Game jams are time-bounded collaborative events that range from one to few days, bringing together teams to create game prototypes. Previous research has emphasized the positive aspects of these events. Fewer studies focused on their limitations, usually focusing on a small number of participants in specific contexts, which provides a limited view of the negative experiences faced by event participants. To address this gap, we qualitatively analyzed 866 open-ended responses about the difficulties faced by the same group of participants in two subsequent game jams. We report a taxonomy with 42 difficulties structured in five categories: Social Dynamics, Project Management, Personal, Event Format, and Technical and Infrastructural. We then discuss how to use this taxonomy in different scenarios, and how the difficulties are intertwined with participants emotional experiences and may even influence whether they decide to return to these events.

Gender disparity persists in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), impacting teamwork, productivity, and innovation. In the gaming industry, women constitute only 30% of professionals, despite comprising half of the players, raising concerns about effective game design and marketing for a diverse audience. Time-bounded collaborative events, such as hackathons and game jams, have been used to promote inclusion, providing opportunities for networking and skill development, among other benefits. However, game jams have low participation rates from minorities. This paper describes a qualitative study using card sorting and interviews with nine women game jam participants to elucidate their difficulties. We explore the interplay of these difficulties, the strategies employed to overcome them, and the subsequent impact on women's experiences. By shedding light on these issues, we aim to contribute insights that help mitigate barriers, fostering a more inclusive environment in the gaming industry and similar domains.

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.

Background: Teamwork is central component of any software development organization. Therefore, the assessment of teamwork quality is important for team management in practice. TWQ (Teamwork Quality) is a measure of the quality of intra-team interactions developed specifically for software development teams. Aims: To perform a differentiated replication of previous studies on TWQ to expand the contexts in which TWQ has been applied, to refine the measurement instrument, increasing its reliability and validity, and to identify possibilities for future research on software teams. Method: We performed a cross-sectional survey collecting data from all 18 teams in one single software organization and from all members of each team, totaling 123 participants. Results: First, we refined the measurement instrument, achieving a more reliable and parsimonious instrument. Second, our results confirmed findings from previous studies when individual level data was used, but almost no confirmation was found when data was aggregated at team level. Conclusions: Our results partially supported previous studies but raised questions about the validity of the aggregation of individual data to team level measures of the studied constructs.