 So, can you please introduce yourself and your role in this game jam? Sure. My name is Evan Witt. I am running the Tree of Audio at the game jam, which is the small collection of composers and sound designers who are providing audio for many of the different teams at the jam. Nice. What does Tree of Audio mean? The Tree of Audio was a, it started off as a little club, basically, at the Vancouver Global Game Jam. In Vancouver, when they run the Global Game Jam, they have, it's a very large game jam of several hundred people. And when you're running with that many people in a game jam, it's very difficult for individual composers to split all the teams among them working individually. Usually on a small game jam, you will, individual composers will just work with, they'll take a team and do all the audio for them, or they'll take two teams and do all the audio for them. If you have an extremely large group of, you know, maybe 300 people, then you can form a collection of composers and audio designers and audio programmers and sound designers and even voice actors. And then you can split up the work based on those people's skills, so that if someone is much better at recording or much better at composing or much better at sound design, they can specialize in that area and take on six or seven games just doing the sound design for that, or just doing the composing for that. So it's a way of splitting the work up, basically, when doing audio for a game jam. Cool. And what's your role in the organizing of the event? Because I heard from Kat and Brian that you had more of a role than just, you know, being here in the audio. Well, Kat and I were, Kat and I had been co-organizers on another game jam earlier. And when he proposed this jam, he wanted me to be part of the, I guess you could say, yeah, I don't know what the term would be. He wanted me to be part of the organizing team that was put together. And this honestly doesn't take too much, it's just a little helping out here and there to get ready for prepping for the game jam. When we scouted out the location together, we talked a little bit about what needs we would have. I talked about what needs I would have in audio, which is how we got this fantastic audio space for recording. Usually, you get no separate recording space at a game jam. We also met and talked about logistics a little and how to, for example, spread the word on the game jam and encourage other people to come to it. I had a bit of an audio circle of friends who I could send out the information. I could go to my little audio circle or email list and tell everyone about the jam. And these are the things that kind of helped prep for the jam. Really though, my main job here aside from making sure that all the other sound designers and composers that they have a good experience while they're here is just helping with grunt work. It turns out that doing a, not to put that down at all, running a game jam takes a lot and a lot of grunt work. You just got to set up tables. You have to put the tables away. You got to get the meals ready. You have to make sure everyone's having a good time, that everyone sits down at the right place and has all the right information that they need. But that's the sort of thing that makes a jam run successfully and smoothly. You want people to be able to show up to a jam and have everything done for them and be treated in such a way that they can simply comfortably sit, be fed food, and now and then have a base to walk around in and work in focus. You don't want them to have to worry about anything else. That's very cool. Sounds like you are wearing a lot of hats in this game jam. What do you think about the theme of this game jam? That's a very timely theme, I think. It's a great choice of theme. Game jam themes oftentimes are focused around creative ideas. It's good to see a game jam focusing on an ideal focused on good, being ethical. I personally am very interested in that topic. That's one reason why I just could not say no to this game jam. People who talk to me a lot, I think that's a very tricky and fascinating topic to discuss. I talk about it a lot with other media producers. People who make music, people who write stories, or people who, for example, might be into telling stories through film or online web comics. The discussion about how to support an ethical program or support an ethical movement or an ethical idea via a medium is a really fascinating and intricate and delicate discussion. Of course, there has been a lot of talk about that going on in the games industry. You see a lot of game makers, especially in the indie field, using games to promote a message or even just to explore needed, interesting themes. An example of a game that comes to mind, like this would be 1979 or Revolution, the game that came out recently that explored the Iranian Revolution. It's a theme you don't really see explored in games very much. I wish that games were more focused in general on that, and a game jam focused on social justice is a great way of doing that. Very cool. What's it been like working with all the different teams so far? Oh, as usual, it's always just a flurry of variety, which is fun to see. It's difficult because everyone wants something different, and a lot of teams, especially at this game jam, excuse me, it's a little difficult because a lot of the teams at this game jam are first-time jammers, and first-time jammers, of course, unfortunately, sometimes don't scope very well. They don't realize until it's too late how much effort it goes into making even the simplest of games. A great example actually is the work that I'm working on right now, where we had 12 lines, roughly, of recorded dialogue to incorporate into the game. And that doesn't sound like much, but that was over an hour of work for several people when you considered that you needed to find who would say the dialogue, you needed to rewrite the dialogue and edit it, and you needed to try several times to record each line to get a good recording out of it, and someone has to clean that up, and then for each of those lines you need to put that into the game at the right spot and mix that all so that the levels are all the same, and just something as simple as that, people don't realize can explode into hours and hours and hours of work. So working with these new teams is there are those standard challenges, I want to say, but that said, it's especially nice to see the variety of team makeup at this jam. This is definitely the first jam I've been to of this size where we've had several teams that were mostly female. We have such good representation of women at this jam and also of students from different schools, which in my book is a very important topic actually. A lot of times a game jam will become popular in one school, and then you'll get a whole bunch of students just from that school, but in this case we have a bit of a wider spread, which I like. Any interesting things or novel things that have come up when working with some of these teams? Sadly not on the music side. One novel thing that came up that was just a difficult thing to work with from a sound design side was the need for a background noises. We call it Walla in the sound design biz. Walla that was specifically for a protest or a march. This sounds kind of straightforward when you describe it that way, but while we were gathering ideas about how to make this, first for reference we just sort of ripped some audio off of YouTube, looked at different kinds of marches basically. An example of a tricky decision when doing protest Walla is if you hear protesters chanting in the background, what sort of chant is acceptable for the game? Is it acceptable if you hear political messages in the protest? If you don't want politically themed messages in the background protest noise for your game, maybe a solution to get out of that problem is to record protest sounds or rather rip protest sounds from foreign nations so that you will hear these sort of vague phrases being shouted but you can't really quite make out what they're saying and of course that's because it's in French or it's in German. Or you get recordings of things that are far enough away, you can't really hear the shouts or you can't hear, you can hear that someone is shouting on a microphone or rather on a megaphone, but you can't quite make out their words or maybe you need to mix and match or you need to find chants that are politically neutral in general, just chants of people saying, heck no we won't go, well that could be people angry at anything so you can go ahead and put that in your background noise. And that's sort of an interesting topic and I've never had to deal with it before. That's cool. How do you, I guess you're not involved in any one game in particular or leading a game, you're more so just leading the audio tree which kind of helps every different game that needs sound design or music, correct? Yeah. So you've probably heard a lot of the ideas that are going on for a lot of these games, right? What kind of impact do you think this type of media promoting this kind of education will give to average uninformed users? I think that's a very difficult question. Unfortunately, it depends a lot on what happens to these games after the jam. If some of these games go on to be played online or even moderately popular online, this could actually have a very big impact, probably much better than people expect. Honestly, there are so many small, tiny indie games that become very popular online, even amateur indie games, that it can, it's entirely possible for a single game that was created here over the weekend to actually influence several people's lives. The way that this happens, I think, is a little trickier. Meaning, for example, in one of our games, it's a very story-focused game, a very character-focused game, and that's a game that's going to impact people more by how they associate with a character than, for example, what they learned about law. One of the games is a little more focused, and they've essentially quizzed you a little on aspects of law. And that's a game that's much more educational. That's a game that might even be expanded or used by other groups who want to train employees or who want to teach their students about an aspect of law. That works a little differently. The point there isn't so much to empathize as it is to well, to memorize, really. And games are good at both of those. I think those are sort of two examples of the variety that we have. So what do you think about this game, Jam, incorporating law professionals and students as well among the traditional mix of developers, artists, and sound designers? I'm sure just like everyone else has told you, I love it, and I think it's a great idea. But that said, I think it's an automatic for me. Meaning, in the first place, I would support law professors and students getting involved with anything. I think that law, and I say this as someone who's very ignorant of law, unfortunately, is it's very easy to be ignorant about law. And I wish that people were more knowledgeable. And law, like medicine, is one of those areas where people can feel very lost. It's easy to sort of feel like, well, I'm not a lawyer. I didn't spend my life studying law. Therefore, there's no purpose in understanding it or seeing how it affects me. I remember vividly, I've read one law book in my life, and I was shocked at how much it excited me. And it was in high school, and it was a book just called Street Law. And all it was was 150 pages, 200 pages of things like, if you make a verbal agreement with your friend for $200, is that legally binding in court? If you want to go to court because of damage that was done to your car, but you don't want to pay all the fees, what are your options? What's the difference between civil court and criminal court? Why should you care about licensing agreements? Written in just simple, easy to understand language for people. And I think that's empowering. People talk so much about law and how powerful it is and how we are so scared about the people who make the laws of the land and we're so very ignorant about what those laws actually are. That I feel like incorporating lawyers and professors and students into media should be done, not just with game games but with all media. Sounds like a smart idea. I like how you think we're pretty ignorant of the things that rule us and that we're afraid of. Any last thoughts about the game jam or the organization or the teams or anything like that? Only that Living Computer Museum is fantastic. I did not know it until I started looking at the space for the jam and it really is great. It's just that simple. I'm going to be bringing friends and family by to check it out. Awesome. Thank you very much, Evan. Thank you.