GAMERella is the world’s longest running game jam focusing on supporting aspiring and emerging marginalized game creators and on of TAG’s flagship projects. Our latest initiative is to find similar, alternative game jams, share knowledge, and build a supportive community for the generous, but sometimes overlooked and undervalued organizers.
The first season of The GAMERella Podcast features interviews with a selection of alternative game jam founders and organizers from around the world. These 60-minute recorded conversations will present listeners with behind-the-scenes, narrative accounts of challenging, inspirational, and ordinary experiences that ensued during the process of game jam organizing. Interviewees will share their paths to innovative game-making and offer practical tips for emerging and experienced organizers. Desirée de Jesus, media scholar and previous GAMERella co-organizer, will conduct the interviews.
In this episode Desirée talks with GAMERella game jam co-founder Gina Hara and GAMERella co-organizer Courtney Blamey from Canada, about organizing inclusive and alternative game jams, community building and more.
You can download the transcript of this episode as a PDF from here.
The episode is available on Spotify, iTunes, iHeartRadio, Spreaker, and Google Podcast.
Gina Hara is a filmmaker and artist from Hungary. She holds an MA in intermedia, an MFA in film production and had worked in different media with regard to film, video, new media, gaming and design. Her research focuses on marginalized narratives in the context of technology, specifically social media and games culture. Hara’s art works have been featured by different institutions including the New Museum in New York, Budapest Kunsthalle and the City of Montreal. You can find some of her short films and her Minecraft webseries on Youtube. You can also watch her documentary, Geek Girls, exploring the hidden half of nerd culture at your local library. Hara’s most recent work, Sidings of the Afternoon won the Critics’ Choice Award at the Milan Machinima Film Festival 2021. Hara lives in Montreal, where she is the creative director of the Technoculture, Art and Games Research Centre, co-founder of GAMERella and Montreal‘s Magical Geek Brunch.
Twitter: @ginahara_
Instagram: @gina_hara
Website: ginahara.com
Courtney Blamey is a PhD student and game designer at Concordia University in the Department of Communication Studies. Her doctoral research concentrates on the process of meaning-making in games tackling serious themes and exploring this relationship between player and designer in her own critical game design process. Her previous research unpacked Blizzard’s approach to community moderation in Overwatch by investigating both developer and community inputs on forums. She is a member of the mLab, a space dedicated to developing innovative methods for studying games and game players and TAG (Technoculture Arts and Games).library.
Twitter: @courtneyblamey
Instagram: @sass_in_assassin
GAMERella Socials: https://linktr.ee/GAMERella
Desirée de Jesus is a video essayist and moving images curator whose digital projects concentrate on girls, women, and folks of colour. She is also an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication and Media Studies at York University. Her research uses experimental animation to reimagine Black girls’ critical resistance strategies and participatory filmmaking to explore racialized girls’ experiences of COVID-19 inequalities. Her experience with game jam organizing includes working as a GAMERella co-organizer and co-developer of GAMERella’s Game Jam Guide.
Produced by Gina Hara
Edited by Marc Lajeunesse
Music by Lyne Dwyer