Essay Jams and Collaborative Writing as a Community Event

Abstract

The Pandemics and Games Essay Jam <https://pandemics-and-games-essay-jam.pubpub.org/> was a community writing event hosted by Arizona State University’s Center for Science and the Imagination <https://csi.asu.edu/> and online games writing nonprofit Critical Distance <https://critical-distance.com/> . The event drew on the practice of “game jams,” in which participants spend a short, focused period of time creating digital games, either as solo developers or teams that may have only formed at the start of the jam. Echoing prior events hosted by Critical Distance and organised by Emilie Reed, the essay jam provided a social context, theme, and creative constraints for participants to create a piece of writing and share it with a community. The publishing platform PubPub provided tools for peer feedback, swift sharing and revising, and sorting essays into sections that would comprise the structure for an ebook edition. Meanwhile, the existing Critical Distance Discord <https://discord.com/> server provided a space for synchronous chat during the jam and later for a book launch event. Building on Critical Distance’s role as a community hub and signposting resource for critical writing about games, the essay jam located submissions within a specific community structure. The leadership role of editors and curators at Critical Distance is nuanced, and the organisation’s work suggests a negotiation between two polar positions: neither fully autonomous and informal community-led editorial management, nor fully hierarchical and formal academic journal management. Critical Distance offers a recognition, response, and context for community writing, through events such as essay jams as well as ongoing curatorial and archiving work. In this essay, we consider how the essay jam, and Critical Distance’s larger editorial structure, both captures productive tensions in community-led, community-responsive publishing, and suggests future directions for structuring collaborative writing activities, from figuring out incentives for participating authors to creating a culture of dialogue around drafts and ideas in progress.