“There’s been a lot of interesting games,” Mark “Arity” Willson says when I ask him if there are any games he can remember being developed during the Global Game Jam. “There was a kind of interesting game about being a fireman, and you use your firehouse as a grappling hook. Another example was someone made a game using a smartphone that you would walk around, and only use audio cues to explore an environment in the game. It was a screenless game. So that was interesting. A lot of creative stuff like that happens.”
The Global Game Jam, which ran this year January 20-26 at, is an annual game development event in which developers from around the world convene to create games under a specific theme and within a compressed time frame. (This year’s theme was “bubbles,” whatever interpretation that invited.) Unlike traditional game development timelines that span years, participants have either a full week or as little as 48 hours to build a game from start to finish. It’s organized by the Global Game Jam nonprofit, which collaborates with local hubs to bring developers together; in 2025, the Jam looked to include nearly 800 host sites around the world.
This is the eighth year that Willson is coordinating the event at Noisebridge, a co-op hacker space on Mission Street. The Jam provides a space for Bay Area-based developers to collaborate, flex their creative muscles, and connect with their peers. As Willson’s discussion of past games indicates, participants have a lot of freedom in what they can make, so long as it fits the theme and can be executed within the shortened development cycle: “People make all sorts of games for these things, typically. They make video games, they make tabletop games, some people might make an RPG that they play on a page or something… The limit’s your imagination.”
The Global Game Jam isn’t the only event of its kind that Willson has organized at Noisebridge, but he says that its communal nature fosters a different environment than other jams. “I’d say the collaborative spirit is very alive with Global Game Jam compared to a lot of other ones, because the focus is on meeting in person at a registered site,” he explains. “Since most other game jams tend to be online, [collaboration is] less of a focus.”
As my discussion with Willson continues, we start talking about the challenges facing the industry, and the diversity of the toolset needed to confront those challenges. “The indie scene is different from the AAA [blockbuster] scene, is different from the hobbyist indie scene, is different from the AA or indie-studio scene,” he explains. “There’s a spectrum of different types of developers with different goals and what they’re dealing with… We all have different needs and goals.”
So the Jam has the potential to equalize the conditions under which participants are making games, in multiple senses. Developers at more remote or smaller sites are developing under roughly the same conditions as developers in areas with a thriving games community—after all, everyone is subject to the same time and theme limitations. And in places like the Bay Area, with a stronger and more present game development scene, the Jam offers a chance for rookie developers to create alongside more experienced peers, to plug into the local scene, and to learn from each other.
According to Maria Burns Ortiz, the executive director of the Global Game Jam parent organization, the event’s community-oriented focus allows it to straddle different sections of a diverse industry. “We provide opportunities to get people together, and it’s not about going to a networking event where you’re like, ‘I’m hoping I’m gonna meet this person and see who’s the most important,” Ortiz says, continuing, “I think there’s not a lot of places where you can go and get together with a bunch of people at different levels of the industry, actually [developing] in practice.”
Ortiz says that this collaborative spirit offers a respite and an antidote to the broader anxieties plaguing an uncertain world. “At this moment, sometimes the world is… there’s a lot going on,” she says. “And it’s a way to say, ‘How can we help make positive change and get people to create community and [be] happy about making games?’… We get to bring fun into the world.”
That optimistic quality dovetails neatly with Willson’s description of Noisebridge. I ask him how he first found out about the space, and he says, “I just kind of showed up there one day after hearing about it from a random person on the street… I was just barely getting into game development at the time, and sort of found my people there. So it was magical for me.” He says he aims to pass along the welcoming environment he found there to newer members, keeping the spirit of collaboration alive. It seems like this ethos applies to the game jam, as well.
When I ask what game jams have to offer to developers from across the industry spectrum, he responds, “Game jams are for everyone, you know?”
