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Outside, the snow is packed in glass sheets, peppered in places with stones that offer a shoe some hope of holding its grip. Here in Tromsų, the most northerly city on planet Earth (so long as you define 'city' as a place with more than 20,000 inhabitants; those people who live farther north than this tend to be loners) every season is a different shade of winter. The ice holds. Inside too - although here in the chicly Norwegian open office complex known as Flow, it has the welcome benefit of being laced with vodka. It's quarter past nine in the evening and around a hundred programmers, artists and designers, attendees of the inaugural Splash game jam, stand around sipping alcoholic slushies and eating pizza. At midnight we'll board the MS Finnmarken, a 138.5 metre-long cruise ship which weighs 15,690 tonnes and seats a thousand, in order begin a 48-hour, 1200 kilometre cruise to Trondheim, in southern Norway. By the time the journey is complete, we will have passed through perilously narrow fjords, watched vast shoals of fish flicker in the sea, have seen a tiny bespectacled man hack a dried cod into crispy pieces using a hand axe, spent an evening carpeting one of the MS Finnmarken's 283 cabins in vomit, and sat self-consciously (us Brits, anyway) in a hot tub while, through the chlorine mist, the Northern lights billow like ghostly cosmic curtains overhead. Some may even have found the time to make a video game.
"Is anyone good at 3D art?" Tim Garbos, creator of the recent iOS hit Progress and a member of the Copenhagen Game Collective, asks in the almost-dark while a man with lank hair cues up Todd Terje tracks on his laptop behind. A number of hands go up. "How about shaders?" Another swish of arms. "What about shooting games? Is anybody here good at making shooters?" One guy standing close to the impromptu stage raises his hand and, while the rest of the room boos, amicably, begins to circle on the spot, grinning. Garbos is a veteran of game jams, the name given to these increasingly popular gatherings of game-makers, who are encouraged to collaborate with strangers to make a video game, usually to a specific theme. It was Garbos who advised Splash Jam's organisers, Runa Haukland and Henriette Myrlund, that their initial idea for a theme, 'Slippery when wet' might be a little too prescriptive. At his suggestion, Haukland and Myrlund changed it to 'Beginnings' and, before anyone is allowed to split off into groups, Garbos invites people to the stage to announce their "best worst idea" based on the theme.
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