Regarding Gæmz

What is Gæmz and what do I do with it?

Gæmz (gaemz.carrd.co) is a community for art/experimental games, playful media, and d0peshit that I started in 2019 to meet more art leaning games people originally in Tokyo.
I had just moved to the city and was trying to do some networking and figured that I could start a meet-up to meet art people in this area based on my experience with art games meet-ups in Berlin. As Covid-19 Global Pandemic hit only one year after I started doing this (and also due to my own personal network), we shifted towards being a little less location specific community as we did online events for all time zones such as weekly drawing sessions and fully online Global Game Jam.


In 2023, I have decided to host the first ever pop-up in-person Gæmz event in Berlin, Germany and the year after that I’ve started Gæmz in London which eventually became a regular event thanks to the people who took over. As of now, we have three regular Gæmz meetup locations which are Tokyo, London, and Taipei.

Community

Over the years, I started to realise how important it is to have a community as that can be a place where one can meet others, co-inform, co-learn, and co-evaluate, check in on each other, support each other, collaborate, or use the power of being a part of something instead of being solo, etc. I think it’s good for everyone who could use a bit of help and a healthy community would be a good way to keep the society healthy.
I come from the part of the world where friendship is complicated and you usually don’t know when you would be qualified as someone’s friend. So there’s also the thought of having a friendly environment where you don’t necessarily need to be friends with anyone but have casual, unconditional, friendly interactions with people instead of being overly business oriented or transactional.
After running the community by myself from 2019 to 2024, we got several new hosts for local events and we have been strengthening the policies to keep the space safe and easier for the hosts to run the in-person events.

Branding

When I started Gæmz, I wanted to make sure that I was able to communicate the vibes and intentions of the community. So, I’ve always thought that it’s important to have a visual identity to show that visually. What I have been doing to get that right is to try to make the cover art look less like video game event poster templates.
I had been making every cover art although I had the intention of getting someone else from the community do the art from early on–and thankfully, Gæmz London suggested that we do this with the London based community members. So, we are finally featuring art made by people other than me and it’s been great to see that.
The name also needed to sound a little cryptic branding. I named the community Gæmz (I would usually pronounce it as games but we welcome free interpretations) just because I wanted to say that I run a games meet-up called Gæmz meetup. The use of the letter that’s usually not used in the modern English is my tribute to ąяţǥąʍ€$ that inspired me to start an event series for art and artists.

Keeping it accessible

As people started asking me whether they can start Gæmz in their neighbourhoods, I decided to make a guide for that just to make sure that we keep the community a safe space and also to share the outlets to advertise events and such. This is the guide: Gæmz Info

Podcast

While this is a little bit different from the normal community activity, the reason I thought of starting a Podcast is kind of similar to why I've been running Gæmz. This is a platform to support creators and to share them with the other people in the bubble.
But since I like listening to casual podcasts where they talk about things that are not necessarily related to their profession (I do appreciate career focused podcast too but I tend to listen to podcasts when I'm working and I can't concentrate on more than one thing simultaneously), I came up with the structure that focuses more on the things that the guests enjoyed recently. I also just like talking about things and wanted to have a space for ourselves to talk about those things.
The podcast is available on many platforms: Gæmz of the Year Podcast aka GOTY Pod

That's it

I think that’s it! I’m currently trying to start regular Gæmz in Berlin. If anyone knows a good venue for this, let me know. Also, if you’d like to start Gæmz in your neighbourhood, I’d be happy to help you!