Mentored Game Bootcamp

The gaming industry is witnessing significant growth, leading to an increased demand for effective mentorship to support emerging developers and entrepreneurs. While many mentorship programmes prioritise the needs of mentees, the requirements of mentoring are usually neglected. Being an experienced developer or entrepreneur does not inherently provide the necessary skills or frameworks for efficient mentoring.

There is no textbook reference for determining the competences expected from game development mentors, it is an emerging practice, more common and appreciated in some industries than in others, and often carried out in isolation, solely based on one’s personal (and thus limited) experience. As all other stakeholders of the game industry, mentors meet and talk regularly, e.g. during game conferences, but they rarely work together in the same environment or with the same team and they even much rarer talk about their work practice and methods.

Acknowledging this gap, our focus has shifted from merely inspiring new mentors to actively supporting seasoned mentors by fostering a meaningful exchange amongst this peer group. During a prior project experience[1], we discovered that game bootcamps offer a perfect environment for such an exchange.

Instead of only focusing on the peer group “young talents and entrepreneurs”, the usual target group for a bootcamp and the actual reason for a mentor to join a camp, we developed a program for a bootcamp that would cater for the primary group of “mentees” but also fostering an exchange on mentoring practices and methods.

[1] The Autumn Academy bootcamp in the BGI/BSGI project: https://baltic-games.eu/media/bsgi_o3.2_white_paper_on_transnational_incubation_activities_2022-07-12.pdf

Programme Manual Online

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