A Tale of Creativity and Struggles: Team Practices for Bottom-Up Innovation in Virtual Game Jams

Game jams are intense and time-sensitive online or face-to-face game creation events where a digital game is developed in a relatively short time frame (typically 48 to 72 hours) exploring given design constraints and end results are shared publicly. They have increasingly become emerging sites where non-professional game developers, amateurs, and hobbyists engage in bottom-up technological innovation by collaboratively designing and developing more creative and novel digital products. Drawing on 28 interviews, in this paper we focus on how game developers collaborate as small teams to innovate game design and development from the bottom up in virtual game jams (i.e., exclusively online) and the unique role of virtual game jams in their technological innovation. We contribute to CSCW by providing new empirical evidence of how team practices for innovation may emerge in a novel technology community that is not widely studied before. We also expand a growing research agenda in CSCW on explicating nuanced social behaviors, processes, and consequences of bottom-up technological innovation.