Art/Experimental Games & Playful Media #gaemzmu | Tokyo, London, etc.
Luma

"It felt so welcoming! My trip was mostly lonely (not really a bad thing), but Gaemz felt like hanging out friends somehow." – Ethan Muller

Last update: 13 March 2025 (Thursday)

日本語のテキスト書き直してます！ご質問はNomiまで | Interested in localising Gæmz in other languages? Get in touch!

TABLE OF CONTENTS

What is this?
What we do
I wanna do something!
Safe Space Policy
When?
Who?
Æ?
Gæmz Events
Sibling Events
Events that didn't happen/to be resurrected maybe
Special Thanks

WHAT IS THIS?

GÆMZ MEETUP is a community for people who are interested in the following things:- Developing art/experimental games or playful media of that sort
- Thinking about games as an artform
- Talking about cool ways to make art for interactive media
- Trying to integrate non-game/non-interactive art world into the interactive world
- Music games that are not hit-the-bars-you-see
- Shaking that button
- Alternative villains
- d0peshitAs a community, we want to provide a space where everyone can talk openly & freely and explore various ideas and practices of artistic/creative expressions. We also want art to flourish so we want to support its creators by creating a space where we can support each other.Gæmz is a little bit different from location-based communities due to the nature of how we operate. Local is cool but it's also so normal to have long-distance networks. (On top of that, we know that local communities can be tricky to manage in some places for various reasons.) So we'd like to cherish and foster both the local networks and long-distance networks as a community regardless of wherever you are. We do online/hybrid events and we also travel. So if you'd like us to bring pop-up Gæmz to your city or start Gæmz in your area, contact Nomi. We're happy to help!Gæmz has been mentioned in Superlevel.de.
Gæmz is a friend of GAIN (Game Arts International Network).

WHAT WE DO

So far, we've been doing the following things:- Mini 'open mic' presentations where participants are encouraged to introduce themselves and/or talk about what they are working on/have been working on recently. (usually everyone talks a bit in this event. It's good to get to know a little about you all!)
- Playing prototypes.
- Playing (commercially) available published games.
- Offline game jams (e.g. Mod Jam, Game Jam! with Gæmz!!, SpektrumGæmz Jam, Ludum Dare offline)
- Online jams (e.g. GGJ 2021, GGJ 2022, Playlist Jam)
- Drawing sessions.
- Film Nites!
- Podcast. Gæmz of the Year Podcast aka GOTY PodThings we might do sometime in the near future:
- Game dev camp
- Field trips
- Curated talks
- Unconference
- Group exhibitions
- Study session? (e.g. pick one or two games and casually study them together?)

I WANNA DO SOMETHING! HOW DO I SIGN UP?

Gr8!
If you'l like to show something at the meet-up for more than just 5 minutes ot if you have something else you wanna say/do about it, you can contact the hosts (see WHO?) directly.If you wanna talk ABOUT Gæmz Meetup, and you'd like to use the official hashtag, it's #GAEMZMU (mu stands for meet-up stylised as meetup although we've kind of dropped meetup from the official branding)

SAFE SPACE POLICY

We want this space to be a safe space for everyone to express themselves, feel things, have discourses, ask questions, etc.
Gæmz is dedicated to providing a harassment free social experience for everyone, regardless of gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, age, religion, faiths, backgrounds, or artistic/game preferences.
Also, if you have preferred pronouns or how you wanna be called today (or forever), please let us know! If you don't have anything to say, that's also cool too! We just want you to feel comfortable.In short, be excellent to each other and party on, dudes!

WHEN'S IT HAPPENING?

TBA. We'll announce it here and there.
You can join our Discord server
Or follow Bsky (gaemz.bsky.social) / [Instagram (@gaemzmu)] (https://instagram.com/gaemzmu) / Facebook (@gaemzmu) / X (@gaemzmu)
We'll announce the next meetup details on those platforms.

WHO?

Gæmz currently has four hosts/organisers.
They are
Nomi: founder
Farfama: Tokyo branch (since 2024)
Andrew: London branch (since 2024)
Fynn: London branch (since 2024)Since Gæmz #40 in Tokyo in February 2025, we're using Luma for public events: Gæmz Calendar on Luma
All the public events will be announced on Discord, Bluesky, and Instagram. And if Nomi remembers, Mastodon, Facebook, and X too.

Æ?

Æ (æ), also known as Ash or Æsh (but not Aesh) is a character formed from the letters a and e. In Swedish and German, we would be Gämz technically. In the Old English Latin alphabet it was called æsc, 'ash tree' from ᚫ. So we could also be Gᚫmz and that's kind of cool.
We have this letter that's not commonly used in the contemporary English because Ąяţǥąʍ€$ was one of the reasons why we started this community and it was pretty difficult to type so that Nomi had to save it in the system. Otherwise it was going to be called Gaemz.HOW TO TYPE Æ
- If you have apple products, it's quite easy to type æ. You just need to type the letter A and hold it until all the other options pop up. There, you could also go for ä if you're feeling umlaut.
- The HTML entities are Æ and aelig;
- In the TeX typesetting system, it's \ae (Although the only person using TeX that I know is my old professor)
- In MS Word, it's Ctrl + Shift + & followed by A
- Or just get an Icelandic, Norwegian, Danish, or Finnish keyboard. That's honestly the best solution. (But we recommend Icelandic because of Thorn (Þ, þ)).HOW TO PRONOUNCE GÆMZ
Look, we are kind of like Moog and Gif. It's kind of up to you. But it was meant to be pronounced like GAMES as in 'games meet-up'. But we also once called ourselves ガメズ (gah meh zoo) in Japanese because Google Translate said so. So, we're pretty chill about the pronunciation. But otherwise, think diphthong.All caps?
Not really. We can be gæmz, Gæmz or even gÆmZ. Feel free to enjoy all sorts of styles.