Quantum Gaming is here – Learnings from the Quantum Game Jam

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In February 2019 in Helsinki, we held The Quantum Wheel – Quantum Game Jam. We had 50+ participants around the world and 10 teams finished their games in less than 48 hours.

This event really underlined that we are at the very beginning of what promises to be a new era combining games, the gaming industry, quantum physics and quantum technologies.

What we have seen so far is that most gaming people don’t necessarily know much about quantum computing but are very excited to learn enough to be able to incorporate it into the game mechanics and the style of the game.  We welcome this openness to learn about quantum computing and do something interesting.

At the moment quantum computing is a very new technology itself, so what it can bring to game development is a new way to explore something you can’t size. What quantum computing can bring to game development in the future will be interesting ways to do procedural generations, random generation of content you get in many games. But today it’s hampered by the fact that you need to make a game decisively solvable and this is going to be a lot easier with a quantum computer.

The most interesting learning from the Quantum Wheel Game Jam event was to bring together people belonging to completely different communities and see how different types of creativity interact with each other. So, it’s really the multidisciplinary aspect when we mixed musicians, artist, game developers with experts in computer coding, in graphical design, and quantum computing experts that showed remarkable outcomes.

And of course, particularly interesting was also to see what the teams could come up with in just 48 hours, with access to a real IBM universal quantum computer, one of the few in the world – and the only one accessible to the public.

See for yourself and try the games here!

This experience was definitely something new that has never been tried before.  And it also showed that quantum computers are going to be very positively affected by new people with new and diverse skills coming into the quantum computing community and that’s what we wanted to try out and encourage with the Quantum Wheel Gaming Jam.

About

Quantum Wheel is a three-day game jam aimed at creating games based on Quantum Physics, both for education and research. The event continued the Quantum Game Jam series, and it is a Finnish Game Jam organized event in collaboration with quantum physicists from the Finnish Centre of Excellence in Quantum Technology (Aalto University) and University of Turku and IBM Research (Zurich).

If you like to know more, please do not hesitate to contact me at andersq@dk.ibm.com