As I settle into the plush seat of my sleeper car, a game development student from Australia sitting across from me, I feel an intense sense of my own smallness. Claustrophobia has a strong foothold deep on an Amtrak train; you realize very distinctly that you're in a cramped metal tube with no way off. And in this case, rolling out of Chicago on a late February day, through the unrelenting grayness of the city's outskirts, the coming journey seems unending.
Our goal, more than four days away, is California. First the Bay Area city of Emeryville, and then onward to the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. But during the 52 hours of our journey, the people on board—the more than 300 designers, programmers, artists, writers, and musicians—will have another goal, one that will eat sleep, time, and all the energy they have to spare. It's the reason they all got on this train in the first place: they want to make videogames.
This is Train Jam.
Game jams, like hackathons, are finite, coordinated campaigns—a chance for developers to formulate and execute an idea much more quickly than they normally would. Intense and usually rushed, often with a theme that constrains creativity even more, game jams can be a source of incredible strain. Train Jam, though, by juxtaposing its challenge with the leisurely experience of a long train ride, seems designed to minimize some of that anxiety.
The event is the brainchild of developer Adriel Wallick, who started Train Jam after a cross-country train trip she took in 2013; she found the trip created a refreshing ideational space, a relaxing break with little internet and nothing but the scenery to distract her from playing and creating games. Now in its fourth year, Train Jam attempts to capture the spirit of that original trip, giving creators a stress-free environment that allows them to explore while they hurtle toward GDC, the largest professional event of the year for anyone involved in creating videogames.
That creation takes all forms. As we prepare to depart Grand Union Station in Chicago, gathered in a large Victorian-style lounge, Elie Abraham walks around the room holding a big posterboard sign reading, in big bold letters, "I want to make music for your game!" Immediately—before creators start to lump themselves into small teams, before the jam's theme is even announced—people rush to take Abraham up on the offer.
Abraham is bright, energetic, and ambitious, with a shirt to match: it's covered with Gremlins. "Isn't it amazing?" they say. (Abraham, who is genderqueer, prefers the pronoun they.) Based in Finland, Abraham tells me that this is the first time they've been in the United States in five years, since graduating college, and they were nervous to return. Between the US' vacillating border-control policies and the possibility of gender-based discrimination—not to mention general anxiety about whether GDC and Train Jam would feel welcoming—their worries aren't far from the surface. "People were asking me if I was going to the States on vacation," Abraham says. "Hello no. This is not the time I would choose to go to America just for fun."
As the greeting period winds down and the Amtrak staff preps the passengers for departure, Walick comes to the front of the room to introduce this year's theme: Unexpected Anticipation. The sense that you're waiting for something, but you're not quite sure what. It's not the most evocative theme, vague and emotive as it is, but Adriel explains that the theme is based on the our journey itself. The western states we'll be traveling through have been gripped by blizzards and other extreme weather events for a couple of weeks now, jeopardizing our route; only this morning did we learn for sure that we wouldn't be re-routed along a detour that would have added 10 hours to the ride (and the jam).
Theme in hand, attendees cluster and re-cluster, formulating groups based on common ideas and the complementary skills needed to see them through. Pamela Figueroa, a young developer from Bolivia, quickly finds a team to work with, and I watch as the group---strangers up until minutes ago---begin to sketch out ideas for a two-player game on a Surface tablet. This goes on for a few minutes, then it's time to board a train.
The first day on the train is devoted to settling in and getting to work—which, on a train, can be challenging. Internet is spotty, if it exists at all; there's no on-board wifi at all, meaning that you're stuck with ambient signals picked up from the surrounding lands and whatever lousy reception your phone can pick up. The train is effectively an island, one that cuts off programmers, artists, and designers from integral resources: documentation and support for their game engines and various coding languages. The hardship goes beyond technological impotence; the train itself is hostile, prone to jittery movement that jostles computer screens and sends anything unsecured tumbling out of reach.
I settle in the observation car, where large, panoramic windows frame the outside world as it passes. The space, which is typically for leisurely sight-seeing, becomes an impromptu shared office space. Teams huddle over cramped tables strewn with laptops and MIDI keyboards, bulky specialized keyboards and drawing tablets filling every inch of space. No outlet goes unused. Throughout the trip, I linger here as much as possible, to watch and listen to people as they work, but I'm often forced to retreat into other parts of the train due to a sheer lack of space.
I spend most of the first afternoon sitting across from Abraham, who's been going up and down the train, taking requests for music. Instead of working on one game, they tell me, they want to contribute a bit to everything, meeting as many people and making as many connections as possible. After one trip down the length of the Amtrak superliner, they already have plenty to do. They dance while they work, occasionally sharing samples of what they're working on---first a 16-bit hiphoppy track for a 2D brawler idea, all motion and groove, then a glam fashion party tune, on and on.
Figueroa sits nearby with her team, building a version of a Wild West standoff: two cowboys on the top of a train, each waiting to draw their weapon. This being a game jam, though, there's a twist. The two players need to share a single controller in order to play, an innovative conceit that will force them into a physical contest as well as a digital one. Silliness runs rampant as well; the guns will shoot gag objects instead of bullets, and if no one fires… well, I promised I wouldn't tell. You'll have to play to find out.
The workflow moves through Pamela's five-person team. First, create a working prototype in the game-creation software suite Unity. Use placeholder assets in order to get all the features running in at least a semi-recognizable form. That's the first day's work; then it's time to fill in the details. Animations, logos, real character art. See how far you get—hopefully you'll end up with something that works.
Meanwhile, the scenery scrolls by. The California Zephyr route carves a west-southwesterly path from Chicago, passing through Illinois towns like Naperville and Galesburg before heading west in earnest. Iowa, Missouri, Nebraska, the Rockies. Travelling through the United States this way can be eerie; when you're uncoupled from roads, the countryside moves independent of your own trajectory. Even new scenery becomes familiar, homes and schools and big-box commerce and corner stores wherever you go. Moving into rural territory is a relief, like something has come to life. Here we are, in the oldest form of industrial land transport, passing through beautiful, vast swaths of the most preserved parts of the country's natural landscape, and we've hacked it all into a game development studio.
As we pass into Iowa, we all look up momentarily to gaze at the wide shores of the Mississippi River. Then everyone gets back to work. It's early, after all. There's too much to do.
The metabolism of a game jam leads to certain structural similarities. Short gestation and shorter delivery means the offspring tends toward simple play mechanics, using easily accessible technology and the most straightforward hacks designers can come up with. They tend to be both silly and deeply strange: half playful blue-sky imagination, half ideas too provocative to find a place in games with a real life-cycle.
The titles under development all around me embody that oddness perfectly. Next to me, creators Alex Zandra and Ashley Nicollette are creating a game that will eventually be called Entertain My Alien Guests, I'll Be Right Back, a multitasking game about, yes, entertaining aliens at a party. An developer named Creatrix Tiara is in the midst of What the $!#&@! Do They Need Now?, about traveling in the age of the Muslim Ban; there's also Schrodinger's Litterbox, an augmented reality title that uses a touch screen to simulate the experience of trying to pet an invisible cat. Perhaps my personal favorite, though, is Ghost Dentist VR, which combines a VR headset and a custom jaw-based sensor for a game where you, as a ghost, possess people and force them to do dental work on themselves. All told, they're a mixture of creative, surprising, and transgressive.
As one day turns into another, though, the mood grows more sedate. Figueroa and her fellow programmer take to sleeping in shifts, to better get the work done without sacrificing basic rest. Elie Abraham, meanwhile, takes longer and longer breaks from work, trying to balance the need to create with the other compelling aspects of the trip. "I don't want to be parked in front of my laptop all weekend," they tell me. "I realized I really also just want to hang out with people."
The urge is understandable. The train hosts an impressive variety and level of talent, from students just figuring out what types of things they want to make to industry veterans looking for a space to breathe and tinker. There's also a substantial number of gender nonconforming, transgender, and non-binary individuals on the train—myself and Abraham included—and there seems to be a significant concerted effort by everyone involved to treat this as what it should be: normal. Even the Amtrak staff calls me by my preferred pronouns.
Train Jam, then, has the feeling of both a limitless creative exploration and an intimate social event, both workshop and slumber party. As we pass through multiple time zones and into the mountains, it's easy to lose a sense of time and just focus on the aesthetics of it. Frantic typing, the hushed exchange of ideas. Some laughter. When the final day rolls around and the jam enters its last hours, the mood is almost mellow. Snow streams down around us through Utah and Nevada, and the surroundings finally begin to pull attention away from game development. The conductor describes the history of the canyons and mountain ranges we're passing through.
"This is very different from how I normally do game jams," Pamela Figueroa says. "Usually, they're very stressful, and the last two hours swing around and I'm, like, ahhhh! This is so different. It's been amazing, to be able to do this in a way where I can just calmly do something I love." Travel, and motion in general, has a galvanizing effect on creativity. The train's quiet journey becomes a metaphor, a useful distraction, a salve for boredom and frustration. Peaks and valleys, winding roads and small oases of civilization in the middle of nowhere. By the time we finally pull into the station in Emeryville, Elie Abraham has recorded nine tracks for as many games and Figuero has finished her team's gunfighting game.
Speaking days later after GDC, both Elie and Pamela have unambiguously positive things to say about their journey. "Seeing into game development by travelling to such a big event was eye-opening, even though I had been making games for a few years," Abraham says. "I got a better idea for how it is these people interact with each other. I got a sense of how to do you in this high-level-of-entry field that I didn't have before." They'll continue their work, they say, as part of the international development team Ian & Elie.
Figueroa, meanwhile, will go back to Bolivia with a stronger sense of international focus—and a new network of friends to lean on as her career progresses. "Last year when I went to GDC, I felt like I was on the outside looking in at these creators who were super awesome," she says, "This time, it felt like I went in with a community." The games, like so many others, may fade, but the creativity that spawned them lives on.
