– What happens when game developers, artists and designers are challenged to transform sustainability in fashion and textiles into something you can actually play?
From 18 to 28 September, the Prato Textile Museum (TMP) brought this challenge to life through its online i-Game Jam, turning a dedicated Discord server into a lively space for experimentation, collaboration and game creation.
Under the theme “Sustainability for Playable Futures” and inspired by the evocative claim “We sleep, but the planet’s loom never stops,” the Game Jam invited participants to explore sustainability not simply as a topic, but as a starting point for creating meaningful interactive experiences.
Nine teams, one creative challenge
The Jam brought together 37 young participants, aged between 20 and 30, representing a diverse mix of junior and senior game developers, 2D and 3D artists, and sound designers. Working remotely, they formed nine teams and embarked on an intensive week of collaborative game development.
To coordinate and support the process, TMP joined forces with two external game-industry specialists: Marco Mazzaglia, expert in Game Design and Game Thinking, and Francesco Liotta, expert in Game Development. They worked closely with the TMP team throughout the event, with the support of IGDA Italy, the Italian branch of the global network connecting communities and professionals across the game-development ecosystem.
Participants were not starting from a blank page. To fuel their creative process, the teams were provided with textile-industry “Sustainability Pills”, pre-generated Game Design Documents (GDDs) and specialised AI authoring tools developed within i-Game.
Turning sustainability into gameplay
From the very beginning, the Game Jam became a two-way learning process. Participants actively engaged with the facilitators, discussing the evaluation criteria and providing constructive feedback on the integration of the i-Game GDDs and AI authoring tools into their development process. This early exchange set the tone for a highly interactive week. Most importantly, the teams did not treat sustainability merely as a background narrative. They wanted to understand it more deeply and translate it into the games themselves.
Questions emerged around real examples of sustainable and unsustainable practices in the fashion and textile sectors, helping participants explore how these issues could become part of game narratives, choices and mechanics. Regular online office hours gave the teams the opportunity to work through both creative and technical challenges together with the facilitators. By 23:59 on 24 September, all nine teams had successfully transformed their ideas into playable prototypes.
From development to the final pitch
The journey culminated on 28 September, when the prototypes entered the evaluation stage.
An expert jury representing different perspectives from the game industry, museums and cultural institutions, textile and fashion sustainability, and the textile business sector assessed the nine games across four main dimensions: Game Design, Game Development, Thematic Application and Tools Application.
The teams then came together once again on Discord for the final awards ceremony, each having just three minutes to pitch their game to the jury and fellow participants. The atmosphere combined friendly competition with a strong sense of mutual support. And when the winning team was finally announced, receiving a €600 Amazon gift card, the online space came alive with congratulations, heart emojis, thank-you messages and celebratory memes.
More than an online Game Jam
The Prato experience demonstrated that meaningful co-creation does not necessarily depend on sharing the same physical space.
Across nine teams and an intensive week of collaboration, participants connected textile heritage, sustainability, creativity and technology, transforming complex challenges into interactive and playable experiences.
For i-Game, this is precisely where the value of game co-creation becomes visible: not only in the games that emerge at the end, but in the conversations, experimentation and new connections that happen while creating them.
The Prato i-Game Jam showed how digital collaborative spaces can bring diverse creative talents together and how the challenges facing fashion and textiles today can become the starting point for imagining more sustainable, playable futures. 🎮🧵🌱