Welcome to the Jam: The Making of Super Street Harassment RPG

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The Man Behind the Jam

Ian Pollock, an Assistant Professor within CSU East Bay's Art Department, served as one of the main coordinators of the Game Jam, though he wasn't there to play the authority figure. Since it's very easy for undergrads to fall into the high school mindset of blindly obeying higher-ups, Pollock encouraged attendees to think for themselves and avoid assuming positions of leaderships in groups. When summoned to solve a problem, Pollock tended to answer questions with other questions in that charming, slightly provocative way only academics can get away with. Though never dismissive, Pollock kept his interventions to a minimum and chose to take the role of "helpful observer," seemingly to prevent his influence from affecting the finished results.

"There isn’t The Boss," says Pollock. "There isn’t the Art Director, which is always a danger. Sometimes people come in and want to be The Boss or the Art Director. Usually, those are the people who are the least qualified to do that job. They don’t want to do anything, they just want to tell other people to do something. Like, 'I don’t have any skills, I just want to tell people what they should do, because I think I have ideas.' And that’s the death of any good creative team, right? A creative team is really a leaderless organization without ownership over particular ideas and builds on each other’s ideas fluidly and you follow the idea, you don’t follow the person."

Pollock's interest in games stems from his childhood fascination with chess, in which he regularly played matches against his parents. But it wasn't necessarily the rules or structure of the game that prompted this interest; Pollock claims these instances of play prompted serious conversations that might not have happened in another setting. "There’s a famous photograph of Marcel DuChamp... where he is sitting near a chessboard," says Pollock, "because at a certain point he said that he had given up making Art and chess was this thing that I think fulfilled some of these requirements, or the idea of intellectual activity and flexibility and seeing moves and kind of visualizing things. It was kind of a kinetic sculpture to him."

CSU East Bay has hosted four quarterly game jams to date, with the intention of creating an interdisciplinary event. Pollock explains his intentions behind this event as showing that art doesn't have to be in service of science, or vice-versa; both can work in concert and inform each other to create something wonderful.

"I saw the Game Jam as a way to bring together students from different disciplines and have them work together on different design challenges to have them work together without one being in the service of the other," says Pollock. "For example, 'The Art of Science,' or, 'Art and Science...' It was really about [lowering] the kind of barriers that people have set up in their minds. Computer scientists say, 'I’m really interested in game-making, but I don’t know how to draw.' And then the art student will say something like, 'I’m really interested in game-making, but I don’t know how to program.' And so really, a lot of what these Game Jams involve is going up to students and talking to them and saying, 'Look, this is the valley of ideas and if we work together as creative collaborators and we create together informed by our disciplines.' In that sense, I think it’s a very 21st century skill."

Previous Game Jams at CSU East Bay centered around queer and race-based social justice topics, in an attempt to, as Pollock puts it, "values that I think myself, the students, and the institution espouse to." During our interview, the topic of GamerGate gradually surfaced, prompting Pollock to explain the importance of a theme like "heroines" during this particular event:

"Women started out programming on the same level as men when computers first came out. It wasn’t such a gendered thing and then it became a gendered thing that computers are really for boys and women were somehow doing something else. I think that there are lots of high profile lawsuits and complaints and founders’ meetings at startup companies because of insensitivities and limitations of the current technological culture. So I think it’s really important to think about well, women and tech, and more specifically, women and games. How do we begin to look at that? Not look at it as say, a woman’s issue, but to look at feminism and feminist values as a 21st century human issue. That inclusivity and participation is not the problem of some particular gender or particular race, that it is really a challenge to everyone in the room to do better and that ultimately, we are all better for it because the experiences that come out of that are richer and more nuanced and more inclusive," says Pollock.