam channels where you can learn everything you could ever want to know about our game jam. You can register to take part, ask us any burning questions you may have, and even help us pick the theme!
WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS CLIMATE REPLAY? IT’S JANUARY 2022 AND I JUST WANT TO GO BACK TO BED
We’ve seen a huge amount of creativity already from the Climate Replay community in the aforementioned (but never plugged enough!) Discord server, with your awesome art and enthusiasm for our Climate Quests. So we want to activate that creativity in our community with a game jam that encourages people to create positive stories.
Apocalyptic stories in speculative fiction definitely have their place. But there’s so many of them. Some are also starting to treat the Climate Crisis as an inevitability, an exciting playground for futuristic funtimes, rather than something that can and must be stopped at all costs (*cough* Battlefield 2042 *cough*) or even still tiresomely pretending that they’re not warnings about the Climate Crisis at all (oh hello again Battlefield 2042! Cough cough cough!). Sometimes a doomy gloomy tale can be effective in galvanizing people, but when you’re living through a Covid apocalypse already, one in which Santa just got us a new Omicron variant even though we clearly asked for the new Switch OLED, these stories can wear you down. It’s important not to just imagine the negative but aspire to the positive. That’s why all our potential themes are geared towards telling positive stories of a more climate conscious future that we should all be aspiring to. Let’s make some aspirational games together!
To reiterate, the Game Jam will officially start on January 22nd and run until January 30th. In the weeks and months that follow, we’ll be streaming your games! Will we be bad at them? No comment. Head over to the Climate Replay discord guild to find out more about how you can take part in our January Game Jam!
