I was pretty pleased with myself when I got Roach to run. My 8-year-old sister, however, was addicted to Nibbles, the Snake clone that came with MS-DOS as a demonstration of QBasic, and didn’t care about my bug game at all. “You know what would be cooler?” she said. “Roaches IN Nibbles!”

My hacked Nibbles variant was impossible to play (the roach scurried around the screen and ran into the snake’s tail, ending the game within seconds). But we had arrived at that first magical checkpoint on the difficult path to productive collaboration, or group flow. We had a desire to make something together—and the together part was not incidental and not optional.

My sister was impressed with my BASIC fu. And I liked having direction. Our next collaboration was works of LaserWriter II art via Dr Halo and Kid Pix. I helmed the mouse, she told me what she wanted to see. I interpreted her vision (“Murderous hawks!”) and managed the business, knocking on doors and bartering our work for brownies and baby bunnies (our neighbors ran a rabbit mill… our attempts to liberate them later the same summer would make a great game—the emergency room level would be especially difficult!).

We didn’t know what to call it, but we’d figured out how to flow together.

You guys know what flow is. It’s that hyper-productive state you find yourself in when you’re completely immersed in your work. You’re neither bored nor frustrated by the challenge in front of you. You effortlessly build on small successes; time distorts and you’re at peak creativity, able to concentrate perfectly despite would-be distractions swirling around you. I see people in flow every day at Miso.

Can we replicate the conditions required for individual flow to rise above the difficulties of group work, and create better things together?

Trying again

After participating in a not-so-successful jam in February, I didn’t have much interest in doing it again. Despite completing three games in a 48-hour period, the experience was unsatisfying for me. Some of that can be chalked up to jam noobishness, but I think our completely desynchronized mental states harmed us more than lack of food or sleep.

It was a novel way to spend a weekend, but unfulfilling for some reason. And anyway, I didn’t have any ideas of my own.

Euphrates

Not being an endless fount of brilliant game ideas is a strange thing in Miso-land, where concepts flow like rhymes at a rap battle.

Well, I had one, but it took a little push to think of it as a “game.”

Last fall, I read an article about coming to terms with the end of the space age. We’re never going to colonize faraway earthlike planets; cryogenic stasis and faster-than-light travel are improbabilities. Our migration from this system to escape its inevitable destruction (or simply for the imperialistic fun of it) will never happen.

The subsequent comment uproar was telling. Americans are romantics in denial.

I thought there could be something compelling in answering this romanticism with a desolate, slyly hopeful narrative, constructed through textual interactions, subtle audio and visual cues that wandered from their starting points without the player noticing until it was far too late. Could an interactive story “play” the player, leave him feeling as solitary and hopeless as the astronauts in my favorite Ray Bradbury short story, as they hurtled away from each other and into oblivion after their ship explodes? (“Kaleidoscope”)

I had an idea, but not a game. So how do you get from here to there? You create a framework for group flow, and see what happens.

Clear Collective Goals

My workflow, despite continuous refinement and the occasional bottom-to-top refactoring, is pretty close to what it was 10 years ago. But there is a cost to this efficiency and familiarity: Fewer side-project-sized gaps between sprints, and close to zero clear-headspace afternoons to dream up and execute fun, useless ideas. This is part of the appeal of a jam, for me. It’s a (self-)mandated, time-limited side project. But the only way it can produce something worthwhile—and not just lead to resentment over a lost weekend—is if everyone is working toward a clear collective goal. And with a new project or team, you might have to embarrass yourself to make that goal painfully clear.

At Bento Box, our projects span months and years. Despite family-like bonds with our partners, we still have to work constantly at ensuring our goals as individuals are understood and aligned as the parameters of our projects change. We have the luxury of time, but we still need to understand whether the work we’re doing is bringing us closer to our pushing us away from our desired outcomes.

In a jam, there is no time to fuss with divergent plans, assumptions, and egos. The chance for total failure is very high. But the real-world risk and cost is low, making it an ideal way to practice group flow.

You are in pure content-creation mode. Your purpose—specific enough that everyone knows whether they’re on track but open-ended enough to allow for interplay and creative breakthroughs—has been voiced and reiterated and documented. That goal becomes your mantra, your sole focus. There’s no question each participant knows and is dedicated to it. You will find out very quickly how well the group understood the goal and whether individuals were able to prioritize it over personal flow.

Our TOJam goal was not to have the most unique gameplay, the biggest game, or the freshest story concept. It was simply to have a complete, playable game by 8 p.m. on Sunday. Constrained enough to require intense focus, but open enough to allow for endless on-the-fly creative departures.

Equal Participation, Equal Control

I still prefer to work the way I did with my little sister, listening hard to clients’ and friends’ ideas, getting to the heart of their inspiration and building tools and processes to help bring their stuff to life; creating the language, spinning the story. But top-down control is not the point—group flow requires participants have equal control.

It’s difficult to derive satisfaction from an unequal collaboration because each individual will struggle with tempo, logistics, and managing each other’s expectations instead of producing. If there’s hierarchy, there are egos—and with egos there is no balance. Even as a pixel pusher, I am as much a creator as the visionary in the partnership (my little sister, a client, a jam team). If there’s a large disparity in abilities, there’s frustration—and with frustration there’s no momentum. If you have to spend your time teaching or adjusting your ambitions, you’re not building.

Let everyone contribute equally, and you’ll develop a strong group identity that will let you think and act in crazy creative solidarity.

Trust & familiarity

If you have the chance, in the weeks before you get down to business, build bonds with your teammates and your tools. Play games, drink beer, hash things out, master your workflow. Create a bolster of trust and familiarity to make it easy to dismiss doubt, which can insidiously and irreversibly erode energy and focus. Lack of confidence in your technical tools can be just as undermining.

Trust your team members to have good gut instincts and to manage their own flow state with whatever they’re working on. Knowing that each person is really good—the best, at that moment, for the job—at crafting their piece and integrating it with the whole, that they are in tune with the purpose and mechanics of the project—is liberating and motivating, and that momentum feeds back into the group. In the heat of a jam, everyone is fully invested, undistracted and constantly tuning their creative output to serve the collective goal.

Understanding each other’s communication style, strengths, and interests allows you to respond rapidly to one another, fulfilling the personal flow requirement for immediate feedback.

Keep Going

Momentum is jam currency. Nothing jeopardizes the project like someone who has dropped out of flow. If you’re out of sync, you’re unable to build on others’ work and move the project closer to its conclusion. At best, jumping back in will be impossible, and at worst, require everyone else to slow down or stop. Keep talking about where things are at, what needs doing. Continuously evaluate your status and provide teammates with feedback.

Finished a task? Chase a pie-in-the-sky idea for a few minutes. That doesn’t mean don’t sleep—jam veterans will sternly warn all but the whipper-snapperiest of participants against pulling all-nighters. It means always be building on and refining the last good thing you did, searching for the next brilliant thread.

Fear Failure

Unless you plan very carefully and have a lot of experience, you’re probably going to fail. This is the point. Don’t ignore it. Don’t assume you’ll succeed. The most valuable thing a tight deadline offers is a near-guarantee of total failure. Harness that terror and use it to drive you toward highly refined collaborative processes with your team.

There are so many channels for setting the tone in a game—player controls, language and story, animations, graphics style, music and effects. Pulling all of these elements together to make something that is actually interesting, compelling and cohesive is a discipline all its own. Planning for that starts with mapping individual capabilities and strengths to group output, creating the conditions for group flow—and then practicing at every opportunity.

It was pretty fun to roleplay art director for Euphrates. I got to fill a role I’m not usually interested in, and it reminded me of what I really want to do while exposing me to the challenges of game production in a group.

What I do, and why we’re reading about women in games

As a front-end designer/developer, what I do touches on many aspects of delivering Web products to end users—from content, to interaction and experience design, to code. I am lucky to have a job like this, because I really dislike the idea of being a cog in a machine, doing my one piece of work over and over again, without my nose and fingers in every other part of the project. This is partially because I like to know that every bit of the work is being done right, or at least in a way that I can totally wrap my mind around and fully understand. The end product is much more likely to be coherent if the team has this conceptual unity.

So, I am interested in how people can find comfortable scale in their work, whether they are making games or publishing books or creating other digital experiences. People newly interested in creating games have it pretty good in this regard. Tools to create complete games have become really accessible—easy to learn, affordable, and available on multiple operating systems. The community is supportive of newcomers. If you have an idea and the gumption to pursue it, you can create a complete game artifact, finished to your own spec. (Whether that is commerically viable, or even interesting to anyone else, is beside the point.)

This new accessibility is especially beneficial to women, who have had to overcome more than just technological barriers to break into games. These barriers are how women are portrayed, how they are treated as players, and the environments and situations they find themselves in as creators in game studios.

My—possibly skewed—perspective

I grew up with women game creators (Roberta Williams), characters (Rosella!), and players (all my friends).

I played a MUD when I was in elementary school with a coworker of my dad’s daughter, who was a bit older than I was. She stopped playing quite suddenly. Later, I found out she thought I was a boy, and she was self-conscious of her slow typing. Would she have kept on if she’d known I was a girl?

This is my only personal anecdote about gender and gaming. My female game-playing friends find this shocking, and based on the reading I’ve done over the last few months, I think it’s unusual. My perspective is really narrow, as I’ve been fortunate enough to have been given access to games and computers my entire life. As far I can tell, my experiences gaming have been as privileged as your average middle-class North American boy’s. I am curious if this is an accurate assumption. If it is, it could be that exposing women’s perspectives on these issues could help people with similarly privileged relationships with video games understand and empathize with those who have not.

Only in the last year or so has the drastically different experience of many—most?—women my age and younger dawned on me. Were many other young women shamed out of playing, like my MUD-buddy? Frightened to even try? How did those childhood experiences shape their relationship with gaming as adults? How do games, and the women involved with them as producers and creators, continue to shape those experiences?

That’s what we’re talking about at Women as Game Players, Characters, and Creators, a No Reading After the Internet event.

Here are the original sources from which we chose our excerpts:

• ‘Women are treated better than men online,’ says NerdBoobLoot-man
• I’m An Anonymous Woman Gamer
• Cheerleaders/booth babes/Halo hoes
• Immoral Women
• Shooting Female Enemies Isn’t Icky
• The Gendering of Computer Gaming: Experience and Space
• Video: Erin Robinson
• 18 to 35
• Roberta Williams interview

So, in late December, a month before officially opening our doors, we began looking for ways we could put our resources where our ideals are. By looking to existing communities for support and direction, we’ve gotten to meet some really great people pulling off some incredible stuff. We are super honored to have been able to support these three recent initiatives:

Dames Making Games

We came across Zoe Quinn and Cecily Carver at the TIFF Nexus Women in Film, Games and New Media Conference on Dec. 9, 2011. As panelists at the unveiling of the Difference Engine Initiative games, Zoe and Cecily announced that they’d been so inspired by the initiative, they’d decided to form their own organization to support more women wanting to learn to make games. Dames Making Games' first project launched January 1—#JAMuary, a month-long game jam with 14 women making games for the first time. We jumped at the chance to host them at Miso!

We want Miso to be welcoming and comfortable for anyone and everyone—but especially those in under-represented groups in technology, such as women—who wants to learn and get work done in a collaborative environment. Providing a place for mentors to share space and time with eager learners is extremely exciting for us and beneficial to the community forming here.

Our first four weekends at Miso have been filled with bleeps and bloops, enthusiastic cheers at every breakthrough, and truly supportive teachers spending their free time passing on their knowledge and experience. We couldn’t have asked for a better group to break in Miso!

Lean Startup Machine

Carolyn Van, founder of thirdocean, is a mover, a shaker, and a connector. She picked up on the connection between what we do at Bento Box (build businesses), at Bento Miso (provide a space for ideas to grow), and the nascent interest in applying Lean principles to startup strategy. A few long conversations at Miso (and brief ones over Twitter) later, and we were signed on to sponsor a lunch workshop at Lean Startup Machine Toronto, a weekend crash-course in implementing Lean Startup principles.

Individuals pitched ideas, formed teams, validated their ideas, and built MVPs. We are advocates of the test-your-assumptions, create-no-waste way of building Web-based businesses, and are proud to support others willing to commit to being disciplined about turning ideas and energy into sustainable businesses.

To give teams a fighting chance beyond the competition, we’ve offered 10 individuals keen to further develop their business free access to Miso for one month following the event.

Global Game Jam Toronto

We can’t think of a better city in the world to be an indie game developer. This community is creatively diverse, supportive, energetic, and smart.

In December, Zoe introduced us to Troy Morrissey of Darc Productions. Troy, an interactive audio designer, had recently taken the helm of the local edition of the Global Game Jam worldwide event. We tripped over ourselves to provide energy-sustaining snack packs for the jammers during the 48-hour gamemaking intensive.

We understand the multi-disciplinary creativity required to take your idea from spark to playable (and enjoyable!) game. We want to support any #GGJTo-ers who want to take their game to the next level and turn their efforts and ideas into something bigger. We’re offering all participants 50% off their first three months as Miso members.