It’s the beginning of the second day of the Global Game Jam here at Miami. If you’re unfamiliar with the Global Game Jam, it’s a pretty simple idea — a group of teams gets together at a location somewhere in the world, finds out this year’s theme and constraints, and then has 48 hours to plan, prototype, develop, and finally upload a working game. It’s happening at over one hundred sites around the world from Las Vegas to Malaysia to Guinea-Bisseau, and Miami’s site is the only one in Ohio. Lindsay Grace has done the phenomenal work of organizing the first Global Game Jam at Miami, and I’m hanging around, helping the participants hash through their ideas, giving feedback on designs, and (trying to) do what I can to keep the trains running on time.

We’ve got 24 people participating from around the state — a cluster of students drove down from Columbus College of Art and Design, a number of local area high school students signed up, a good chunk of Miami students (and Interactive Media Studies in particular), and one Miami faculty member is participating. Their five teams so far have run the gamut in terms of game style, implementation, and goals — this year’s theme is “deception,” and all participants need to make a game that somehow addresses this theme. We’ve got a real-time strategy/”god game” combo that’s in the works, a side-scroller in which players have to attempt to deceive nearby opponents, a game that’s using sound (via microphones) as one of the primary means of interaction, and a couple others that I haven’t talked to lately so who knows what awesome ideas they’ve come up with in the past few hours?

Our Game Jam started off yesterday evening with an opening chat with Johnny Wilson, of DePaul University’s College of Computing and Digital Media and former editor of Computer Gaming World. Soon after, we split the crowd into clusters according to expertise (programmers, artists, and designers), and let them mill about for a while until they found a team they thought they could work with.

This quickly led to five groups being formed, and then the fun, crazy, sometimes contentious task of coming up with a game design began — for some groups, this came together quickly (far too quickly, which we tried to pull people back from. A group or two bounced around ideas for a good six or so hours before settling on something, which we prodded them into further developing. This led to some great ideas, some lousy ideas, and a number in-between being worked on through the night.

I just showed back up here about a half hour ago, and most of the groups seem to have something basic coded and playable — basic game mechanics have been settled on (at least a first pass), some basic sprites are being designed, some rendering of more complex game art is underway. Most of the Miami students seem to have gone home to sleep, with a number of the CCAD students pulling all-nighters, and a couple of the high school kids asleep in one of the classrooms. We have the entire first floor of Benton Hall and in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences to use, with computers out the wazoo and dev tools ranging from XNA to Unity to Maya and GameMaker.

All the while, we’ve been trying to pay attention to other GGJ sites and see what they’ve been up to — most of the sites have been broadcasting streaming video, which we’ve had up on an HDTV screen in one of our classrooms.

And, of course, we’ve contributed with our own live stream of the same room — which, for a while last night, turned into a testament to caffeine consumption.

It looks like my pals at Games+Learning+Society in Madison have their own Global Game Jam site, and have had a couple of teams working late into the night (they also have a live stream, too, though it’s gone black at the moment). It’s great to check out what people around the world are doing as they’re doing it; the variety of people, places, and tools used in this game jam is phenomenal. Things like this highlight that gaming — and game design — are truly international and global activities. Glad we get to help put Miami on that map.

We’ve got a busy second day ahead of us, with a couple of visiting speakers and the students from Miami’s Video Game Design Club stopping in to help out, then hopefully some playtesting before the final push. I’ll update more as we move along here in Day Two!