Finnish Game Jam’s fifth scholarship is for the Lyst Game Jam in Denmark. This time we decided to select two candidates to receive the scholarship. We are proud to send Elie Abraham and Ludwig Sandbacka to represent our jamming scene! Have a blast, both of you, and bring back the lessons learnt! Here are Elie’s and Ludwig’s feelings before the exciting trip:
Elie Abraham
After reading the same old “We had many strong applications this year…” e-mail intro, I was absolutely not expecting the sentence to end in congratulations. My reputation in the game dev community is probably most heavily centered around game jams and even my friends outside of the scene know how much I love to jam! So, it’s no secret that I am beyond excited to hear the news that I’ll be receiving the support to travel for another jam.
But Lyst isn’t just any jam. When you open the site for the Lyst Summit, you see *Romance, Love and Sex in Games *loud and clear staring right at you. With talks from “Queering the Controller” to “Playing with Pride,” one can imagine how enthusiastic I am to be sent as a queer game developer to interact, work, and share good times with others at this kind of symposium.
As with any game jam I go to, I hope to be a part of as many games as I can possibly make myself stay awake to work on, but more importantly: I look forward to making new friends, as connecting to others is truly what I want most out of any jam.
Feel free to keep updated on my journey and game happenings via my twitter (@elieabraham64) and thank you SO much, FGJ, for making this possible for me!
Elie Abraham
Ludwig Sandbacka
I’m quite new to the game jam scene. I went to my first game jam two years ago. It was an eyeopening experience to say the least. The creativity, the pressure, the people – it is insane to try to make a game in 48 hours and still after 20 cups of coffee and no sleep you stand there with a game and a shared experience of having pushed through, having made something that others can hopefully enjoy. Something that didn’t exist 2 days before.
I’ve been wanting to go to Lyst since I fist heard about it. Romance, sex and sexuality are rather provocative subjects in our society as a whole and even more so in games. In an interactive medium such as games, the player is both the audience and the performer. It allows us to have experiences and take actions that would otherwise be far removed from our everyday life and possibly our comfort zone. That in itself is exciting and mixing in some lust, desire and things that are perhaps a bit taboo… well it’s a new frontier.
At the most, I’m hoping to see some boundaries being pushed at Lyst and possibly some really weird ideas being realised. At the least, there will be good people, interesting conversations and lots of coffee.
Thank you FGJ for this opportunity! I’m going on an adventure.
Ludwig Sandbacka