Cultural Game Jam Model: A Quadruple Helix Intervention

The EPIC-WE Cultural Game Jam: Óbidos UNESCO City of Literature (CGJ) was a purposeful game jam, and part of the EPIC-WE Horizon-Europe project. CGJ empowers youth to participate through ideating cultural worlds, by creating and exchanging cultural values and heritage through game-making (game jams experience), within the Quadruple Helix (QH) Cultural Innovation Ecosystem. The study is focused on the specific presence of jammers at the game jam venue, within the cultural spaces and cultural agents. Describing the development of unique Game Jams applying the QH model, linking a municipality region, a games company, university researchers, and a youth focus group to foster the production of games for culture and games through culture. With extensive experience in organising game jams since 2014, the researchers confronted the literature review study focused on youth empowerment and cultural game jams (Costa, et al., 2024), ensuring the project research protocols to define a model for 4 game jams to be held from 2024 to 2025. The ongoing research demonstrates the creation of a research protocol for the 1st CGJ model: student recruitment; Pre-Game Jam with the theme reveal and ideation; Game Jam activities and conditions; Reflection Day; Data collection; Post-Mortem analysis; CCIs games evaluation; and future outcomes. 8 games produced on the 1st CGJ demonstrated the effectiveness of the CGJ model for cultural purposes. Besides the cultural theme limitation, participants (N=26) evidenced a high level of satisfaction evidenced in the final survey. Several recommendations for improvement were given (survey reflection 2) and outlined so that future CGJs can produce games that delve more deeply into the topics covered.