Games Built From Scratch in Under 48 Hours

The One Laptop per Child project is hosting Game Jam, an event where developers and others will come together to build free open-source games on a very, very tight deadline.

If it’s possible to provide affordable laptops for the world’s poorest children, developing entire games for said laptops in just one weekend should be no problem. That’s what One Laptop per Child is setting out to do with Game Jam, a marathon three-day game development session which aims to produce working open-source games for OLPC laptops by its conclusion.

Game Jam will run June 8-10 at Olin College in Needham, Mass. A crew of 100 is expected to show up, including developers, educators, authors, musicians, artists, and writers. Fueled by pizza and junk food, they’ll work nonstop using their own laptops and a OLPC-supplied development kit to cook up working games in small teams of five to seven.

The games are expected to fit into four development tracks that leverage different capabilities of the OLPC “XO” hardware. Mesh networking will allow some games to be collaborative between players. The XO’s tablet mode will allow others that involve real-world activity. A video-conferencing camera in the side of every XO laptop holds other possibilities. A category for “malleable games” encourages software that kids could manipulate on their own and learn from.

Sign-up to be a developer for the event has already been closed, but OLPC still accepts sponsors, donations and other miscellaneous forms of volunteer help on the event Web page.