All For One and One For All: Investigating How Global Game Jam Participants Get and Offer Help

Background: Time-bounded collaborative events are events that bring together different participants to address a problem through the creation of a computational artifact over a short period of time. Examples of these events include hackathons, game jams, and ideathons. Despite previous research on these events, little is understood about how people seek and get help during these events. Aims: Our goal is to understand how event participants seek and get help during time-bounded collaborative events to design better strategies supporting search behaviour. This is necessary because participants learn and improve different skills important for working in the industry during these events. Method: We conducted a mixed-methods study where we collected data through a large-scale survey with participants of a global-scale game jam. Our primary method was quantitative, but we had a qualitative dataset that we used to augment aspects of our quantitative results. Results: Our findings suggest that professional and independent developers are the ones who provide help most often, while students interact more with mentors. In addition, the frequency that participants getting help from mentors decreases with increased experience in game development and the number of participations in game jams. Participants also point to mentors as an essential part of the jams: they are expert facilitators, so much so that the perception of the mentors' absence or distance was reported as a disappointment. Conclusions: Understanding how participants in time-bounded collaborative events seek and get help is important to design more effective events and improving the participants' overall experience. We translate our findings into suggestions for event organizers.