It’s already December, which means Global Game Jam 2012 is about to happen in just over a month!
Worldwide a good many people are busy setting up their locations, getting everything ready for that one weekend of jamming, providing their participants with the best environment and a great vibe.
In previous years we (the global game jam directors) had a system of looking into the registration, approve the location and communicate with local organizers through means like basecamp and IRC. This year we decided to do it a bit differently: we agreed to try and personally talk to all the local organizers that registered. As before we divided the world up in areas, each director got an area.
Being the one director located in Europe, it was only logical for me to take on Europe. And I got to say, it has been a joy so far. It’s inspiring to hear everyone’s stories: the ‘newbie’ organizer who got involved because students heard about it and wanted to participate, the veteran organizer who is still learning but has fantastic ideas about how to do the weekend this year and evolve the experience from the years before.
Europe is growing as a game dev and jam continent. At time of writing about 51 European locations signed up for participation. Below a map of the regions and a list with locations per country* that have one or more locations so far.
Norway: 3
Sweden: 1
Finland: 7
Ireland: 2
Northern Ireland: 1
England: 6
Wales: 1
Scotland: 1
Denmark: 1
The Netherlands: 5
Belgium: 1
France: 3
Spain: 2
Portugal: 1
Italy: 1
Austria: 2
Switserland: 1
Germany: 7
Czech Republic: 2
Poland: 1
Lithuania: 2
For Global Game Jam 2011 we had about 55 jam locations in Europe in total during the jam, which means almost halfway December we’re almost there! Looking forward to see new sites sign up. Hoping to do a new posts after the jam and see what happened in the last month.
*note: we decided region wise to leave Turkey for my colleague, so I didn’t include them in the calculations.