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Game Jam Winner Spotlight: Letters To Cthulhu

from the gaming-like-it's-1928 dept

And here we are! We’ve arrived at the end of our series of posts looking at the winners of the sixth annual public domain game jam, Gaming Like It’s 1928! We’ve already featured Best Visuals winner Flight from Podunk Station and Best Adaptation winner Mickey Party, Best Remix winner The Burden Of Creation, Best and Deep Cut winner Solar Storm 1928, and Best Digital Game winner Millions of Cats, and today we’re looking at our sixth and final game, Best Analog Game winner Letters To Cthulhu by Lucienne Impala.

A small tabletop roleplaying game is an excellent project to undertake for a jam like this, as putting one together requires nothing more than a clear theme and some written rules, but that doesn’t mean making a good one is easy. To stand out, such a game needs to shine in at least one way whether that’s highly engaging written content for the setting and characters, or rich and interesting rules that suggest gameplay depth, or — as is often the most impressive, and as is the case with Lucienne Impala’s Letters to Cthulhu — a creative and clever core mechanic that brings the entire thing into focus.

The game, which is based on the H. P. Lovecraft story of the same name and the broader mythos of his works, puts players in the shoes (or robes) of Cthulhu cultists trying to communicate with their dark god. There’s a thematic core that’s essential to this kind of Lovecraftian story and setting: a roiling mixture of ambition, avarice, fear, power, awe, and madness. Lovecraft explored these themes through dozens of stories, while the game takes them on in a mere ten pages of rules.

The game is simple: one player takes on the role of Cthulhu, and will serve as the judge of the outcome, while the rest are tasked with composing the letter that will be judged. The group’s goal is to bring Cthulhu forth into the world, but each cultist is also randomly assigned a secret desire of their own, and each contributes just one sentence to the letter as it’s passed around the group. And there’s a twist: each cultist also has a specific way in which they can alter the previous sentence.

How they use this power (and if they use it at all) is up to them — will they try to manipulate the letter to ensure their own desires are fulfilled, or try to stymie the greed of others and keep the group on track towards its shared goal? Perhaps both, or neither. It becomes a monstrously corrupted game of telephone, where every link in the chain matters. The balance of desires in the final letter will determine the outcome, as the player representing Cthulhu uses a few simple rules (and a lot of freeform narrative creativity) to decide the fate that befalls the group and each individual.

The game is designed to move relatively quickly so it can be played more than once, each time with different players taking on the role of Cthulhu and different desires for all the cultists, and it’s best played with a larger group of 6-8 people. The tense, paranoid, conniving dynamic the game creates is subtle and specific to its source material, and is successfully established by just a few pages of rules that anyone can learn in moments. That kind of design elegance is always worth of note, and earns Letters to Cthulhu the title of Best Analog Game.

Congratulations to Lucienne Impala for the win! You can get everything you need to play Letters to Cthulhu on Itch, plus don’t forget to check out the other winners as well as the many great entries that didn’t quite make the cut!

And that’s a wrap on this year’s winner spotlights. A huge thanks to everyone who submitted a game this year! We’ll be back next January, as always, with Gaming Like It’s 1929 — and whether you’ve entered the jam before or are thinking about doing it for the first time, it’s never too early to start exploring the many great works that will be entering the public domain in 2025.

Filed Under: copyright, game jam, games, gaming, public domain, winner spotlight

Game Jam Winner Spotlight: Millions Of Cats

from the gaming-like-it's-1928 dept

We’re closing in on the end of our series of spotlight posts looking at the winners of the sixth annual public domain game jam, Gaming Like It’s 1928! We’ve already featured Best Visuals winner Flight from Podunk Station and Best Adaptation winner Mickey Party, Best Remix winner The Burden Of Creation, Best and Deep Cut winner Solar Storm 1928, and today we’re looking at the winner of Best Digital Game: Millions of Cats by Javi Muhrer, Chris Muhrer & McCoy Khamphouy.

Most of the submissions we receive in these jams come from solo designers, but this game is a powerful demonstration of what a small team can accomplish. By splitting up the tasks (Javi Muhrer did the programming, Chris Muhrer designed the levels, and McCoy Khamphouy created the art) were able to achieve something fairly rare in the jam: a complete video game, built from the ground up with all original elements. Based on the early American picture book of the same name by Wanda Gag, Millions of Cats is a classic puzzle platformer that offers everything you’d expect from such a title: a clever core mechanic that’s easy to understand and seems simple at first, but which must be used in increasingly creative and thoughtful ways through a series of increasingly challenging levels.

As the player, you control the character described in the original book only as “the very old man”, who is plagued and/or blessed by avid followers in the form of unlimited cats. With a button press, you can spawn more and more cats to trail behind you and copying your actions, and though you can’t control them directly, with some clever movement you can maneuver them to press buttons and help you reach the end of each level. Your score can be increased by using as few cats as possible, adding a great “find the true solution” challenge that gives puzzle games like this more replay value.

After a couple of levels, it quickly becomes clear how this mechanic can easily serve as the engine for all kinds of puzzles. That alone would be a satisfying prototype and more than enough for a game jam entry — the kind of thing a solo developer could pull off too. But this small team didn’t stop there. By having a dedicated level designer, they were able to include a pretty full slate of levels (I’m not quite sure of the final count, as I didn’t get to the end!) that explore several aspects of the core mechanic. Level design is so critical to puzzle platformers like this, so it really pays off. And while all this could have been presented with placeholder graphics or something generic, instead we get handcrafted original sprites and backgrounds, and even a custom title treatment for the game.

Overall, this is probably the most ambitious video game project we’ve had as an entry in these game jams, and it absolutely lives up to that ambition. That’s a testament not just to the skill and talent of the individual designers, but also to their ability to organize and coordinate a development project like this while each focuses on their area of expertise. It’s no surprise that Millions of Cats is this year’s Best Digital Game.

Congratulations to Javi Muhrer, Chris Muhrer & McCoy Khamphouy for the win! You can play Millions of Cats in your browser on Itch, plus don’t forget to check out the other winners as well as the many great entries that didn’t quite make the cut! We’ll be back next week with the final winner spotlight.

Filed Under: game jam, games, gaming, gaming like it's 1928, public domain, winner spotlight

Game Jam Winner Spotlight: Solar Storm 1928

from the gaming-like-it's-1928 dept

We’re past the halfway mark in our series of spotlight posts looking at the winners of the sixth annual public domain game jam, Gaming Like It’s 1928! We’ve already featured Best Visuals winner Flight from Podunk Station and Best Adaptation winner Mickey Party, and Best Remix winner The Burden Of Creation, and today we’re taking a look at the winner of Best Deep Cut: Solar Storm 1928 by David Harris.

As you probably know, David has been a repeat winner in this jam ever since his first entry, and Solar Storm 1928 continues his track record of submitting games that blow our mind with their creativity and uniqueness. It’s a tabletop game that forges a connection between two very different works from 1928: Buckminster Fuller’s design for the Dymaxion House (a futuristic home design that sought to “maximum gain of advantage from minimal energy input”) and a huge collection of sketches from astronomers at the Mt. Wilson Observatory, documenting solar storm activity. Some of Fuller’s sketches just scream out to be used as game board, so that’s where things begin: with each player designing their own Dymaxion House by placing the walls and furniture on the floorplan, already outfitted with some futuristic fixtures.

Next, the true game begins, as the players subject each others’ houses to acute damage caused by solar activity across a series of rounds, while struggling to keep their own houses together by making repairs, rearranging doors and furniture, installing reflectors, and utilizing special tools like the bathroom fogger and vacuum pump. This is already enough for an extremely cool game about Fuller’s design — you could have players rolling dice or using some other simple source of randomness to determine the amount of damage. But this is where Solar Storm 1928 goes a step further, and reaches for a true deep-cut public domain source. The amount of damage that players must contend with is instead generated by having each turn represent a day of the year (players can begin the game on any date they choose), then pulling the actual documented solar storm activity for that day from the collection of Mt. Wilson Observatory sketches. A simple analytic process laid out in the rules translates each sketch into a number of damaged tiles for the round.

As play proceeds, the player grids fill up with damage and alterations, until one house fails entirely at which point all the houses get scores based on how they held up.

As with all the designer’s past winning games, Solar Storm 1928 isn’t just mechanically interesting, it’s also a thoughtful and playful reflection on the works it draws from. This time, the game also includes a full separate booklet of Designer Notes, discussing and explaining the origin and nature of this reflection: inspired by visits to old observatories and a fascination with their handwritten records, leading to the discovery of the sunspot sketches which in turn sparked thoughts of architecture and engineering. The game then emerged as a way to explore “the tension between the idea of the universe being difficult, and humans trying to make up for it.” For succeeding wonderfully in this reflection while offering fun and engaging gameplay, all grown from the seed of some technical drawings in an observatory’s archives, Solar Storm 1928 is this year’s Best Deep Cut.

Congratulations to David Harris for the win! You can get everything you need to play Solar Storm 1928 from its page on Itch. plus don’t forget to check out the other winners as well as the many great entries that didn’t quite make the cut! We’ll be back next week with another winner spotlight.

Filed Under: game jam, games, gaming, gaming like it's 1928, public domain, winner spotlight

Game Jam Winner Spotlight: The Burden Of Creation

from the gaming-like-it's-1928 dept

It’s time for another entry in our series of spotlight posts looking at the winners of the sixth annual public domain game jam, Gaming Like It’s 1928! We’ve already featured Best Visuals winner Flight from Podunk Station and Best Adaptation winner Mickey Party, and today we’re taking a closer look at the winner of Best Remix: The Burden Of Creation by Menéndez Guerra.

Although Steamboat Willie gets all the attention, there were actually several early cartoons that entered the public domain this year, and what better way to compete for the Best Remix award than by using a whole bunch of them in a game? That’s exactly what The Burden of Creation does, using images clipped from several 1928 animated shorts including and especially the early appearances of KoKo the Clown from Fleischer Studios, alongside multiple Disney releases, and putting them all together in a mysterious and moody walking simulator.

It’s tough to capture good screenshots of the game, as its pixelated low-res aesthetic only really work in motion, and the exact quality of graphics seems to vary for different players — but some animated GIFs provided by the designer convey the feel:

The game starts with the player outdoors, moving towards a strange building, and soon you’ll find yourself wandering its gloomy gray hallways and encountering various characters and tableaus clipped from cartoons. Some scenes have intriguing dialogue, some doors are locked, some hallways have strange signs on the walls, and soon it becomes clear there’s a mystery hiding in this place.

The player can unravel that mystery by engaging in some light puzzle-esque gameplay, which will result in some surprising revelations and striking changes in scenery — but I don’t want to give too much away, as it’s best experienced firsthand at the game’s slow and thoughtful pace, underscored by period-appropriate music that seals the dreary atmosphere. For those who don’t want to play but would like to see it unfold, two different commenters on Itch linked to videos of their own full playthroughs.

As we continue to see works from the era of early American animation enter the public domain each year, there will always be some entries that capture the lion’s share of attention, none moreso than Steamboat Willie. So it’s great to see a designer casting a wider net like this, shining a spotlight on some other great cartoons, and putting them all together in such an intriguing way. For that, The Burden Of Creation is this year’s Best Remix.

Congratulations to Menéndez Guerra for the win! You can download or play The Burden Of Creation in your browser on Itch. plus don’t forget to check out the other winners as well as the many great entries that didn’t quite make the cut! We’ll be back next week with another winner spotlight.

Filed Under: game jam, games, gaming, gaming like it's 1928, winner spotlight

Techdirt Podcast Episode 383: Gaming Like It’s 1928!

from the winner-spotlight dept

As is tradition, now that we’ve announced the winners of our latest public domain game jam, Gaming Like It’s 1928, it’s time for a special episode of the podcast taking a closer look at them. Just like in past years, Mike is joined by myself and our game design partner Randy Lubin to discuss our thoughts on the winners in all six categories, and a bunch of other great games that didn’t quite make the cut.

Follow the Techdirt Podcast on Soundcloud, subscribe via Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or grab the RSS feed. You can also keep up with all the latest episodes right here on Techdirt.

Filed Under: game jam, games, gaming, gaming like it's 1928, podcast, public domain, randy lubin

Game Jam Winner Spotlight: Mickey Party

from the gaming-like-it's-1928 dept

It’s time for the second entry in our series of spotlight posts looking at the winners of the sixth annual public domain game jam, Gaming Like It’s 1928! We’ve already featured Best Visuals winner Flight from Podunk Station, and today we’re taking a closer look at the winner of Best Adaptation: Mickey Party by Benjamin Gray.

Best Adaptation is probably the subtlest category in these jams: it’s reserved for the game we think did the best or most interesting job of truly “adapting” a newly public domain work by bringing its original spirit into the medium of games, rather than just being inspired by it or using material from it. Personally, I didn’t really think about Steamboat Willie as a prime candidate for that kind of adaptation, but then along came Mickey Party — a tabletop party game unabashedly inspired by the famous Mario Party video games, and embodied with the spirit of the cartoon it’s based on.

So what is the spirit of Steamboat Willie? I’d sum it up in one word: antics. Like other cartoons of the era, and like the works of Buster Keaton and other silent comedians that inspired them, the plot exists to take the characters from one amusing antic to the next, with each scene sporting its own comedic premise and jam-packed with action and visual interest. Mickey Party does the exact same thing: players roll dice to move along the board trying to collect enough “notes” to earn a “song”, and enough songs to win, in the course of which they stumble into a series of fast-paced minigames for the whole group to play. Each minigame is directly based on one of the scenes from the cartoon: it’s a series of animated antics, in game form.

And oh yeah: it’s a lot of fun. Players will be making paper footballs, peeling oranges, stacking cups, and more. They’ll be engaging in a few other layers of gameplay too, all equally centered on material from the cartoon, such as buying a variety of ludicrous items from the shop to gain different bonuses.

So there you have it: a cartoon, in game form. What more can I say? Pulling that off is more than enough for Mickey Party to earn the title of Best Adaptation.

Congratulations to Benjamin Gray for the win! You can download everything you need to play Mickey Party (minus the aforementioned dice, cups, and citrus fruits) from its page on Itch. plus don’t forget to check out the other winners as well as the many great entries that didn’t quite make the cut! We’ll be back next week with another winner spotlight.

Filed Under: game jam, games, gaming, gaming like it's 1928, winner spotlight

Game Jam Winner Spotlight: Flight From Podunk Station

from the gaming-like-it's-1928 dept

Earlier this week, we announced the winners of the 6th annual public domain game jam, Gaming Like It’s 1928! Now, as in years past, for the next few Saturdays we’ll be featuring spotlight posts taking a closer look at each of the winning games (in no particular order). Today, we’re kicking things off with the Best Visuals winner, Flight from Podunk Station by onamint.

Based on Steamboat Willie, this year’s big entrant into the public domain, Flight from Podunk Station is a short RPG that puts a dark twist on Mickey Mouse and his pals, casting them as gangsters on a midnight run aboard their boat. Of all the entries in the jams so far, this probably has the most original artwork we’ve ever seen. Right off the bat, you’re introduced to the main cast of characters, each sporting a beautifully drawn portrait.

And as you can see, it’s not just the portraits: the background and the text and the whole interface looks fantastic, immediately coming together to set the tone of the game, helped out by the simple and striking color scheme of greyscale art with red accents. Pretty soon, you’ll be having violent encounters on the river, and getting introduced to a variety of wonderfully twisted enemy designs:

The mechanics of the game are straightforward, consisting of a little bit of resource management and plenty of classic turn-based combat. By the designer’s own admission, the gameplay needs more refinement and balance, but that was a worthwhile sacrifice on the game jam timeline since it let so much love go towards the artwork. In a comment on Itch, the designer explains a bit more about the process for the artwork: the characters were all drawn from scratch then gussied up by digitally applying some paper textures, while the background uses a heavily-modified photo, and the interface combines original elements with a few modified third-party icons. The result of this combination is a huge success, and goes to show how smart use of various assets is almost as important as artistic ability when trying to make a good-looking game as a solo developer. Just one look at almost any screen from the game (and there are plenty more that you should go play to see for yourself) makes it obvious why Flight from Podunk Station is this year’s winner for Best Visuals.

Congratulations Onamint for the win! You can play Flight from Podunk Station in your browser on Itch, plus don’t forget to check out the other winners as well as the many great entries that didn’t quite make the cut! We’ll be back next week with another winner spotlight.

Filed Under: game jam, games, gaming, gaming like it's 1928, winner spotlight

Announcing The Winners Of The 6th Annual Public Domain Game Jam!

from the gaming-like-it's-1928 dept

At the start of this year, for the sixth time in a row, we launched the latest edition of our public domain game jam, Gaming Like It’s 1928! Once again, we got a whole bunch of fantastic entries making use of newly public domain materials to create games of all types. And now it’s time to announce the winners!

Every year, it gets more and more painful to choose the final slate of winners in all six categories, because there are so many entries that deserve recognition. So before we get to the winners, I want to acknowledge a few fantastic games that didn’t quite make the cut.

Leaving Cambridge is the third entry in these jams from designer Nora Katz, who won Best Analog Game with Nude On A Yellow Sofa in 2022 and got a nod for The Chess Player in 2023, and like those last two entries it’s a thoughtful and intimate roleplaying experience, this time inspired by a 1928 poem. Ladies of the Almanack by dandelion dino is an unfinished but extremely promising start to an adventure-game-esque adaptation of Ladies Almanack by Djuna Barnes, with fantastic visuals and subject matter. 1928 Author Clicker Tycoon by gogp is a creative minimalist browser game that slowly reveals amusing new mechanics and draws on a huge corpus of text from 1928 books, and is notable for being coded from scratch rather than using any kind of engine. M3KMarch by A.M.Homunculus is a robust solo pen-and-paper roleplaying game that feels a little like an analogue roguelike. Soulless Children and Troika 19280!, both by xiombarg, are clever modifications/extensions to existing roleplaying systems. The Steamboat of Madness by Digital Phoenix UG is a twisted, visually-striking platformer. And 20 Hrs. 40 Min. by aeta is rich and playful roleplaying/storytelling game about Amelia Earhart with excellent rotoscoped pixel art.

I strongly encourage everyone to check out all these games and the other entries over on Itch, but now without further delay, on to the winners…

Best Analog Game — Letters To Cthulhu by Lucienne Impala

We get a lot of great small, experimental roleplaying games as submissions in these jams, and every now and then one of them stands out for containing an especially creative and unique idea. Letters To Cthulhu by Lucienne Impala is, as you’ve probably guessed, based on H. P. Lovecraft’s Call of Cthulhu, and with just a few pages of rules it taps into the themes of corruption and madness in the quest for knowledge and power that we associate with the Lovecraft mythos. Players take on the roles of Cthulhu cultists (except one who plays the dark god itself) and collaborate to write a letter in which they must weigh their devotion against their desires — and in doing so, they have opportunity to alter and sabotage each others’ words, whether to jockey for Cthulhu’s favor or rein in the avarice of their compatriots. The elegant simplicity with which it creates this intriguing dynamic earns Letters to Cthulhu this year’s title of Best Analog Game.

Best Digital Game — Millions of Cats by Javi Muhrer, Chris Muhrer & McCoy Khamphouy

It’s tough to make a video game on a game jam timeline. Usually the smart approach is to limit your ambition and pick one or two things to focus on, whether that’s refined mechanics or original art or ample content or something else. But if you’re feeling ambitious, you can try to do what Javi Muhrer, Chris Muhrer, and McCoy Khamphouy have done with Millions of Cats: build a fully-realized puzzle platformer with a strong core mechanic that gets explored through a full slate of levels rendered in original pixel art. Based on the 1928 book of the same name by Wanda Gag (the oldest American picture book still in print), Millions of Cats is an impressive accomplishment. You control a character who is followed by cats that you can spawn at will, and must use them to navigate rooms full of gates and switches that grow increasingly complex, while the game teaches you via well-employed conventions of puzzle design. For being a complete and satisfying puzzle game, Millions of Cats wins Best Digital Game.

Best Adaptation — Mickey Party by Benjamin Gray

We knew it was almost certain we’d have lots of entries and at least one winner based on the big entrant to this year’s public domain, Steamboat Willie, but this was never the category that came to mind first. Yet Mickey Party by Benjamin Gray has found the perfect way to adapt the source material and retain the playful cartoon spirit of a series of madcap antics between expressively animated characters, in part by taking a little inspiration from a popular video game that is decidedly not in the public domain. But Mickey Party is no video game: it’s a tabletop take on Mario Party, with players moving pieces around a wacky game board and competing in competitive minigames based on scenes from the iconic cartoon, for which they’ll need props including dice, coins, cups, and citrus fruits. Apart from these accessories, it’s simple enough to print the necessary pieces and play with a group of 2-4 players — and the action gets started right away. For its success in embodying the spirit and style of Steamboat Willie in game form, Mickey Party wins Best Adaptation.

**Best Remix — The Burden Of Creation by Menéndez Guerra

Steamboat Willie was the most famous cartoon to enter the public domain this year, but it wasn’t the only one. Not only were there other Mickey Mouse shorts in 1928, there were also classic early works by the Dave and Max Fleischer — and The Burden Of Creation by Menéndez Guerra chops them all up and puts them back together in a small walking simulator with a surreal low-res aesthetic, ominous vibes, and a hidden narrative. As the player, you explore the grey hallways of a strange building, facing a few light obstacles and encountering a series of vignettes built out of sprites from the various source cartoons. It’s creepy and mysterious, and there are secrets to be found, plus the whole thing is elevated by a backdrop of 1928 music that only adds to the atmosphere. For creatively combining material from multiple sources into a memorable little experience, The Burden Of Creation wins Best Remix.

Best Deep Cut — Solar Storm 1928 by David Harris

Long time followers of these game jams surely know the name by now: David Harris has submitted a winning game in every jam since the second, and each time his entry is one of the most unique and striking of them all. This year is no different: Solar Storm 1928 is a tabletop game very unlike its predecessors, but with all the same creativity and thoughtfulness plus some intricate mechanics. It draws on one not-so-deep cut source, Buckminster Fuller’s 1928 plans for the Dymaxion house, and one very deep cut: hand-drawn sketches of solar activity in 1928 from the Mt. Wilson Observatory. The former becomes the game board, with each player constructing a Dymaxion house of their very own on Fuller’s template, while the latter provides the challenge, with the historical solar activity doing damage to the houses to see whose holds up best. Either of these mechanics could, by itself, form the basis of a great game, and the combination of them both is simply inspired. For using a collection of sunspot sketches of all things to power a game about Buckminster Fuller, Solar Storm 1928 wins Best Deep Cut.

Best Visuals — _Flight from Podunk Station**_ by onamint

There were quite a few good-looking entries this year, but it’s hard to compete with a game that consists almost entirely of completely original artwork, and that’s what you’ll find in Flight from Podunk Station by onamint. It’s another take on Steamboat Willie, but this time a much darker one, casting the boat’s crew as a party of gangsters on a grim and frightening river in a classic RPG with turn-based combat. Players must manage their party and their resources through a series of violent encounters with twisted enemies, and while the gameplay and balance is unrefined at the present stage of development, it’s not the star of the show anyway. That would be the artwork: unique handcrafted portraits for each character and enemy, absolutely brimming with expressiveness and style while drawing on the Disney source material, all rendered in striking black-and-white-and-red. Beyond the characters, the environment and interface are all similarly stylized and original, with just a few third-party icons and stock effects seamlessly filling in some gaps. For its wealth of top-notch original art that’s been perfectly assembled, Flight from Podunk Station wins Best Visuals.

The winning designers will be contacted via their Itch pages to arrange their prizes, so if you see your game listed here, keep an eye on your incoming comments!

A huge thanks to all the designers who submitted games to this year’s jam! Stay tuned for our series of spotlight posts taking a closer look at each of the winning entries, and for an episode of the Techdirt Podcast where we’ll be discussing them. In the mean time, go check out all the great entries on Itch!

Filed Under: game jam, games, gaming, gaming like it's 1928

And That’s A Wrap! Check Out The Entries In The Public Domain Game Jam

from the gaming-like-it's-1928 dept

As you likely know, at the beginning of January we launched the latest edition of our public domain game jam, Gaming Like It’s 1928! We invited designers of all stripes to make analog and digital games using the material that entered the public domain this year (including the big one, Mickey Mouse). Now, the jam has come to a close, and we’re thrilled to have received a whole bunch of exciting entries.

We’re now working on checking them all out in detail so we can choose the winners of the six categories, but you shouldn’t wait for us — go check out the entries for yourself! I can already tell that there’s some great stuff in there. As expected, we got more than one entry making creative use of Steamboat Willie, like the video games Steamboat Willie Live! and The Steamboat of Madness, and (also as expected) many designers cast a wider net and found lots of other newly public domain material to make use of. One entry gives René Magritte’s The Empty Mask the puzzle game treatment it screams out for, another draws on the designs of Buckminster Fuller; there’s a walking simulator that combines early Mickey Mouse with a variety of other 1928 cartoons, and a tabletop game about Amelia Earhart’s memoir. And those are just a few of the many that caught my eye — I can’t wait to dig in, and you shouldn’t either.

Once again, a huge thank you to all the designers who submitted games — we had no idea how this jam would go when we started it in 2019, but thanks to you we’ve been able to run it six times with no shortage of exciting entries. We’ll be hard at work on the judging process for at least a couple of weeks, so stay tuned for the results.

And for those of you out there who didn’t submit an entry but are now thinking you should have, and those who have followed these jams but never quite pulled the trigger on getting involved, remember: it’s never too early to start looking at what will be entering the public domain in 2025, when we’ll run Gaming Like It’s 1929!

Filed Under: copyright, game jam, gaming, gaming like it's 1928, public domain

Techdirt Podcast Episode 374: Content Moderation Games

from the season-finale dept

Many of you might know Andrew “K’Tetch” Norton as a Techdirt commenter, or from his work at TorrentFreak or for the Pirate Party, and some of you might know that he also runs his own podcast, Tetch Talk. Recently, Andrew asked Mike and I to join him on the podcast for a discussion about our content moderation games Moderator Mayhem and Trust & Safety Tycoon, and today we’re posting a mirror of the full discussion for our last podcast of the year. See you in 2024!

Follow the Techdirt Podcast on Soundcloud, subscribe via Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or grab the RSS feed. You can also keep up with all the latest episodes right here on Techdirt.

Filed Under: content moderation, games, gaming, moderator mayhem, podcast, trust and safety tycoon