Last month, 134 developers gathered at IT University in Copenhagen for the Nordic Game Jam '08, during which they came up with 19 game demos in just under two days.
The theme of the Game Jam was "Taboo," to ensure that participants' concepts would be more artistic and less commercial in nature. There were few rules, other than that the game had to have a game loop, be winnable, playable with a controller instead of just a mouse and keyboard, and it had to be multiplayer.
Participants pitched games with themes covering everything from torture (yeesh) to pedophilia (bigger yeesh) to truly scary things like PMS (don't even go there). Forty hours and nearly 300 beers later, the 19 different teams had 15 minutes each to present their products of their labors to the crowd.
The winner, as chosen by a jury populated by members of both the gaming industry and academia, was Love Child, a game in which you and your mate create the ideal baby by shooting away bad genes and snagging the good ones. A "Fetus Quality" meter shows your progress in the creation of the uber-child.
The object of Torturama was to get information from fluffy little animals by torturing them. Social in the Elevator dealt with a different kind of torture -- figuring out who farted in an elevator. (It was you, admit it. Pig.)
The cleverly-named Yum Me had the simple goal of being the first to cross the finish line, but threw in the disturbing twist of making eating your own body the only way to gather speed.
The winner of the Participant's Award, given to the game that the players simply liked the best, was Segregation, a top-down puzzler in which players must guide their followers home across a playfield. If groups of followers mixed, they would attack each other, making segregation of the followers a key component of success.
Pretty safe to say we won't be seeing any of those on Xbox Live Arcade any time soon.
Nordic Game Jam 2008 [Gamasutra, via VH1]
