Living Digital Media

As the stories of Chapter One show, collaboration is an area of rhetorical-affective practice that includes circulating tasks between co-creators and mentors–and thus resolving bad feelings—and it encompasses addressing feedback that circulates between creators and reviewers before publication. Living collaboration is a concurrent area practice that touches many people and cultivates affectively rich practices in a production cycle, including inventing and revising based on feedback. For creators in writing studies, many webtexts are collaborative at their inception, and some scholars who create webtexts collaborate with horizontal and vertical mentors on revision tasks after receiving feedback. Living collaboration isn’t exclusive to one part of a production cycle. It’s crucial for moving through many parts of a cycle.

In Chapter Two, then, I dive deeper into theorizing living collaboration as a rhetorical-affective practice by foregrounding stories of game developers who collaborate well before a text goes to any reviewer or public audience. Turning to stories of game developers reveals more approaches to collaboration in digital media production cycles. Although the stakes of game development are different than webtexts (i.e., many studios are working on limited funding and trying to sell games), stories of game developers working in collaboration raises questions about remote work on, feminist orientations toward, and inclusive programming for webtext development.

It’s a Wednesday evening, and one game developer I’m speaking with is tired.

They’re tired of drowning in received and sent messages on Discord and Slack, which seem to produce 10,000 messages a day. Tired of displaying their face on video calls. Tired of trying virtual reality platforms that have, to varying degrees of success, remediated meeting spaces and whiteboards for a 35-person team. For them, a more interpersonal, physical circulation of ideas would be invigorating:

Especially as a leader, especially as a designer, a lot of the collaborative aspect comes from being in a room with people, writing on a whiteboard and revving on things together. And I find that so much easier when I’m in a room with people, I find it almost impossible to do virtually. And we tried so many things. We tried virtual whiteboards and whatever programs, and we’ve tried virtual meeting rooms that have you walk around. We tried VR Chat, we tried a million things, but it’s just not the same. And obviously on top of that, the actual social aspect of going for a coffee with someone or having lunch with someone and not only talking about work all the time is different.

Elsewhere, creative director Sara Alfageeh is laughing about her internet habits and her company’s commitment to being fully remote forever and always. We meet over Skype for a call about her company’s game and platform One More Multiverse. Remotely, the team has designed One More Multiverse for players who participate and build tabletop role-playing game campaigns.

Alfageeh: There’s people on my team, I talk to them every single day and yet, I’ve never met them face to face. I am a child of the internet in the sense of I’ve had online friends since I was 15. So it doesn’t feel weird to me. But I know that this is very, very unconventional.

Shivener: You don’t feel like that aspect is lost? So you’re saying you’re a child of the internet, so you don’t feel like you’re affected by not seeing those people in a corporeal form?

Alfageeh: I wouldn’t say I’m not affected. It’s just a different way of working. I think if I had different expectations, maybe I wouldn’t be affected by it. I think also part of it comes from my freelance background. I’ve always worked from home, so it’s not weird for me to work from home. It’s what I kind of prefer. I like the fact that I can go see my co-founders every now and again because we’re based in the same city. But would I feel differently? Probably not.

As many of us in academic circles have come to understand, 2020 and 2021 were washes for any kind of in-person professional activities, whether collaborating in coffee shops or meeting and sharing ideas at conferences and week-long institutes. The pandemic indeed impacted when, how, and where creators collaborate on projects. This chapter builds on the previous chapter by telling stories of emplaced and remote collaboration with teammates as well as public audiences insofar as online publics are helping creators work out problems and ideas with text, design, code, and more in real time.

Before I discuss forms of online collaboration, however, I start this chapter by telling stories of creators who have spoken at length about the need for what Kara Poe Alexander and Danielle Williams (2015) call "proximal composing,” of being near bodies, such as content collaborators in work spaces, to really feel their way through projects—to share immediate feelings of confusion, surprise, and the like. As you’ll hear from creators like Michael McMaster: "It takes a village to make an indie game and it probably takes a village to make an indie studio or to develop a practice in that way.” I complicate such stories with those of creators such as Casey Yano, Hannah Nicklin, Cara Ellison, Beidi Guo, Marina Kittaka, and Melos Han-Tani, who have developed games entirely remotely across two or more countries and continents.

To address the tensions between collaborating in-person and remotely, this chapter later shifts to a proposal for a kind of scholarly jam based on Twitch collaborations and the Toronto Game Jam. I focus on creators such as Douglas Gregory and Attila "Gabriel” Branyiczky, both of whom participated in the Toronto Game Jam (TO Jam) in 2020 and 2021. In 2021, the TO Jam saw more than 90 submissions come together across Discord, the website itch.io, and Twitch, where fellow developers and various hosts played through and commented on submissions. Theories of embodiment in relation to feelings shed light on such comments about in-person and remote collaboration.

Lastly, to further emphasize the claims of this chapter and previous ones, I point out, unabashedly, that this chapter is based on research and collaboration with scholars such as Beth Caravella, Nanditha Narayanamoorthy, and Jessica Oliviera Da Silva. Horizontal and vertical collaboration ought not to be rendered invisible.

Locating Affective Bodies in Collaborative Contexts

Despite the disorienting phenomena we experience when composing collaboratively in new modes, the convergence that results is ultimately productive. Collaborative multimodal composition is a valuable practice not only because of what it is capable of producing but also because of how it re-energizes concepts of audience, genre, and recursivity.

—Molly J. Scanlon (2015)

Collaborative authorship is a frequent and widely accepted practice in writing studies and game development, as many books, articles, and games demonstrate. Ideas for collaborative articles and books stem from emails, informal conversations at conferences, and connections on Twitter and other social media. Such stories are present in Chapter One, in which numerous creators tell stories of mentors and collaborators who supported their projects. As I explain in Chapter One, collaboration involves talking out ideas and strategies with co-authors, seeking out peers and mentors, and assigning production practices to co-authors, all for the sake of resolving bad feelings about webtext production. The writing studies field is ripe with stories of scholars, students, and community members collaborating on projects. Similarly, game developers have written extensively about the incredible teamwork that it takes to get a project finished. I’ll get to some of those stories in a minute. Right now, still lingering in my mind is what Jason Palmeri and Ben McCorkle told me about collaborating in shared space and time at a work retreat for scholars working on webtexts:

That was huge in terms of motivators and terms of affect and stuff like that. We were in an isolated place for two weeks. . . . We had a lot of steam; we had a lot of energy; we were excited [emphasis added]. We had access to Kairos editors to bounce questions off of.

For a bit of refrain, this affective scene emphasizes what Alexander and Williams (2015) have called "distributed invention” that allows for "proximal composing,” the act of writing and collaborating near each other in shared space and time. It is such an apt term for recognizing the affective power of working together, especially when we can physically be together, our computers whirring at the same table, ideas brewing along with a second cup of coffee. Alexander and Williams’ theory of distributed invention is one of many useful theories for understanding how feelings figure into collaborations. Affect theory is more often than not bound up with concerns of embodiment and the transient nature of feelings. Sometimes in the same breath as affect theory, rhetorical theories of collaboration have also been concerned with how bodies are affected when two or more people come together for a project. Living collaboration builds on prior theories and re-emphasizes the affective richness of bodies in proximity.

Margaret Syverson (1999) has argued that collaboration is dependent on relationships, which may or may not always be cooperative during a project. In The Wealth of Reality, an exploration of human-nonhuman ensembles in writing scenes, Syverson (1999) shares a transcript from a meeting between three students who are collaborating on an assignment. The meeting features students Rick, Annie, and Dana trying to write a first draft. Much of that scene takes place by "a single computer, either in Rick’s dorm room or in Annie’s, with one person inputting or changing text or reading back what had been written as the others made suggestions” (Syverson, 1999, p. 95). According to Syverson, the students "were determined to write the essay while in close physical proximity (when one member of the group had to be out of town, no one suggested that the group discuss the work by phone; instead they waited until they could all get together)” (p. 97).

Although that scene in Syverson’s book is more than 20 years old, it’s still relevant to more current theories of collaboration, such as Alexander and Williams’ aforementioned theory of distributed invention, Alexander and Michael-John DePalma’s (2018) theory of "distributed collaboration,” and Laura Micciche’s (2017) theory of "writing partners.” In a similar line of thought to the aforementioned scholars, Ashley Clayson (2018) argues that writing studies needs "to focus simultaneously on the material and embodied nature of writing by combining them under the umbrella term distributed” (p. 220), later arguing that "to better understand their agency, we must understand the [writers’] interactions with their immediate environments, not just larger, abstract structures” (p. 223).

Clayson’s focus calls attention to immediate environments that include fellow bodies and local resources. A writer’s interactions often include immediate collaboration, the kind we can see materialize in a physical, shared space. For Clay Spinuzzi (2015), this immediate collaboration is part of "coworking” in "all-edge adhocracies.” Coworking, he describes, "is a service in which most of the value comes not from providing the space itself but from connecting people who can help each other out” (p. 97). Spinuzzi’s definition aligns well with Micciche’s (2017) view that writing partners are always present in scenes and spaces of writing—that even animals are crucial collaborators in the composing process. Cats, dogs, that pre-tenure colleague who started the same year you did—they all matter whether they are contributing text, image, or nothing at all in terms of what is placed on the page. Micciche puts it this way:

Writing is populated and partnered in ways that we can’t always recognize. An indiscreet art, writing is something we do with others, created through contact with and exposure to diverse influences and agents. The fabric on your favorite chair, the smell of the laundromat down the street, the light coming in through a window, the muffled voices half heard through floorboards, the cat on your lap—all of these partners make writing a thoroughly collaborative—COLLABORATIVE!—event. (p. 111)

For Micciche, even that bee who dive-bombs into my cup of coffee is a collaborator, a reminder to look up and pay attention to the environmental surroundings that make writing (im)possible. Micciche’s theory and others maintain that the writer never writes alone. Collaborators indeed challenge us to work with, between, and against material and affective forces in circulation (Micciche, 2017; Rule, 2019).

Game production studies drive this point about collaboration further. In The Developer’s Dilemma, Casey O’Donnell (2014) unpacks creative collaboration among large and small development teams of games. O’Donnell’s book is useful because, in great detail, it scopes out the commonplace roles of game developers. Engineers interact with artists, both of whom interact with designers who negotiate the former’s programming and stylings, all of which is later subject to many change requests and short deadlines that follow such requests. As O’Donnell posits,

[T]his process, when under pressure, can result in reckless cycling, or rapid changes that result in a more chaotic structure. The ability to “iterate” on a problem with a team is productive, but when that iterative structure is put under immense time pressure, it often begins to fall apart, rendering the resulting incessant iteration useless. (p. 133)

Although O’Donnell’s scope is outside of emotion studies, numerous stories in The Developer’s Dilemma are ripe with affectively rich practices and consequences, including in-person, ad-hoc discussions about problem-solving. “The general unpredictability and instability of production systems” results in myriad scenes of tension between team members on deadline (p. 132). System failures and deadlines amount to what the gaming industry and O’Donnell call “crunch,” a strategy and condition in which “employees will stay late to make up the slack created by overwhelmed feedback loops, ineffective interactivity, interdisciplinary breakdowns, or disrespect of emergent forms of structure” (p. 134). Crunch turns studios into spawning pits of bad feelings, including resentment and angst toward development partners. O’Donnell calls out the dangerous assumption of crunch: “Put in the language of the videogame industry, if you crunch it is because you did something wrong. And if you object to crunching, you shouldn’t be in the game industry” (p. 151). Although this embodied, negative feeling is a near omnipresent condition of the industry, a whole other chapter would need to be dedicated to it in order to make sense of it, and for most of my participants, it was a thing that happened at times but did not destroy a team or a project. Nevertheless, a takeaway from O’Donnell’s analysis is that collaboration is circulatory and affectively charged, for better or worse.

So far in this chapter I’ve discussed theories of collaboration that emphasize proximity and immediate interactions with peers and others, at times under deadlines. I’m going to complicate this discussion by turning to a collaborative project by Lauren Berlant and Kathleen Stewart (2019), The Hundreds. The book is a collection of “theoretical poems,” 100-word meditations on everyday happenings, scenes of feelings in motion. In the book, Berlant and Stewart offered the following about collaboration: “Collaboration is a meeting of minds that don’t match. Circulation disturbs and creates what’s continuous, anchoring you enough in the scene to pull in other things as you go” (p. 28). That latter line—I read it as a comment on feelings that circulate between collaborators and objects in scenes of collaboration. Better yet, the comment is apt for in-person and remote collaborations. In an interview about The Hundreds, Berlant notes much of her collaborative writing with Stewart was completed at a distance. She reflected on the “the great pleasure of editing together” with Stewart (p. 291), a pleasure that extended between their workplaces in Chicago and Austin. As Berlant explains in an interview with Katarzyna Bojarska (2019):

. . . Many of the pieces come from our long-term exchanges about things we had seen and experienced. We were talking on the phone, taking notes and transcribing, writing and rewriting, thinking ‘what have we learnt from this?’ Then we finally sat down to work on the book and to get as close as possible to our hooks. We share commitments but not the same sensitivities, sometimes. (p. 300)

By commitments, Berlant might be referring to commitments to writing and working together, a shared time when feelings can clash and shift during a production cycle—even if it’s done entirely remotely. Collaboration and affect need not be entirely moot if done remotely, as many of us have come to understand all too well during the global pandemic. Given what the aforementioned scholars have theorized about collaboration and spaces for it, it’s safe to say, however, that the field of writing studies has paid less attention to remote collaboration. The exigency for making visible and establishing those remote partners simply wasn’t there until the pandemic gripped our workplaces and practices.

If we turn again to game development, however, stories of remote collaboration and associated feelings come into full view. O’Donnell writes, for example, of India developers who struggled to collaborate with US-based developers via remote communication channels:

Teams of artists were being asked to produce art assets in a way that no traditional game developer would be asked to do. The inability to see how changes made to a particular art asset were then reflected in the games engine made it difficult for artists to understand the relationship between their work and the game in which it was being placed. (p. 118)

For a 2021 perspective on students who developed games remotely for the Cologne Game Lab in Germany, André Czauderna and Emmanuel Guardiola (2021) write that students “were well aware that remote work requires additional attention and efforts when it comes to aspects such as time management, allocation of work, and mutual understanding” (p. 17). However, they warn of “unhappiness and psychological struggles for students/workers which might not only be to the detriment of their well-being, but also—in the long-run—their professional performance” (p. 17). These examples suggest the spectrum of feelings that might surface in scenes of remote collaboration.

Furthermore, scenes of collaboration narrated directly from game developers underscore such findings. In the gaming industry, game creators often write public post-mortems, or reflections on the successes and failures of a project. In our study of more than 75 post-mortems written by game developers, my collaborator Jessica Oliviera Da Silva and I found that developers spoke often of the challenges of remote communication—that is, working on and thus communicating production tasks remotely (you can read more about it in our 2022 article, “Sharing Pain and Pleasure”). As Michael Balm (2015) wrote about his team’s helicopter-based platformer game Heroki, much of the game’s production stage was communicated via Skype, which resulted in miscommunication: “From time to time, team members would be confused about certain gameplay elements because they had interpreted something in another way than it had been intended.” Balm added, "Toward the end of the project we were able to work from the same location more often, and during these times we found that we worked more efficiently. Working together made creating and testing builds a faster process and development sped up” (“1. Workflow”).

For Balm and many others, bodies in proximity resulted in better production, better task management, better communication, and better feelings between team members. Ted Morris (2015) writes of working on the real-time strategy game Grey Goo in an open-office environment,

. . . impromptu meetings sprang up to solve problems on the spot, everyone was on the same page about the components they were working on, windows were now a more widely available commodity and there seemed to be less of a reliance on email to get things done. There were, of course, a few transitional issues as well (like noise), but after everyone got used to their new environment, that regulated itself fairly well—or people started wearing headphones. (“2. A Fundamental Shift in the Work Environment”)

Amid pandemic conditions in 2022, these feelings persist. Numerous news articles and reports about game development delays due to COVID-19 have shed light on embodied collaboration. In their "State of the Game Industry 2021” report, for example, organizers of the annual Game Developers Conference published the following comments from developers:

"We have lost months due to not being able to travel, work in person, and work together more collaboratively” (p. 18).

"Connection to my team, work-life balance was much harder, working from home easily slid into ‘living in the (home) office’. I have returned back to working in the office a couple months ago and felt like I got my life back” (p. 20).

Comments like these are echoed across too many articles to cite here. However, it’s important to call out that game development has a long history of in-person and remote collaboration and work in general. In our study of 246 game developers affected by COVID-19, Beth Caravella, Nanditha Narayanamoorthy, and I found that 96 of developers preferred working from home—many saying they already worked from home—and working in a hybrid model between home and an office. Developer comments were ripe with feelings about both in-person and remote collaboration (Caravella, Narayanamoorthy, and Shivener, 2022).

Along with my previous studies of scholarly authorship, the pandemic and the aforementioned study were exigencies for discussing both proximal and remote collaborations in this chapter. To ignore our current pandemic conditions would fail to acknowledge the new and likely permanent calls for hybrid workplaces and collaborations.

Missing Bodies and Pandemic Collaborations

On a sunny evening in May 2020, I’m speaking with Michael McMaster, one of four developers and friends who run the company House House. House House is known for developing the wrestling-ball game Push Me Pull You (2016) and Untitled Goose Game (2019), a relatively short game in which a goose causes all sorts of trouble in a small village. McMaster and his collaborators are based in Melbourne, Australia. If you check out the end credits of both games, you’ll find a massive list of collaborators. McMaster tells me that it literally takes a village to make an indie game, speaking about the Melbourne community:

There is this nice creative community and scene of game development within Melbourne that we’ve relied on and leaned on and drawn from when we’ve been hiring contractors for different bits of work. Certainly throughout Push Me Pull You, which is our first game, when we started we didn’t come from a game-making background. We were sort of starting from scratch. We really relied on the community to welcome us into that scene and show us around and introduce us to people and that kind of thing. We were very reliant on that scene to help us through the first game.

More often than not, game development is a deeply collaborative, creative process that unfolds over months and years. Before the pandemic, many developers and their collaborators were working alongside each other, in apartments, small offices, and massive buildings. O’Donnell (2014) has emphasized much negativity stems from such collaborations. But McMaster’s story demonstrates the situatedness of such feelings. Here he is reflecting on the most pleasurable part of working on Untitled Goose Game. It wasn’t the many accolades that followed its release. Even though Untitled Goose Game was awarded Game of the Year, the most pleasure came from collaboration, he tells me:

To be honest, the most pleasurable thing has been like we, the four of us were friends before we started making video games and we’ve managed to stay friends and enjoy each other’s company and working together. It’s been very nice to be able to actually enjoy going into the office and spending time with these three people who I spend every other day with and not completely hate them through that process of collaborating on a creative project.

McMaster points out that much of Untitled Goose Game was finished before the pandemic, aside from a two-player update released in summer 2020. In contrast to his positive story, numerous stories of the pandemic’s effects on game development are those of production delays as well as nostalgia for working in proximity to one another. Speaking with Matt Kim (2021) for the game news site IGN, Final Fantasy 14 director Naoki Yoshida said, "Those times where you’re sitting in front of the computer, and your teammates are there, and a programmer would just pull in their teammates, saying, ‘Hey, can you come look at my screen and check this out?’ You can’t do that in a work-from-home situation.” Collaboration and interpersonal circulation therein have transformed into virtual worlds.

Yoshida’s story is emblematic of creators who were working together prior to the pandemic and separated at the height of it. Much of the stories I relay here are based on interviews in 2020 and 2021, when the pandemic was looming globally, and later, when lockdowns were in full effect in Canada and beyond. That means most of the interviews I did with creators were remote. (You can read more about my methodological shifts in the section “Ephemera: Chapter Two.”) Nevertheless, the interviews were still meaningful and full of details about collaborative practices and feelings that circulated among creators.

It’s a Tuesday in February 2020, and I’m speaking with Adam Volker and Bohdon Sayre, the developers behind the game Creature in the Well (2019), a post-apocalyptic, dungeon crawling game that they describe as “pinball with swords.” You play as a sword-wielding robot tasked with powering on an ancient machine before a sandstorm devastates a city. A game about environmental shifts and deadly automation, Creature in the Well weaves a haunting narrative with scenes of bouncing energy orbs and explosions.

Volker and Sayre are developers for Flight School Studio, a large collective of studios that work in graphic design, animation, and gaming. Volker works as an art director, whereas Sayre leads the programming. Here’s Sayre: “When Adam’s waiting for me to finish all the boring technical aspects of the end of the production, he’s making a lot of art for the next collection. It involves a lot of cool world building and concept and stuff like that.”

When we spoke, the two were sharing an office in Montréal, having immigrated recently from Dallas, Texas. The office was blooming with creative energy—a white board with character sketches and notes, passersby from the film studio down the hall, computers displaying works in progress. Volker and Sayre attended the same university—but, interestingly, they met after graduation—and have worked in game design together since 2010. As a two-person team, they prefer collaborating and working in close proximity because it supports relatively rapid game development. Creature in the Well was developed and delivered within a two-year window, which is rather fast in the game dev world. Figure 6 depicts a prototype of the game.

Figure 6
A Prototype of Creature in the Well

Sayre discusses the team’s prototyping practices for Creature in the Well in 2017 and how they followed each other to Montréal, where much of the game’s development happened.

So early 2017 we had prototypes or we were like, “Let’s make a game in Canada.” That was basically our idea. We’re gonna move to Canada and we’re gonna make a game, it’s just gonna be the two of us and it’s gonna be great. So, we’re like, “what are we going to make?” We were actually living in Dallas at the time. And we decided to basically make three prototypes, and then kind of evaluate them, figure out which ones have the best potential, things like that. So we made three things. One of them was this game, which at the time the prototype was called Skip Stickball. Literally just a cylinder with a stick that flicks and then the ball bounces around. There’s some prototype videos online, like old GIFs. . . . And then from there we hit the ground running. Adam went straight to Montréal. I spent a little time in Vancouver, with my wife along the way. And then eventually, we both ended up in Montréal and kind of cranked through production. The core production was 12 months basically and then we spent a lot of time just fixing bugs and porting and shipping in 2018.

Here’s Volker adding to our conversation about Montreal:

Yeah, from AAA to the indie, the scene has been very welcoming. It’s got a couple organizations in town that host events that everybody goes to. You see the same faces and everyone’s really, really friendly. The French language part is a hurdle for us as Americans, such as learning the language and integrating in that. The food is super awesome. The weather is fun because it makes you feel like you’re traveling without traveling. The city changes so much between the winter and the summer.

At the time of speaking with Volker and Sayre, the pandemic hadn’t yet shut down everything in Montréal and beyond. They were drawn to the buzz of Montréal and its creative community. Montréal is a hub for independent and AAA game studios and major internet companies such as Rockstar, Google, and Amazon. One landmark for game development is the Montreal International Gaming Summit and Montreal Expo Gaming Arcade (MEGAMIGS) convention, an industry-focused convention for the gaming industry held every fall in Montréal that features a large hall for game demonstrations and speaker panels about myriad topics. Panels for the 2021 edition in November included "Dead Good PR” and "Programmers Are from Mars, Designers Are from Venus: Understanding Interdisciplinary Communication” (MIGS). Like 2020, it was an entirely virtual conference, mediated through screens and webcams.

I tell Volker and Sayre’s story here because they were the last creators I spoke with before the pandemic prompted the official cancellation of the 2020 MEGAMIGS as well as the seminal Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco. The warning signs had been there, as companies such as Sony and Facebook were backing out of GDC, citing the health and safety of its employees. Volker and Sayre also had reservations as news of the virus was spreading. I hadn’t yet canceled my plans. Here’s Volker in February 2020: “I’m super bummed that even if we do end up going this year, a lot of the events and a lot of people that we were going to see won’t be there. So if you’re going for the first time, don’t judge the conference.”

I couldn’t judge the conference because I couldn’t go. On February 28, 2020, the organizers of GDC announced that the in-person conference would be postponed, but a free conference would take place on Twitch. That meant hundreds of game developers would miss those crucial in-person connections with potential collaborators, playtesting sessions with audiences, and events and parties that often lead to publisher support and funding. Instead, GDC would stream a number of panels and talks on Twitch and would later announce plans for GDC Summer, another virtual event that took place as the pandemic ravaged the world.

It should be no surprise that events such as MEGAMIGS and GDC were relegated to Twitch, Zoom rooms and Discord channels once the pandemic hit many of us like the final boss of many games. Those lively panels and meetups at bars and co-ops? Gone. Proximal collaboration? Gone. It’s a wonder how many games-in-progress and collaborations that might have been were outright canceled in response to virtual conferences.

Feelings about collaborative losses were swirling between me and David Martin, a Québec native and another game developer who lives in Montréal. Martin is a developer with the small indie-team Barnaque, which released the experimental puzzle game Infini in 2020. It’s April 14, 2020 now, and we’re speaking over Zoom. Mixing abstract art with esoteric dialogue and atmospheric music, Infini was nominated for or won awards at festivals such as the Tokyo Game Show 2020 and Independent Games Festival at GDC. Martin wrote most of the music with his collaborator Marc-André Provencher, leaving much of the programming to his main collaborator, Émeric Morin. When we talk on Zoom, Martin describes how roles and tasks cross between teammates, which is typical in independent game development collaborations:

Émeric does most of the programming. I do a lot of programming too, but he does the deeper stuff. I do the music and help with the art and everything else. He does most of the level design. I did some of it too, but he did most of it. And for everything else we do it together. In terms of the game design, in terms of the story, the narrative, writing was mainly me but he contributed a lot too. We sort of keep it really open. . . . we’re not super protective of each other’s roles.

We worked mainly in the same room and we have an office. That was pretty cool. Sometimes we would work remotely, of course right now [during the pandemic]. But most of the time we would be in the same room. We would use mainly GIT for the programming and most of the assets also would all be in the same repositories. We would have different clouds, be it Google Drive or something else in which we would have all of our documents, so everything's on the cloud.

At the time of speaking with me, Martin and his family have gone for a change of scenery, an escape from lockdown protocols in the city. The day before our interview, Québec had 13,557 confirmed cases of COVID-19. During our interview, he narrates the significance of Montréal’s game-development scene:

There’s events that are organized by [studios and companies] and we have all sorts of advantages in terms of financing or stuff like that. When we started meeting other devs, there were really no feelings of competition or anything like that. People are super helpful. People with bigger studios, they give away their numbers, their stats, everything. You really feel like you can ask any question.

Stories like those of Volker and Sayre, Martin, and McMaster run the risk of suggesting that in-person collaboration is so much more effective—and affective—than remote work. Rather, my aim has been to bring forth the affective resonances of working together in shared time and space. These stories demonstrate a kind of bias toward positivity, in part because the games have been completed. In-person collaboration doesn’t work for everyone, of course, and to suggest otherwise runs the risk of reifying ableist and gendered concerns that scholars such as Aphra Kerr (2020) and Alayna Cole and Jessica Zammit (2021) have raised about game jams.

That said, an interesting case of someone who values and speaks in great detail about collaboration in both contexts is game creator Hannah Nicklin.

In June 2020, Jessica Oliveira Da Silva and I join a Skype call with Nicklin, who is the chief executive officer (CEO) and lead narrative designer for the company Die Gute Fabrik, based in Copenhagen. In 2017, Nicklin was hired to write the narrative for the company’s game Mutazione (2019), about a teenage mutant who returns home to take care of an elderly family member. At first, Nicklin would work remotely from London but travel to Copenhagen for redesign meetings. “I would go in and spend the time in the meeting room. We would do a lot of the design discussion in those times,” she tells us. The exigency for those visits centered on embodied collaboration. Nicklin discusses two points relative to this chapter: the challenges of remote collaboration, but the necessity to work independently because in-person collaboration is too distracting. She begins by talking about Christoffer Holmgård, a game designer and one of the founders of Die Gute Fabrik:

One thing that I wish Christoffer tried to implement, but just people in the office were really resistant to, was that collaboration over calls is much better when everyone is on the same terms. So whenever one goes to a room with their headphones on and talks in the same way, as someone who is remote is experiencing, you put everyone on the same level of communication. Whereas if there were three people in the office talking to two remote people, the people in the office have extra cues; they have asides; they have body language.

I’m going to continue Nicklin’s story later in this chapter, which speaks further to stories of the affective value of remote collaboration. For now, I want to end this section by once again acknowledging that remote collaboration is well-founded in writing studies and game development. Though Volker and Sayre are seemingly inseparable as proximal collaborators, for example, they collaborated remotely with teams who “ported” Creature in the Well to game consoles such as Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 4. Here is Sayre speaking about how porting worked:

Shivener: Now, did you handle the ports? I was speaking with one developer who said their game was outsourced. How did that work on your end?

Sayre: It’s kind of impractical for us as a small team to be simultaneously testing it and putting it on all of the consoles. We just develop on PC, basically. But in the past we’ve done our own porting. We made some games work on [Playstation 4] and its own thing. You just have to do a lot of optimization and a lot of bug fixing. The engines take care of a lot of it. Using Unreal and Unity really makes it pretty much a one-click build-to-platform but it doesn’t fix all the optimization issues in your assets and all the creative decisions you made. But we used a team for this. We just needed to release the game on more platforms than we could do it on, so we had a team that helped us do [Nintendo] Switch and Xbox at the same time. And then we followed up later to do PS4.

Beyond Volker and Sayre’s outsourcing of porting to remote teams, several developers I spoke with noted that their small teams are entirely remote and dispersed across several countries and timezones. I tell their stories in the next section.

Remote Collaboration’s Affective Promise

The previous section ends with a lingering yet important acknowledgement that remote collaboration is a vital, affectively rich practice for creators in game development realms. Across geographic lines and time zones, they’ve had to make remote collaboration work, whether they like it or not. This section emphasizes that last point by telling stories of creators such as Nicklin, Casey Yano, and Melos Han-Tani and Marina Kittaka.

First, let’s resume Nicklin’s story from the previous section. She moved from London to Copenhagen to help write and redesign the narrative for the mutant island game Mutazione, developed by indie development company Die Gute Fabrik. Nicklin’s work ethic and creativity eventually landed her the hybrid role of CEO and lead narrative designer of the company. During our Skype call in June 2020, she shares a number of design documents and programs that held Mutazione together. As depicted in Figure 7, we review a spreadsheet called "Narrative Sheets” that include locations, plot lines, and shorthand notations about where to find the narrative scene in the code. Later, she displays documents called "redrafts” and documents in the Unity game engine called "plot line manager” and "Storybeats.” The "Truth Sheet” is one critical document that connects others. In the following motion graphic, she is describing the sheet as we look at a screen full of text that contains in-game passages such as "Tung said people hang out in the bar,” and locations such as "Harbour” and "Town Square”:

Figure 7
Nicklin's Narrative Sheets

So, this is a record of every single conversation that exists in the game. Something that when I arrived . . . that was just the story tool. So the story tool is this. Currently, you can search by name. That was a feature that I fought quite hard for. Before that it was just a list. It was just a list of every conversation in the game. So I quickly encouraged us to maintain what we called the Truth Sheet [a Google Sheet I built myself to help us keep track of the writing in the game] that included more information. So what this is called is the label; that's how you find it in the story edits tool, which is a standalone program built in Unity, which connects to Unity. The label is the name that you would find [in] the story editor tool. The plotline is how it's implemented. I'll talk more about that in a second, but that also helps you find it within Unity as opposed to industry as a tool. Then after we'd sort of done the redesign around how time worked in the game. There are 52 or 53—I can't remember how many exactly absolute times in the game. So as you play the game, you get a day and then you get a time of day, right? You get Monday lunchtime. But the very first time of the day is zero. And let's say the first day is “Monday dawn”, Monday “lunchtime” would be absolute time two. “Monday afternoon” would be absolute time three, for example. And then I also have a day filter because when I was redrafting, it was useful to go through on a date, like a day-to-day basis. You could also filter by what characters are in there, then in a more complicated way, where they happen, and what activity they use. Activity is the basic arrangement of characters and default animations.

Perhaps it’s needless to say that an overwhelming amount of visual-textual documents holds this game together. Admittedly, I tell Nicklin that I’m even more intimidated about working as a writer in video games because it requires much coordination. But I’m also convinced that Nicklin loves serving in her hybrid role of CEO and lead narrative designer. Nicklin embraces the tension of collaborating with programmers, treating negotiation and any associated bad feelings not as a personal slight but rather as a part of the collaborative development process. Her comment that follows casts a positive light on the way Casey O’Donnell (2014) depicts tensions between designers and programmers. As Nicklin says:

I really, really want to say that when I’m talking about the programmers not having done this or not having done that, that is a systems tension, and a production tension, which just exists no matter what. The people I worked with were brilliant. And part of being a narrative designer is having to argue and fight for the story in the room. That is part of the job, and equally a programmer’s job is to fight for what they see to be their priorities. That’s why you need excellent producers. That’s why you need excellent creative leads to assess actually what should win out in this case. Yes, in an ideal world, everyone is on a project from the beginning. But also practically, you can’t fund projects like that. Very often they have to start out from a place where there’s just one or two people working on them. In games, that [one person or two] isn’t the storyteller. I just want to say that it’s systemic and not personal. I worked with excellent programmers. It’s just the result of game design.

For Nicklin, this distributed, highly collaborative game development can, and has been, working remotely in an effective way, more often than not. Her story is reminiscent of the many women who have been hired as departmental administrators and who face conflicts stemming from long histories of gender inequity and service labor. A writing program administrator (WPA) is tasked with leading a program’s story, changing it by negotiating with colleagues (read: men). In the words of Jennifer Heinert and Cassandra Phillips (2019), “[S]ervice can be an important avenue to effect change, which is needed to challenge the gendered ways that labor is valued in academia” (p. 256). Historically, they note, this administrative labor has been devalued by colleagues and students. The same can be said of narrative designers hired well into a game’s development.

In the context of game development, echoes of Nicklin’s sentiments come through in my conversation with Cara Ellison, writer and narrative designer for the game development company Blue Manchu. In 2019, Blue Manchu released Void Bastards, depicted in Figure 8. It's a sci-fi first-person shooter game about the prisoners and space pirates hijacking luxury and cargo ships to escape what seems like an infinite death cycle.

Figure 8
The Writing and Art of Void Bastards

Like Nicklin, Ellison was brought in after assets and mechanics for Void Bastards (2019) had been developed by Blue Manchu. The team’s affective orientation toward collaborating with her was positive. A mix of writing programs and spreadsheets helped her plot text, main character dialogues, and "barks,” those lines of dialogue spoken by non-playable characters in the game. She worked entirely remotely, as she explains when we meet over Skype in April 2020. Her main collaborator was Ben Lee, the art director of Void Bastards. The two had co-crafted the comic-book style of the art and the extremely sarcastic tone of the game. Ellison speaks of the game’s collaborative development as it crossed time zones and geographies:

Ellison: At the time Ben was living in Brighton in England. Jon was living in Canberra [Australia] with the rest of the team. I was living in Edinburgh in Scotland, so it was done remotely. It was actually easier to talk to Ben that way because he was on UK time.

Rich: It’s really fascinating how a lot of independent game development is distributed so much [remotely, across the world].

Ellison: The more specialist you get, I think the more you have to work in the same building, because with smaller games, you can be a jack of all trades. I think if you’re going to succeed, especially as a narrative designer of independent games, you can’t just be a writer. You have to be a designer, scripter; you have to understand the player experience. You have to have a fundamental understanding of user experience. What’s the first hour like? Are you playing through the game? How can you sculpt the player’s understanding of information via what you’re writing and giving them? Usually you have to have some kind of fundamental understanding of the containers that your text might sit in if the player sees them and how many different mechanics you might have to name or what items you might give them. So you have to kind of be more of a designer, I would say in independent games as a narrative designer, then you would in a very, very large studio that is making like God of War—because there you can be like a pure class writer and then have a spreadsheet where you write the barks and then you write the script and it’s all very A to B. Obviously in that role you still need to know games very well, but you can actually be more of a pure writer, although all that is thrown out of the water in my current job. I’m working in an RPG [role-playing game], and RPGs are very demanding across all levels of design. So you can’t just be a writer for an RPG. You have to be everything.

Ellison’s comment indicates why Living Digital Media has focused on relatively small, independent teams that share and blend roles during a production. These teams parallel the work of collaborators of digital media scholarship. (I call attention to, for example, Chapter One’s story of Eric and Grace co-writing and designing their webtext for Computers and Composition Online.) Small-team collaborations, even remotely, are ways of touching and feeling myriad parts of a project in a production cycle. Interpersonal circulation can be intense yet exciting as a project moves to completion.

To that point, I want to transition now to in-depth stories of small creative teams, especially partners of two and teams who are dispersed across different cities. Again, these collaborative situations reflect the remote collaboration discussed among scholars. For example, Sarah Riddick and I spent nine months passing documents back and forth, meeting on Discord to share research updates, then doing our own tasks at our respective desks in Massachusetts and Ontario. Our collaboration came together after a chance meeting at a Rhetoric Society of America webinar, and we didn’t meet in person until after the article was accepted. I definitely feel less weird about that entirely remote collaboration after speaking at length with game developers such as Melos Han-Tani and Marina Kittaka.

Melos Han-Tani and Marina Kittaka are the creative team best known for their games Anodyne (2013) and Anodyne 2 (2019), depicted in Figure 9. Anodyne harks back to 8-bit Nintendo role-playing and dungeon-crawling games like Zelda and Final Fantasy. The game’s soundtrack and plot take players on a journey of subconscious exploration. Its sequel, Anodyne 2, entangles 2D and 3D dreamscapes to tell a story about youth and identity. As they reference in the official game description of Anodyne 2, “Travel the world, meet strange people, and save the world from the dangerous Nano Dust.”

Figure 9
Melos Han-Tani and Marina Kittaka's Anodyne 2

Anodyne 2 was a nominee for the Seumas McNally Grand Prize, the highest honor of the 2020 Independent Games Festival held in conjunction with the annual GDC. The team has also released the games Even the Ocean (2016) and All Our Asias (2018), collectively also about identities, power inequities, and memories. Han-Tani directs much of the team’s programming and music, while Kittaka leads writing and art. They call themselves co-designers of their games, much like the developers referenced in this chapter. Han-Tani and Kittaka were introduced by a mutual friend while both were attending different universities in the United States. Here is Han-Tani discussing the team’s initial, somewhat challenging communication practices during their early collaborations:

Han-Tani: A mutual friend, one of my best friends from high school, went to Marina’s college, and they met, and I asked her if she knew anyone who wanted to do pixel art, and then she found Marina. Very lucky.

Shivener: So you just communicated over Skype, Google Hangouts, and so forth while you were working on it?

Han-Tani: Email. [Both laugh.] When I think about Even the Ocean’s development, I think one of the biggest mistakes is probably not using a chat app.

Han-Tani and Kittaka didn’t meet in-person until after Anodyne was completed in 2013. When I meet them over Google Hangouts in March 2020, Kittaka is calling in from Minneapolis, while Han-Tani is checking in from Tokyo. (We had planned to meet at GDC 2020, by the way.) It’s about 7pm for Kittaka, 8pm for me, and 9am for Han-Tani in Tokyo. In this excerpt, I ask them about meeting online

Shivener: Okay, [you meet online for] prototyping to passing art back and forth?

Kittaka: It’s mostly for planning, design ideas, you know, stuff like that.

Han-Tani: The hardest part is pretty much, what are you gonna do in the level? What does it look like? What does it sound like? How does it fit into everything? And that’s all just discussion, right? It’s just talking back and forth.

Kittaka: But we have our kind of processes that we do. Once the discussion is done, we can usually just do our things. It works more or less. [Laughs.]

Han-Tani and Kittaka’s system of collaboration has worked “more or less” for more than three games. No need for in-person meetings and socials. Both developers have preferred working from home instead of in offices and co-working spaces. Here’s Kittaka talking through a video games cooperative they worked at during the last few months of working on Anodyne 2—the period of time that many developers call "crunch.” It’s that time when life gets in the way of work, when teams work 10/12/16-hour days in order to finish a game before, say, a launch deadline.

Kittaka: And during that time, it was just having to produce a lot of art assets or whatever. And so it was relatively easy to know exactly what I needed to do—not a lot of really hard sitting and thinking or stuff where I would want to have a very flexible day. It was more just like, "Okay, I’m just gonna sit at the computer and hammer out this stuff for a while.” And then it was really helpful for me to have to commute a little because I would really notice that it would get dark outside and everyone else would leave. And I’d be like, “Okay, if I’m gonna stay and keep working, I should have a good reason to; otherwise, I should just go home and then be done for the night.” And so having that boundary worked well, specifically for the heavy production time, and it helped a little bit reduce my crunch-y mindset.

Han-Tani: I’ve never worked at a co-working space. I think it would be fun to have an office space and something, but the logistics won’t really ever happen. There are co-working spaces in Tokyo, but I don’t know, the commute is pretty bad. You’ve seen the subway videos in the morning?

Han-Tani and Kittaka’s comments are helpful reminders that in-person collaboration need not be vital for game development writ large. In fact, some developers have no need to meet at all because it’s simply disruptive or not worth commuting times, perhaps (Caravella, Shivener, & Narayanamoorthy, 2023). Sometimes just being around other people for a limited time can be enough. And depending on the task, proximal collaboration can be harmful to drafting and revision practices. Why change it if the production cycle is moving well as is? I’ll let Han-Tani answer that question: “It’s pretty common for small indie games to be done totally online, but people haven’t met.”

Later in our conversation, I asked Han-Tani and Kittaka if they could see themselves working on a large team, even if it’s entirely remote:

Han-Tani: Part of the satisfaction is the development communication process, and how that comes to light. And if that’s gone, it’s not, it’s kind of rote. If I get a job at a bigger studio or something, it would probably be as a junior programmer, and I would code like a bear. Or as a junior planner, I would plan the forest level or something. And would be for an existing set of mechanics, which obey an existing set of financial needs for the company.

Kittaka: I think we’re both very director-minded, where we’ll do the tasks of creating assets and stuff like that. But the interesting part of that is the fact that we have agency and how different things are coming together in an overarching way. I get very antsy very easily. I don’t want to just be hyper-specialized ever. Because it really doesn’t interest me trying to find the laziest way to do each micro task because the network of different things coming together is what’s driving me.

Reflecting on our conversation, I’m struck by Kittaka’s comment on agency. The team’s desire for agency is a desire to feel all the assets and aspects of a game. It reminds me of how Sara Ahmed (2010) describes “happy objects.” As Ahmed theorizes, “If we arrive at objects with an expectation of how we will be affected by them, then this affects how they affect us, even in the moment they fail to live up to our expectations” (p. 41). To work in isolation on a specific task repeatedly is to limit felt experiences that surface and circulate across tasks. Task-specific roles, in other words, might limit the “economies of feeling,” or swirl of objects and feelings, that indie developers say is critical to their work.

Similar sentiments of agency come through in the words of Casey Yano, who co-developed the game Slay the Spire (2019) with Anthony Giovannetti. As depicted in Figure 10, Slay the Spire is a rogue-like card game in which your party/character fights their way to the top of a tower by combatting a wide range of creatures and beasts. Yano tells me that the team’s development processes are “insane.”

I think day to day, we really choose what to work on. And then we just kind of tell the other person like, “Hey, I’ll be working on this thing for like two or three days.” And then once that’s done I’ll be kind of burned out from working on this thing. We don’t work in person. We both live in Washington state. But we don’t really meet up that often. We meet maybe five to 10 times a year.

I work in a very different, transparent way. I don’t like being asked, “What are you working on?” And we have a version control. We just kind of highlight what’s important.

Figure 10
Casey Yano and Anthony Giovannetti's game Slay the Spire

You can also hear about control and transparency in my conversation with Beidi Guo, the lead illustrator for Lantern Studios, the development team behind the game Luna: The Shadow Dust (2019). Figure 11 depicts the design of this vibrant game. In the team’s words, Luna is "a hand-animated puzzle adventure, featuring a breath-taking original soundtrack and beautiful 2D cinematics.” Guo is talking with me on a Skype call from their apartment in London. Guo has team members in Canada, UK, and Shanghai, and everyone touches all parts of the game in some way. Even if time-zone differences make remote meetings difficult to schedule, Guo describes the creative freedom as the most pleasurable part of developing Luna: The Shadow Dust:

We get to make every single decision. We get to try something very risky that a normal game studio probably would not try, because it most likely is going to fail. And we can decide what we think is the most valuable thing in this game for us. I think that’s the best part—we all contribute. We don’t have a level-design guy. So everyone designs everything. As long as you have an idea, we can all share it and talk about it. We all play games ourselves as well. I think while you play other people’s games you also subconsciously learn what a good game is supposed to be like. You can tell a good game from a bad game. So you instantly pick up all those things from the game that you like. . . .

Then we’re trying to borrow ideas. I learned so many things about coding and music composing, funny enough, that usually I will not be that interested in. But because we work together so closely now . . . when I talked to our music composer, she’s telling me the reason she composes a piece. She really wants my honest opinion, but in order to be able to talk about more detail with her, I have to learn loads of music terms and study some basic music knowledge.

Figure 11
Lantern Studios' game Luna: The Shadow Dust

It seems a bit ironic, doesn’t it? The idea that the more responsibilities—or “side work,” as Guo calls it—you have for tasks across a game’s development, the more pleasure you feel. But if stories like Han-Tani’s, Yano’s, and Guo’s are in any way generalizable, the double isolation of working remotely and on one task, or skillset, just isn’t fulfilling, or full of feelings. And so let me fade out this section by coming back to what Nicklin said near the end of our conversation. She is speaking about the affective duality of collaboration—that it’s at once painful and pleasurable, a result of working closely with fellow designers and programmers to make the best game possible:

Shivener: I had this in the questionnaire, but I was curious: What do you think were the most painful and pleasurable parts of working on Mutazione?

Nicklin: Those are the same thing. I got great, great pleasure from collaborating with so many people from so many different disciplines, and having so many restrictions on what I was allowed to do with the characters and with the plot and how I had to fight for changes. All of that stuff pushed me in my practice, in a really good way.

Nicklin’s comments suggest that good feelings were a result of working through challenges of hybrid work and interpersonal dynamics. As we continue speaking on Skype, she acknowledges that this work approach stems from lived experiences in male-dominated spaces:

One of the reasons I was able to find my footing in Mutazione is because I’m really happy to just talk over someone until they stopped talking. That comes to me as someone who has put myself in male-dominated spaces for a number of parts of my life. So my involvement in the punk scene, my involvement in racing road bikes, the sports that I do; all of these things are very male-dominated spaces. So that fits my personality, but there are a lot of voices that we completely lose.

Nicklin’s affective orientation toward male domination is reflective of Ahmed’s (2017) opening comments in Living a Feminist Life: “It brings to mind women who have stood up, spoken back, risked lives, homes, relationships in the struggle for more bearable worlds” (p. 1). Nicklin’s practices are emblematic of a “feminist killjoy,” someone willing to speak out about violence rendered by racism and sexism. From Ahmed’s perspective, women like Nicklin are “willing to speak out about the violence of the system, to strike, to demonstrate. We are willing to talk about the rods, to risk being identified as the wayward arm” (p. 263). Such willingness is a crucial move toward more inclusive development spaces.

Collaborative Jamming: A Proposal for Writing Studies

The stories of Nicklin and aforementioned creators raise a few questions. In the field of writing studies, in which ways have—and can we—transform the methods and spirit of in-person and remote game development into something toward webtext productions? Is it possible to test out game development’s collaborative approaches in manageable and inclusive ways?

It is, but the stakes would be different. This final section, then, proposes a low-stakes approach to collaborative jamming with fellow scholars, including those who might envision webtexts-as-games. I’m turning here to creators like Douglas Gregory, who works full-time as a game developer at a major studio and makes independent games during the annual TO Jam. Gregory’s story of the relatively condensed nature of indie game development via the TO Jam offers a heuristic for collaborative work on digital media. Game jams are typically limited to 72 hours. They are fruitful for invention and experimentation, though, as previously acknowledged, they can be exclusive, male-dominated, and ableist if not approached carefully. TO Jam anticipates such issues of participation through its code of conduct, which includes monitoring verbal and physical harassment. Among several lines about unacceptable behavior, the code tells creators to avoid “any language, behavior or content that contains profanity, obscene gestures, or racial, religious, gender, or ethnic slurs” (“Code of Conduct”). TO Jam has a long history of building community along with numerous prototypes by new and experienced creators.

For an inside perspective on jamming, I want to tell Douglas Gregory’s story about TO Jam. Gregory works by day as a designer for the major studio and games publisher Ubisoft. When Anika Rahman and I meet Gregory in June 2021 over Zoom, he is working on Far Cry 6 (2021), a first-person shooter that revolves around guerrilla fighters in conflict with the regime of the nation Yara. In his spare time, Gregory has developed short, independent games during TO Jam. TO Jam 2021 ran from May 14 to May 16, 2021 with the theme “Once More with Feeling,” which was loosely followed but mainly served as a meta-commentary on the online edition of the jam for a second year in a row. For several years before the pandemic, TO Jam took place at George Brown College in Toronto for 72 hours, starting on a Friday and ending Sunday evening. TO Jam’s long-held tradition of pulling together developers for 72 hours is quite similar to institutes such as the Digital Media and Composition Institute (DMAC) and the Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI), those academic institutes where scholars across disciplines gather for proximal composing, seminars, and workshops centered on digital media. But the key difference is that, even in its material formations, TO Jam is completely free and contained to three days. Gregory describes the TO Jams of then and now this way:

When we’re doing the jam at George Brown, you’ll be sitting side by side with people from other teams making completely different games. You’ll be able to kind of look around like, “Hey, is anyone here like good with quaternions?” And some of them put up their hand; we’ll work together. You get a lot of pumped up energy from seeing what everybody else is making. We run slideshows on the big projectors, all the GIFs and screenshots people have been sending. That kind of keeps the hype going. And Discord was kind of doing that job for me this year. In terms of feeling like I was in the community, being able to chit chat, see people sharing their work, tell them how awesome it is, get positive feedback on my work to make sure I’m not going down a rabbit hole and working on the wrong thing.

By the end of the 2021 TO Jam, Gregory had uploaded his submission That’s My Jam! (2021) to the event’s distribution page on the website itch.io. That’s My Jam! is what Gregory calls a freestyle rhythm dance game, and it might remind you of those Dance Dance Revolution (1998) games often placed at arcades, malls, and movie theaters. In That’s My Jam!, you start by controlling a single dancer by pressing any key on the keyboard to the beats of two tracks. Later, as depicted in Figure 12, more dancers join the party.

Figure 12
Douglas Gregory's rhythm game That's My Jam!

For his day job, Gregory is entrenched in massive games like Far Cry 6, so why does he do TO Jam? Gregory describes it as a change of pace from his day job, a different kind of collaboration guided by his own desires. At the time of our conversation, Far Cry 6 is in its third year of development and the company is preparing for an October 2021 release date. Here is Gregory reflecting on the helpful time constraints of jamming on an independent game:

So for something like a jam, I can start with nothing on the Friday and have a new playable thing on the Sunday. And a new thing I can put on my website, on my itch.io page, you know, tweet to people about so it really is concrete progress. I can kind of chalk up and go, like, “Oh, I did something, I accomplished something, I finished something.” That’s really good for me. The short time constraint makes it a little bit easier to take risks. If I’ve got an idea, that might just be a terrible idea, I don’t want to sink a week into it, you know, or a month or something like that. But if I know, worst case, even if my idea is absolute garbage, I’ve lost a weekend. . . . I also like the independence of being able to make a small scope game, just by myself. I don’t have to have a design meeting and convince the whole team; I can just do it. And if it’s terrible, well, okay, that’s on me, but it’s fine. At least you didn’t have to pay anything to join the jam.

Perhaps it’s the free aspect of TO Jam that allows low-key collaboration and feelings to blossom. As Gregory tells us, an idea can be total garbage before, during, and after TO Jam—but hopefully it’s usable. His idea accords with the aims of the TO Jam, whose organizers argue that, “We consider the jam a kick-start, and want everyone to continue polishing their diamonds in the rough” (“Register|TOJam 2023”). Sure, they do want you to finish something in 72 hours and make it available for public feedback, but they frame it as something that can be worked on further after the jam ends. It is the beginning of feeling feedback and revision. Gregory describes the open-ended production cycle of TO Jam as "coming at a problem and trying to figure out the minimum prototype.”

What’s the toy here that we can build and see if it’s any fun first, as opposed to trying to find a huge overarching feature and build the whole thing? That’s something that, from practicing in jams, I know I really want to bring that back into my other game work whenever I can, because it’s kind of proven to have a bit of a track record at this point that it works. I’ve seen a lot of features that were very meticulously planned out over the big scope that we didn’t do that core fun finding first. And we’ve suffered as a result.

During TO Jam 2021, Gregory and dozens of others seemed to do plenty of fun-finding, prototyping, and collaborating on TO Jam’s official Discord. For 72 hours, as Gregory recalls, developers were sharing screenshots of their works in progress, asking questions and seeking advice, and some were also developing their work live on Twitch simultaneously. Some participants jammed as "floaters”—creators who, as the name implies, move between projects to help create media assets. For That’s My Jam!, Gregory used musical tracks by David Vitas and James Stajov, a floater that year. Gregory argues that floating is a small commitment for the participant but a huge help for solo developers like himself. Thinking about Stajov’s contributor and past floater support, Gregory says that, in a way, the collaborative community-building goals of TO Jam were even stronger than its past brick-and-mortar editions at George Brown College. TO Jam on Discord means less time spent moving around physical rooms and such. Gregory describes the Jam on Discord this way:

It’s really easy for an all-call [message] on Discord to say, "I need a floater that does do X,” and you can put that up where everybody in the jam [on Discord] is gonna see it versus asking in the room you’re in, like, “Hey, are there any floaters in this room?” And there are five rooms so you have to run around or that kind of thing. Also, having the history [of chats on Discord] so that I can scroll back up and see a conversation that I wasn’t physically present for. I’m sleeping at the time, but I can get caught up. Although I do find it harder to keep synchronous. We had a help channel for getting help troubleshooting issues or implementing features. I tried to stay on top of that one. But every so often, I would come in and go like, "Oh, hey, there’s a question I could have answered five hours ago.”

And so this is my main point in this final section. Our field needs more free, remote events like this to support collaborative invention and minimal prototypes. A weekend just to show something. A weekend to find fun in a scholarly project. As I claim in Chapter One, brick-and-mortar versions of scholarly institutes are resource-intensive, even if it’s an institution-based model. Participant fees support catering, compensate guest speakers, and keep the lights on, the servers running overnight. In contrast, remote jams on Discord are much less costly—save for the platform’s optional subscription packages—relying more on a “Bring Your Own Computer” model. The one caveat, I might suggest is time, which one participant of TO Jam told me is the most stressful part of jams. Here’s Gabriel Branyiczky, who you’ll meet again in Chapters Three and Four. In this interview, he is reflecting on his development of the game Worlds Within Worlds (2021), another submission for TO Jam 2021:

That’s probably the most stressful part of the jam—that very beginning. Feeling a time crunch and trying to come up with an idea under the time crunch, I think, is the most stressful part of it. And then, very, very close underneath that is the time crunch you run into at the end, where it’s like, “Oh man, I thought this was gonna work.” And moments before uploading, I realize things are broken. Thankfully, it doesn’t happen to me very often. I’ve participated in somewhere around 15 game jams at this point, and all of those have really helped me to get a good sense of what I’m able to do in any given span of time.

As of writing this book, I have yet to see a temporally intense jam for digital media scholarship, but I find promise in events like the open-house meetings with editors at Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy. During a Zoom call in summer 2021, a number of virtual rooms were established with one or two editors in each room, each answering topical questions (e.g., web design templates) and commenting on webtext ideas and early drafts. Part of the goal of these open-house meetings is to encourage submissions, especially by junior faculty and BIPOC scholars. This movement toward openness is part of the field’s recent collective mission to be more inclusive in publishing spaces.

So can we do more than those meetings? Yes. Have we? Maybe by the time this book hits screens, the field will have done a kind of weekend jam that builds on those open-house meetings. Maybe editors and experienced digital media composers are serving as floaters for first-time creators, or maybe first-time creators are serving as floaters in order to scale their time commitments. Maybe, like some game jams put on by studios, the media assets are already there and ready for remixing in any way shape or form (e.g., Santos’ 2019 “StoneJam” for his game StoneStory). Maybe minimum prototypes are circulating on a public website, a Twitch channel in which some composers and editors are offering helpful feedback or developing their prototypes live. Maybe it’s a truly inclusive event that allows myriad scholars—and not just white dudes looking to get a job—to touch and feel their way through what they once thought was total garbage. As we will learn more about in Chapters Three and Four, minimum prototypes and small ideas can blossom into projects that live on and evolve for months and years.

Overall, Chapter Two sheds light on the nature of collaborative work before and amid the pandemic: whether it’s in-person or remote, collaboration is productive and affectively intense. For many creators in game development, this long-held method of collaboration requires the circulation of content and feelings across numerous textual and digital communication channels, from in-text editors in Unity to Google Docs to Discord and Zoom. The sheer volume of content produced by remote collaboration and hybrid forms can be extraordinary and overwhelming, but it still results in a finished project vibrant with feelings.