The GI Game Jam is a series of tri-annual “game jams” held by the Games Institute at the University of Waterloo to celebrate the game-making community in the Kitchener-Waterloo region. I volunteered on the GI Game Jam committee during my MSc career and produced a series of posters to advertise for the event with intentions of attracting greater participant (jammer) diversity.
I intended for the posters to:
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Hold a consistent brand over the year
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Appeal to demographics under-represented in game-making
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Accurately display event information including themes and sponsors
Observed misconceptions recounted by senior members of the GI Game Jam committee is that potential participants felt they are unable to participate because they (1) had little or no knowledge of scripting; and (2) had no team to participate with. These misconceptions were noticeably evident among non-computer science students and non male-identifying individuals.
To address these points, I deliberately designed the posters to attract first-time “jammers.” The poster listed multiple roles in game development in addition to development roles, such as artists, musicians, and writers to appeal to jammers uninterested in programming or wished to create non-digital table-top games. Both teams and independents were explicitly welcomed to invite jammers with or without team members, and a clear “Make a game in 48 hours” was stated to describe the event. To purposefully appeal to those interested in the arts, character art was used on the posters in mimicry of Japanese role-playing games, movies, and general pop culture. Character art was illustrated in Photoshop CS5.
All posters held a consistent colour palette popular with movie posters in 2018-2019 (ie. John Wick, Into the Spiderverse, Atomic Blonde) to resonate with potential participants. A pink VR headset was also a consistent element of all character art to build an image for the GI Game Jam series to encourage the creation of VR games during the 2018-2019 period of the GI Game Jam series.
