How Organisers Understand and Promote Participants’ Creativity in Game Jams

Game jams are fast-paced game-making events that aim to elicit the participants’ creativity; a quality often ascribed to game jams. However, there is only little research on creativity in game jam formats. Since game jam organisers have great influence on how creativity can be supported in game jams, we explore creativity from the organisers’ perspective. We report insights from an online survey with responses from 27 game jam organisers from 12 different countries with dissimilar levels of organiser experience. We analyse the organisers’ understanding of creativity based on four key aspects from general creativity research: novelty, risk-taking, combinational creativity and creativity constraints. These key aspects guide a deductive, thematic analysis to explore how game jam organisers not only understand, but indeed try to promote the participants’ creativity. On this basis, we discuss how insights from creativity research may further contribute to inform how organisers can successfully facilitate participants’ creativity in game jams.