Game Jam Winner Spotlight: Calder’s Circus
This is the fourth in our series of posts about the winners of this year’s public domain game jam, Gaming Like It’s 1929! We’ve already covered the Best Remix, Best Deep Cut, and Best Visuals, and today we’re looking at the winner of the Best Adaptation category: Calder’s Circus by David Harris.
Regular followers of the jam are surely familiar with David Harris, our one regular entrant who has won a category every single year. And I promise the judges aren’t just playing favorites: this year’s entry is once again suffused with the sort of thoughtful creativity that always makes David’s games stand out. Calder’s Circus (I Think Best In Wire) is inspired by the work of Alexander Calder, best known as one of the earliest creators of kinetic sculptures or mobiles. In 1929, he presented Cirque Calder, an improvised circus performance utilizing dozens of wire and wood figurines. Calder’s Circus the game doesn’t just take inspiration from these performances — it continues them.
Players are tasked with creating their own circus, by building their own wire figurines and telling tales of their performances. Thus it becomes a combination of a crafting/artmaking game with a storytelling game, which thrusts players right into the heart of Cirque Calder‘s unique combination of sculpture and performance. Thanks to the robust design notes David Harris has included with the game, which walk through his creative process in detail, we can understand this aspect of the game design his own words:
Isn’t this a game about wire-bending not narrative? Only if you’re looking at the tree and not the forest. Calder was sketching in wire but he was creating a circus and the performance of that circus was his end goal.
In the game, this manifests as a lightly-competitive group exercise in which, after constructing their free-standing circus scenes from wire (or pipe cleaners if you want to play with kids, who would definitely get a kick out of this), they compete to tell the stories of each others’ performances, randomly determined to be either triumphant or disastrous. The player who tells the best stories becomes the ringleader, and must name the circus and present its dramatic introduction.
As the aforementioned design notes describe, to create this game David immersed himself not only in Calder’s work but also in the context surrounding it: Calder’s life in the art scene in Paris and his comments on his own creative process, and his relationship with real life circuses and the fraught history surrounding circuses themselves as a form of entertainment. It’s no surprise that the result is a game that feels more like a continuation of Cirque Calder than just an homage to it, and a game that is a fitting winner of Best Adaptation.
Congratulations to David Harris for the win! You can get everything you need to play Calder’s Circus, as well as David’s design notes, from its page on Itch. We’ll be back next week with the next in our series of winner spotlights, and don’t forget to check out the many great entries that didn’t quite make the cut! And stay tuned for next year, when we’ll be back for Gaming Like It’s 1930.