MANIFESTO JAM 2026

A Manifesto for Manifesto Jam, 2026:

SEND ME YOUR ADDRESS SO I CAN VISIT YOU AND EXPLAIN MY PASSIONS

I'm sick of talks. I'm sick of takeaways and I'm sick of talking around games and never dipping below the surface; always circling the drain, never looking down the maelstrom below, never willing to take the plunge.

In the microcosm of english-language game making/writing, the discursive ecosystem has been overrun with grifters, clout-chasers, compulsive social media posters, linkedin users and large language models spouting bullshit, saturating the atmosphere with hot air, leaving little breathing room for critique that aims--as Em Reed wrote in the manifesto for the first Manifesto Jam--to 'converse, complicate, and imagine alternatives'.

The manifesto, in my imagined alternative, is the ugly smear on the polished surfaces of conference keynotes, aspirational #bizdev posts and job-ready portfolio pieces. The manifesto is awkward, clunky, impractical, confronting, uncompromising, defiant: all qualifiers undesirable in an increasingly professionalised, corporatised game making ecosystem. These traits are what makes the manifesto beautiful.

This is the third Manifesto Jam, therefore I don't feel like I need to justify the format of 'the jam' for this particular endeavour (and you can read the previous manifestos for Manifesto Jams if you somehow need convincing); it's about the urgency of the exclamation having the potential to be as true as the lengthy extraction of the belaboured thought. Extended time invites self-consciousness: a jam should be for daring to think of the diamond in the rough as having value in and of itself. The ugly duckling has a place in this world regardless of whether it becomes a swan. This is true for birds, it is true for game making and it is true for writing.

This jam is an invitation and a provocation. Write, really write about making, responding to, critiquing, interrogating the videogame as an art form, the videogame as an academic field, the videogame as a commercial product, the videogame as an object of frustration, the videogame as an artefact of the reality we live in. Write about the videogame in conversation with itself and with the world. The form, scale and tone of your manifesto is yours to instill, what matters is that it comes out of you, the cathartic externalisation of an interior will.

Write your manifesto, release it, and take the plunge into this world.

I'll see you there.

SEND ME YOUR ADDRESS SO I CAN VISIT YOU AND EXPLAIN MY PASSIONS

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MANIFESTO JAM RULES:

1. Write a manifesto!
2. Upload it as a text file, PDF, directly onto your itch project page, or any other format.
3. Add a title to your manifesto, if you wish.
4. Submit your manifesto to this jam.

Sub rules:

• Please don't just republish something you wrote beforehand. Not that I or anyone else would be a cop about it, but come on. What's the point of a jam if you're not willing to jam?
• Don’t use LLMs/AI if you’re going to take part in this jam. Same as above, except I believe I or anyone would kill you with a rock about it.

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MANIFESTO RESOURCES:

• Robert Yang compiled a list of videogame related manifestos and first floated the idea of a #manifestojam in this blog post.
• Robert also recently wrote a Sportslike Manifesto for Grapefruit Games' upcoming title Tryhard.
• You can also find a list of art manifestos to explore on the Wikipedia page for 'Art manifesto'.
• Definitely also check out the entries to the previous Manifesto Jams! The original one, and the 2022 one.

TO GET STARTED

• Doesn't matter if you write about games or make them or simply play them. All perspectives welcome.
• If you're new to writing about games or anything else: don't worry about the quality of your writing, what's important in this exercise is to simply express something. Speaking your truth and all that.
• You're free to experiment with the form of your manifesto, or use whatever tool or process or format is most comfortable or most appropriate for the manifesto you're writing, whether it's a plain text file or a game or a recording of you reading it or something you handwrite in the margins of a book.

TOOLS YOU COULD USE

• Windowpane, a collage/comics/zine maker by Bagenzo.
• Plano a flatgame maker also by Bagenzo.
• Decker by Internet Janitor.
• Jupiter engine by candle, which also has a boilerplate/template with tutorial made by andsfw.
• Domino, a mind-mapping tool by candle.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

• Thanks Em Reed for hosting the first Manifesto Jam back in 2018, and Max Myers for hosting the second one in 2022 for which I wrote a manifesto, which had a discernible impact on my own work since.
• Thanks Robert Yang for putting this jam idea into words a whooping nine years ago. Hello Rob if you're reading this, bet you weren't expecting this to be going again. Sorry mate.

If you have any further thoughts or questions, @ me on bsky, or email me, or make a post in the 'jam community' or whatever.

~~HaVe~FuN!~~