Taiwan Game Jam Community

30-Second Overview

The public history of Taiwan's Game Jam community starts from 2012, when Faust Li returned from Japan having learned from a Game Jam there, and co-organized Taiwan's first documented public Game Jam — the "MIT Game Jam" — with IGDSHARE at Yuan Ze University. From there, the community gradually expanded around Global Game Jam (GGJ) Taipei venues, growing into an informal network connecting students, developers, and industry professionals. Its most distinctive experiment is KUSO GAME JAM, founded in 2015 — which does not demand good games, only honest confrontation with the creative impulse toward "bad taste."

Keywords: Game Jam, IGDSHARE, Global Game Jam, KUSO GAME JAM, indie games, junk-work (廢作)

Global Game Jam is the world's largest annual Game Jam event; Taiwan venues have been established one after another since around 2012.

A Five-Minute Deep Dive

The Opening of a Strange Question

In 2019, at the Taiwan Game Developers Forum (TGDF), the projector screen showed three images in succession: a black-and-white Diane Arbus photograph of twins, a low-resolution screenshot from the 1995 Hong Kong homemade game HK97, and a bowl of steaming stinky tofu.

The speaker asked a question that sounded nothing like a game talk: What is bad taste? Why do we need it?¹

This talk was a defense of a Taiwanese community event called KUSO GAME JAM. That event had started in 2015, telling participants every year one thing that game design courses almost never teach: It's okay to make bad games.

Taking Root: From Yuan Ze University to All of Taiwan

In 2012, Faust Li (Li Chia-i, internet name Faust Li, 1979–2014) returned from attending a Game Jam in Japan. Back in Taiwan, he co-organized a "MIT Game Jam" with IGDSHARE at Yuan Ze University in Taoyuan — the earliest documented public Game Jam in Taiwan.² MIT stood for "Made in Taiwan," a name that itself carried a local declaration: Taiwan would create its own game culture. The event was small in scale; Faust Li had only two more years — he passed away in 2014, never seeing the community's subsequent growth.

Global Game Jam (GGJ) is the world's largest annual Game Jam event, held globally in synchrony every January, with a unified theme released and participants building a game from scratch in 48 hours. IGDSHARE subsequently officially established the first GGJ venue in Taipei; IGDSHARE's Johnson Lin also served as GGJ's Asia regional director, becoming one of the most important early drivers of Taiwan's Game Jam ecosystem.³

The GGJ format gave Taiwanese developers a condition that is otherwise hard to replicate: a mandatory deadline. A game in normal development can remain "still in progress" indefinitely, but in a Game Jam, you hand something over after 48 hours no matter what. That forced-completion pressure was a kind of breakthrough for many participants making their "first finished game." A second Taipei venue joined in 2016; by 2026 it had run for 7 consecutive editions, and both venues together form Taipei's Game Jam infrastructure.¹

It is worth noting that beyond GGJ's official records, Taiwan may have hosted non-public events held in synchrony with GGJ by individual universities earlier still — but such documentation is difficult to locate; the 2012 Yuan Ze University event remains the earliest verifiable public record.

The Birth of KUSO GAME JAM

In 2015, KUSO GAME JAM held its first edition in purely online form. The founder's question was straightforward: if "making a good game" is removed from the goal, what would creators make?

From the second edition onward, the event added an offline venue, running in parallel with the online component. Scale per edition ranges between 15 and 35 groups; during the pandemic it returned to purely online format; by 2026 it had run for 12 consecutive editions.¹ The word "KUSO" is borrowed from Japanese; in Taiwan's internet culture it has long since evolved into an attitude of tolerance for the absurd, the failed, and the bad-taste. KUSO GAME JAM structures that attitude: junk-work is the goal itself.

Among past works that left an impression, what made them memorable was being accurately absurd rather than refined. The 2017 work PooPooL used excrement as its core mechanic, then actually released on Google Play to receive real player downloads before being removed.⁴ The 2023 work "Human Drum Too" (人打鼓太) used humans as drumsticks; the 2025 work "Your Soul Needs a Course" (你的心靈需要課程) packaged pseudo-inspirational logic in game format. These works are not visually polished, but the design intent is clear — clearly absurd.

Full In-Depth Material

A Genealogy of Bad Taste

The TGDF 2019 talk attempted to build a genealogy of "bad taste" with historical depth:¹

The logic of the cult movie: the audience knows it's bad, yet watches it repeatedly — because it's bad in a certain purity. The logic of punk: deliberately rough, resisting the polished mainstream aesthetic; roughness itself is a position statement. Diane Arbus's photography:⁴ looking directly at society's margins, using the lens to refuse to look away from the deformed and vulnerable — making the boundary between beautiful and ugly suspect. Stinky tofu: the smell creates an entry threshold, but those who pass it receive a rich experience; its exclusivity is part of its quality. HK97:⁵ a 1995 Hong Kong homemade Game Boy game, rough in production and politically satirical; it has become a kind of artistic position because it so honestly displays the maker's impulse.

These coordinates all point to the same thing: there is a creative honesty that comes from not pretending you are doing something noble. What KUSO GAME JAM wants to do is give Taiwan's game community a formal space to practice this honesty.

Game Jam as Entry Point to Indie Games

Taiwan's indie game development community is small, but Game Jams play several concrete functional roles.

Social networking: developers meet at Game Jam venues, forming horizontal connections across companies and schools; many subsequent collaborations began here. Student entry point: Game Jam is the occasion for many students to "complete a game under real constraints" for the first time — school courses rarely provide this kind of pressure. Keeping people in the ecosystem: some Game Jam participants from over ten years ago have since become full-time indie game developers. Nitrous Games developer Lee-Kuo Chen is one traceable example⁷ — from community participation to releasing an independent work, the Game Jam was one of the early nodes on that path.

The Seriousness of Junk-Work

One easy misunderstanding: KUSO does not mean not serious.

KUSO GAME JAM works, beneath their absurd exteriors, typically have clear design intent. Creators need to figure out "why this game is entertainingly bad rather than simply bad" — which itself requires design thinking. Doing things randomly usually amounts to nothing; genuinely effective junk-work requires sufficient understanding of "good games" to be able to break them precisely.

This parallels the logic of punk: The Clash's roughness was deliberate roughness, not incompetent roughness. Understanding why you're rough is what makes the roughness persuasive.

Two Cultural Climates Coexisting

Taiwan currently operates two Game Jam frameworks simultaneously: the GGJ track emphasizes completion, community connection, and synchrony with the international community; the KUSO GAME JAM track emphasizes experimentalism, absurdist aesthetics, and breaking the assumption of "what a game should be."

They are not mutually exclusive. Many developers participate in both, using different frameworks to exercise different creative muscles. GGJ trains "making something playable under constraints"; KUSO GAME JAM trains "finding what you want to say without any standard." The former answers game design's technical questions; the latter answers the creator's motivational questions.

Extended Thinking

Taiwan's Game Jam community story is still being written. In every GGJ's 48 hours every January, in every KUSO GAME JAM's submitted junk-work, the same question is being answered: what is making games for?

Discussion Questions

1. Is there a deeper cultural connection between Taiwan's KUSO culture (Taiwanese kitsch, temple troupes, parody) and KUSO GAME JAM's "legitimacy of bad taste"?
2. To what extent does the indie game community's informal network (Game Jams, community events) substitute for formal industry cultivation mechanisms?
3. If a game can also be "stinky tofu," what kind of distribution platform or community mechanism could help such works find the right audience?

Related Topics

• → Taiwan Gaming Industry and Digital Entertainment
• → Red Candle Games
• → Taiwan Open Source Spirit

Sources

This article's primary material comes from first-hand accounts by KUSO GAME JAM founder tppr2046. For factual additions or corrections, please open a PR.