The Global Game Jam team is proud to present a message from the legendary Sid Meier to all participants and friends of GGJ. Sid Meier gives a short, but tongue in cheek advice on how to become a great game designer.

World Record Breaking Event to take place January 25-27, 2013

SAN LUIS OBISPO, Calif. – January 15, 2012 - Global Game Jam Inc.™ today announced an incredible line-up of speakers for this year’s keynote. The Global Game Jam™ annually presents cutting edge speakers and this year’s line-up promises to keep with that tradition. On board to motivate this year’s jammers are Erin Robinson, award winning indie game designer and Bret Victor, inventor & designer of experimental UI concepts at Apple.

The video keynotes are being translated into more than 15 languages to be shown in over 300 locations in 63 countries around the world. The keynotes go live in every location at 5pm January 25th, shortly thereafter the package will be posted to the Global Game Jam YouTube Channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/globalgamejam If you go to the channel now, you can see the GGJ teaser trailer which was created by Adam Barenblat & Amanda Ligman from Cause and FX - A Creative Workshop.

The Global Game Jam encourages all kinds of games: Computer, console, smartphone, boardgames, card games, and pretty much everything else too, including geocaches! 

This week Elonka Dunin, one of the Global Game Jam Directors, and an avid geocacher herself, is interviewed on the largest geocaching podcast in the world, Podcacher. Geocaching is a rapidly growing worldwide game which started in May 2000. There are currently nearly two million geocaches hidden around the world, and five million people playing the game, hiding and finding these caches.

In this interview, Elonka explains to the geocaching community what a game jam is, how jam sites can potentially be organized, and how geocachers may want to join game jams to create complex geocaches such as multi-caches and digital GPS adventures known as Wherigos.

On January 25-27 hundreds of game makers around the world

will create games for social impact in a single weekend

New York - January 9, 2013 - Global Game Jam Inc.™ (GGJ) today announced a new partnership with Games for Change (G4C), to celebrate G4C’s 10^th anniversary and allow GGJ13 participants from all over the world to visit sites that focus specifically on positive social impact.  Jesse Schell, renowned game designer, author and Carnegie Mellon Professor will deliver a special video keynote to launch this unique effort on January 25^th.

Through this partnership, GGJ site organizers will be offered the opportunity to register their site as a “G4C” site, and invite participants to create innovative digital games that go beyond entertainment. G4C has a purpose to raise awareness around real-world issues, promote learning, change behavior or recruit other players to support a cause.

With a record 275 sites already registered, the annual event has successfully enlisted new “G4C”-dedicated sites including the MIT Game Lab, the School of Visual Arts in New York, the Art Institute of Portland, George Mason University in Virginia, Bento Miso in Toronto Canada, Akademia Leona Koźmińskiego in Warsaw Poland, the University of Sao Paulo Brazil.

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By now, it has become an annual tradition. When do we surpass last year's record? This actually happened in December: We officially broke our own Guinness record for the largest game jam in the world. So far we have approved 269 jam sites in 57 nations. Another one (Greece) is being processed right now and is expected to be our 58th. We could actually see more by GGJ 2013. See our live status or our list of locations.

Including Greece, GGJ welcomes first-time participation in 10 new countries: Bolivia, Chile, Egypt, Greece, India, Macedonia, Morocco, Nigeria, Serbia and Tunisia. In the past GGJ had locations in Iceland, Northern Ireland, Pakistan and Portugal, bringing to total number of countries GGJ has ever had presence in to 62.

GGJ now has now put up a tech talks page, where participants can watch introductory talks from our sponsors. The page is available here. The first talk, from our Gold Sponsor Mixamo is embedded below 

SAN LUIS OBISPO, Calif. - December 20, 2012 - Global Game Jam Inc.™ (GGJ) announced that character creation and animation innovator Mixamo will be a sponsor of the upcoming Global Game Jam 2013.

The Global Game Jam is proud to announce GGJ Radio. GGJ Radio will be streaming from the Global Game Jam servers and anyone who wants to listen can do so.

GGJ Radio will go online when the Global Game Jam starts at 5 PM in New Zealand, and will turn off when the last location finishes in the western Americas.