The submissions have been read. The judges have conferred. And we are now ready to announce the honorees of the 2025 Game Jam!
Before I make the big announcement, there are some people who need to be thanked:
- Huge kudos to Allen White, who conceived of the Game Jam last year, championed it this year, and built the itch.io spaces which made it super easy for contributors to submit!
- My sincere personal appreciation to Trey Alsup and Jonathan Lawrence, who joined me as judges for this year’s event. Each of them brought a different perspective, all of which helped us see these games in different ways.
- And of course, thanks to the 13 authors who submitted 15 different games for consideration. We had a huge increase in both submitters and submissions for this year, which bodes well for the future of Reacting Microgames!
Without further ado, the honorees are:
Every author will receive detailed feedback from the judges later today (check your spam folders!). The judges also wanted to collectively share with the community some impressions for authors thinking about writing a microgame:
- Beware of the temptation to cram a 90-minute game arc into a 60-75 minute timeframe. Make sure you include sufficient time for both prep and debrief. If you find yourself tweaking minutes here and there to make your game “fit” into the timeframe, you may want to consider the Short Game format instead.
- We loved the various innovations in microgame approaches, not only by the honorees, but by many other submissions as well. Card adaptations, applications of music, utilization of online scaffolding: all of these and more are welcome “tinkering” with the Microgame format as it continues to evolve.
- We wanted to particularly commend the “Learning Objectives” section in Pachamama v. Production. The explicit listing of goals in multiple disciplines is a great model for other microgame authors to copy.
- One very real challenge for microgame authors is the additional challenge of giving students context for a game setting that is far displaced from their experience. From a practical sense, this means that it is more challenging to write a microgame set in an older context than a contemporary one. This should not be taken as discouraging authors from writing microgames for non-contemporary settings; just recognize that those games may have to be less ambitious in the amount of material they cover because players may need more scaffolding to adapt to the setting.
Yours in ambitious gameplay,
Raymond Kimball
Reacting Microgame Coordinator
