Resist Jam: The Role of Games Under Authoritarianism
Art has been used as a form of political expression and resistance for thousands of years, influencing and propelling social and political movements. From Pablo Picasso’s Guernica to Beyonce’s Lemonade, art as protest can be found in all forms and in all disciplines. And yet, for mainstream games, examples of overt political engagement are few and far between. There are certainly standouts, such as Missile Command or Spec Ops: The Line, but for most games, politics are more often set dressing than something to discuss. However, with a wave of far-right authoritarianism gripping the U.S. and countries throughout the world, it is imperative games engage their audiences with political discourse. Into this environment, Resist Jam was born.
Resist Jam was a game jam held from March 3 through March 11, 2017, where game creators and activists from across the world came together and collectively made over 200 games related to the themes of resistance and authoritarianism. “As a game developer, as someone who game jams a lot, I was brainstorming with some friends, ‘What can we do?” Tyler Coleman,one of the organizers, says of the jam’s origins. “We can go to protests, we can call our senators, there’s a lot of things we can do that pretty much anyone with a phone or access to a public space can do. But as game devs, the idea of a game jam came up, the idea of making political games,” he says.
“I spent a lot of time after the presidential election in a sort of horrified haze, wandering around hoping that I’d wake up from some sort of awful dream. Eventually, I decided to do something about it,” writes Damon Reece, another organizer, writes.
The theme was a clear choice for everyone involved. “We made this platform to resist structures that stop other people from resisting; our main goal was/is to empower people to create games that critique power structures and make things better,” Reece writes. “We resist because we cannot, in good conscience, stand by while white nationalism and structural oppression wash across the Western world.” Indeed, Coleman takes that one step further, saying Resist Jam is “a global response to issues of authoritarianism.”
Wake Up by Inverge Studios
A quick survey of the jam’s page on itch.io reveals creators from Canada, Spain, Indonesia, Korea, Japan, Australia, Brazil, and beyond. While Maize Wallin, another of the organizers, acknowledges “the timing was very U.S. centric,” the organizers were able to bring in both game creators and activists from across the world, adding a global perspective to the authoritarian crisis that can too often feel isolated. “We all move forward together just because of the fact that we are global,” Wallin says.
Hand-in-hand with this inclusivity, the organizers wanted to create more than just a space to put political games: they wanted to teach people. “These gamers are gonna learn how to be activists, they’re gonna learn, it’s not that hard, and they’re gonna learn to do it everyday,” says Wallin, who lead efforts to create workshops on the jam’s YouTube page.
Conversely, “we wanted to try to empower people who had never made games before, make this their first time. If they came to us because they’re more interested in activism and political issues, we wanted to make sure they could still make a game in this medium,” Coleman says. Resist Jam’s workshops covered everything from introductions to the game engine Unity, to increasing accessibility, to game creation as activism. “It’s in this way that, when we have activism workshops and intro to Unity workshops, we place them as equally as important,” Wallin says.
“There had to be quite a lot of thought to how do we make it not game dev centric, and how do we make it not U.S. centric, cause both of those things are really easy to slip into,” Wallin says.
Darby Machin was one of the hundreds of creators who decided to put their game-making talents towards Resist Jam. They and two co-designers made Pivotal. “Voices in unison are always more powerful than one by itself, and seeing the passion and creativity of the Resist Jam organizers and participants really just hit home to me that this was something I had to be involved in,” Machin says.
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