What 80 Jordanians built in 72 hours
Inside the 72-hour challenge revealing a side of Jordan's creative industry we don't talk about enough.
Eighty young participants. Three days. One theme: Dreams.
Across Jordan Gaming Lab’s four branches, participants were given 72 hours to turn that prompt into a working game as part of the local edition of an Arab game-development challenge.
But what happened over those three days was not only programming.
72 hours. 1 theme.
Teams formed around programming, illustration, design, sound and story-writing. These are disciplines that rarely get discussed together when Jordan’s “creative scene” is being mapped.
That is partly what makes game development interesting. A finished game might depend on code, but it also requires a visual language, characters, environments, narrative decisions, music, sound and an understanding of how an audience interacts with all of it.
By the end of the challenge, the participants had produced 24 finished games.
24 games later…
The completed games were uploaded to itch.io, where participants could play and rate one another’s work. The competition does not stop at Jordan’s borders: local teams are being assessed alongside developers participating from across the Arab region.
That matters because it places emerging Jordanian developers within a regional creative network rather than treating game development as an isolated local hobby.
Beyond gaming.
Jordan Gaming Lab’s ambitions also extend beyond the competition itself. The lab is being developed around areas including artificial intelligence, IoT, VR and AR, robotics, digital production and game development.
The stated aim: preparing young Jordanians for the jobs that don’t exist here yet.
Someone still has to imagine the environment, construct the story, design the interface, create the sound and decide what the final experience feels like.
That is creative work.
This is a creative industry. It just doesn’t look like the ones we usually talk about.