A whistlestop tour of the Serious Slow Game Jam model. The SSGJ is an inclusive, collaborative, creative framework which allows rigorous interdisciplinary serious game design suitable for the wider research community. Come play with our resources, and find out how you could use the SSGJ in your own work…

Game Jams contribute to creative, innovative and collaborative design, however, to use game jams for serious games, an alternative model is needed that integrates domain experts to ensure design/content validity. Furthermore, a rigorous yet accessible design methodology is required to balance pedagogic and game aspects (Aibara, 2020, Goddard et al, 2014). The Serious Slow Game Jam (SSGJ) model provides a highly rigorous, structured framework that would take 5 – 6 days in practice but you can get a taste of it from dropping into our foyer session throughout the conference.

You will have the opportunity to interrogate the model in detail, have a quick go at discrete activities of particular interest, and play with the resources that are released with the SSGJ model. These include three card decks: a discipline specific deck (in our case, cybersecurity-themed); a Learning Mechanics deck; and a Game Mechanics deck (Arnab et al, 2015). These decks are used within the framework to map subject knowledge to appropriate serious game mechanics and increase the rigour of designed games. Participants may undertake an (extremely!) rapid version of the main design phases of the SSGJ using these card decks and investigate the relationships between them.

We will also share reflections on the advantages and limitations of the SSGJ model and you can offer suggestions and guidance for how we can release the model in a format that supports adaption to any subject and is most beneficial to the serious games research community. You can also make suggestions of what support/guidance material you may need to run successful Serious Slow Game Jams yourself.