Liminal Game Jam 2023 will be held in May of this year!

The jam ended on 9/11/2022.

The winners (according to the judges, not the participants' votes) are as follows:

1st place: Liminal Game

2nd place: Project Liminal

3rd place: Childhood Memories

Honorable mentions

Cow Game (while the game is pretty simple, the author did put some effort into it and was one of the most active participants)

Bowl-O-World (not particularly advanced, but an interesting submission nonetheless)

You have a few months to create a game centered around the concept of liminal spaces, anemoia, kenopsia, "oddly familiar places", "Dreamcore", or "Weirdcore". The rules are very relaxed, you can start working on your game before the game jam starts (yes, you can even finish an old project that you may have laying around and submit it for the game jam!).

Rules:

1. Absolutely no nudity; (violence, blood, and gore are FINE)

2. An exception can be made by the hosts to the above rule if there is a good reason for the nudity, but please contact us first!

That's it!

"What is a liminal space?"

Adapted from this Reddit post:
Liminality is a combination of multiple things:
In concept, it refers to a transitional point between two regions or states. We’ll explore examples soon, but in concrete terms, this would be things like paths, hallways, roads etc. In abstract terms this is usually things like the act of waiting, the state of being between uses, transitional stages in life, transitional times of day, etc - things that could be compared to a state of limbo. Without mixing concrete and abstract qualities, an image will only be transitional in one dimension, falling short of liminality’s depth. In practice, therefore, liminality is not just transition in one sense. A road is transitional in itself, but not all pictures of roads are liminal.

It’s only when you combine several transitional qualities that a space becomes liminal. Liminality in photography and other media revolves around the sense of lingering in a region or state that would usually be passed without a second's thought. People pass through the hallways of an airport in an instant, so lingering in them would feel unfamiliar and almost wrong, but since you live in and around the rooms and hallways of your own home, such unfamiliarity is absent, removing that deeper element of transition. In addition, liminal spaces must be empty, devoid of people; (In this game jam, this isn't a rule, but rather a suggestion!) an absence of people is necessary for liminal spaces, as far as we’re concerned. This refers to real, present people - anything that introduces a first hand human presence into photos. Being physically present objects, mannequins and statues of people are considered in this.

Posters, and signs portraying people aren’t, but are strongly advised against. Liminality naturally draws on other concepts - although only pertaining to physical people, the concept of kenopsia defines well the kind of emptiness we seek, pertaining to the surreal atmosphere of an empty place usually populated by people. This ties in with the abstract transition of a place being between uses.

Related video:

"What is weirdcore?"

Weirdcore usually refers to images that are confusing and/or give off a strange vibe. These are usually accompanied by low-quality graphics and nonsensical and/or unsettling text. In the recent months, weird core has been "taken over" by TikTok kids who twisted the "genre" to make "OC's" (original characters) which are basically mash ups of images taken from various sites made to look like people, but with weird objects, such as flowers where their heads should be. We (the hosts) personally dislike that kind of stuff, but you can use them in your game if you really want to.