Get Ready To Enter A New Decade With The Next Public Domain Game Jam: Gaming Like It’s 1930!

from the gaming-like-it’s-1930 dept

The new year is approaching fast, and you know what that means: new material is entering the public domain in the US, and we’ll be celebrating it with the eighth installment of our public domain game jam. What’s more, this is an extra special year because the ever-growing public domain is hitting a new decade: it’s time for Gaming Like It’s 1930!

As in past years, we’re calling on designers of all stripes to create both analog and digital games that build on works entering the public domain. There are plenty of interesting works to draw on, including:

• Written works by Agatha Christie, Dashiell Hammett, Langston Hughes, Olaf Stapledon, Sigmund Freud, William Faulkner
• Art by Edward Hopper, Georgia O’Keeffe, Grant Wood, M. C. Escher, Paul Klee, Piet Mondrian
• Films All Quiet on the Western Front, Animal Crackers, Hell’s Angels, and the first Looney Toons
• Music by Cole Porter, Duke Ellington, the Gershwins, and Son House
• Other characters including Nancy Drew and The Little Engine That Could

The jam will begin on January 1st and run through the end of the month, accepting submissions of both analog and digital games based on works from 1930. Whether you’ve participated before or not, we encourage everyone to get involved!

Even if you don’t have any experience, it’s never been easier to try your hand at game design. There are lots of great tools available that let anyone build a simple digital game, like interactive fiction engine Twine and the storytelling platform Story Synth from Randy Lubin, our game design partner and co-host of this jam (check out his guide to building a Story Synth game in an hour here on Techdirt). And an analog game can be as simple as a single page of rules. For inspiration, you can have a look at last year’s winners and our series of winner spotlight posts that take a look at each year’s winning entries in more detail.

At the end of the jam we’ll be choosing winners in six categories, and awarding a choice of prizes from Techdirt and Diegetic Games. You can read the full rules and other details, and sign up to participate, on the game jam page over on Itch.io. We’ll be back with more reminder posts as the jam draws nearer, including a look at one card game submission from last year that has since been released for purchase and is getting great reviews (so stay tuned for that!)

Filed Under: copyright, game jam, gaming, gaming like it’s 1930, public domain