The Gaming of Players: Jamming Azad.

This chapter examines the prototyping of the game Azad, from Iain M Banks’s The Player of Games (1988). Banks clearly ‘designed’ Azad to be conceptual rather than actual, and was sceptical that it could ever be replicated. At the 72nd Worldcon ‘Loncon 3’, where Banks was a posthumous Guest of Honour, a group of games jammers, academics and fans spent several sessions developing prototype versions of Azad through an activity known as a ‘games jam’. The games made were not intended for commercial use; nor were they entirely functional. The jam instead produced a number of experimental, playful pieces intended to celebrate Banks’s work. A second remit of the sessions introduced non-gamers to some of the fundamental tools of games design. Promoting the ethos that games are for everybody, this chapter also suggests a wider context for the games jam, whereby it functions as a liminal space bridging possibility and playfulness, and serves as a space in which learning takes place through shared activity.