The prompt for our Warren Tech fall 8-hour creative jam, an extension of the idea of a game jam, is announced: "What are you afraid of?" I'm a novice technical artist for games, dealing mostly in the intangible. The other 6 teammates are from graphic design, none of which I'm very familiar with, who deal mostly in the tangible. I'm getting some red flags when these teammates are talking back and forth about food or something, while our announcer explains the rules and eventually the aforementioned prompt.

More red flags as at least 3 of our teammates are clueless to what the announcer just said as we leave the room. For the first 30 minutes, we start trying to come up with an idea. I start by asking everyone the obvious question, "What are you afraid of." I hear spiders three times, needles, rejection, the dark, and I myself say "lost." The next question, "how do we present these ideas?" The idea I have is to make a forest, grimly lit, the trees are spider legs, and perhaps you would navigate through it all through Sketchfab. However this idea wasn't very inclusive and also would overburden me as the only one who could do computer-3D. Another idea was a dream catcher of horror. Not necessarily creative, possibly assimilative, but it would at least let us all put something into it. This idea was thrown out though, because we didn't think we had the resources to do so. Decidedly very okay. However, the idea we settled on, with also the least time spent discussing, was a box of ambiguous insides that you would reach into. This has the same limitation as the last suggestion, but I was sick of sitting on a carpet floor so I just said "okay."

The next step was to make the box. we didn't actually have a cardboard box to work with, so instead we had to use some uniquely thick paper-ish material. Cutting it all apart took about 3 pairs of hands, but I wasn't very keen on it out of the seven of us, so I waited. This is a re-occurring and constant theme for the rest of the day, only breaking for a moment when I get the opportunity to cut a hole in the top of the box. Then back to the rest of the day. I just sat around and watched. The box was also spray-painted, but I didn't really participate in that either, because again it didn't demand all hands on deck. 45 minutes before "class" got out for the day, we were done with the box. Then the next course of action was to... sit around and do nothing. Poking around on my phone and showing a funny pufferfish video was tempting, but I suppressed the urge, again doing nothing. A mentor comes in and reminds us that we've got thousands of dollars worth of equipment and work blogs like this one,and we just head over to our home rooms to write these blogs.

Uh.