The deadline to register for the Green Game Jam 2025 has been extended to the 12th February. If you're already registered - or looking to sign up - and fancy your chance at winning one of our coveted trophies in the process, read on for some tips from last year's judges.
What was the ask for 2024?
The 2024 Green Game Jam was a little different from previous years. It asked studios to get their players out of the game and into the real-world, focusing on collecting real-world player actions. The hope was that by showing them how to take one small step towards helping the planet we could deepen their engagement into more long term habits.
How was it judged?
This was a difficult concept for us to measure, and subsequently made for a more complicated judging process. Judges scored out of a number of categories, details of which can be found here.
We’ve compiled the trends we noticed across our judge’s feedback scores to reflect on the 2024 cohort; and consider what we can do differently this year too. It’s important to note that not all judges provided feedback, and so the below represents nine out of fifteen judges across all categories.
To understand a bit more about what participants built, take a look at our case studies for some of last year's participants: Merge Mansion, Love & Pies, Dragon Mania Legends, Orna: The Fantasy RPG and GPS MMO.
Know your limits…or stack your odds?
- Judges broadly acknowledged the limitations in what participants were able to do, and reflected on the occasional gap between the potential of a studio’s idea and what was actually achieved.
- That being said, it’s not always clear that judges took the material limitations of participants (e.g. studio size) into their final scoring, which is something we hope to rectify in next years’ awards.
- Judges across categories seemed to respond well to studios that almost pointed that out for them, recognizing their own limitations and working creatively within them.
- Conversely, judges commented on studios that “went big”, choosing to approach the theme from multiple different angles, i.e. working on food, waste and restoration, or combining both in-game and social-media campaigns.
Expect the unexpected?
- Judges were impressed with activations that used the themes in an unexpected way and integrated them creatively into the game experience.
- Sometimes, however, there was significant tension between the message the team chose to focus on and the actual content or message of the game.
- Yet despite this, judges appreciated when an unexpected connection paid off, citing Dragon Mania Legends, FarmVille 3, Top Eleven and Narcos: Cartel Wars as strong examples of this.
- In this context, judges were especially impressed by those participants that carried out pre-research to confirm what their players wanted to see - naming in particular Klondike Adventures, FarmVille 3 and PUBG Mobile.
To be clear…
- Judges appreciated activations with a clear ask for players. My Talking Tom Friends was repeatedly cited as an example of good end-user work.
- However, in some cases judges appeared disappointed with submission decks that featured a lack of detail on what the activation was or insufficient evidence of impact.
- Interestingly, this conflicts with studio feedback that the submission process requested too much detail and was too time-intensive - this could indicate a need to close some kind of gap between the resources we give to judges and to our games.
Tracking shot
- Our Call to Action category was judged by representatives of the IGDA Climate SIG, reflecting on the techniques used by the activations to motivate players towards action.
- These judges cited a few examples of excellent tools to build self-efficacy, including Gamepoint Bingo’s land tracker, EverForest’s “Jam Jar”, and Outfit7’s incorporation of circular economies.
- Being able to visually track or clearly imagine the process that the activation covers has a lot of potential to motivate players.
Not just one answer
- In some cases, judges within the same category gave conflicting feedback on the same activations - but did land ultimately on roughly similar weighted scores.
- Often this feedback would acknowledge the great work done by the game team, but suggested that the activation didn’t quite meet the criteria on which it is being judged.
We’d like to thank our judges across all of our awards categories for their hard work scoring each submission deck along a complicated set of criteria. Find out more about the way this year’s Green Game Jam was judged here, and more about the entire 2024 GGJ here.
You can also enter the 2025 edition of the Green Game Jam here.
