A MAZE. / Berlin 2018

Join us on Stage 1 before the talks kick off for a relaxed session. Marie Claire LeBlanc Flanagan will be talking about her experience design efforts at A MAZE. / Berlin 2018. There might be drone music as well. Please note we won't be offering breakfast to attendees, this is a bring-your-own-breakfast kind of thing, but Marie promised she'll get a couple of croissants!

Schedule:

10.30-10.35 | Opening Björn Bartholdy and Gundolf S. Freyermuth
10.35-11.15 | Opening Keynote Frans Mäyrä
11.15-11.45 | Katharina Tillmanns project presentation
11.45-12.15 | Emmanuel Guardiola project presentation
12.15-12.45 | Isabela Granic project presentation
12.45-13.30 | Closing Keynote Pippin Barr

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The integration of academic and artistic research on games is a central desideratum of game studies - but to a certain extent it is already a lived reality. This Summit deals with the fundamental question of how the procedures and results of academic and artistic research relate to one another. Furthermore, outstanding projects will be presented that embody the interface between academic and artistic research.

Prof. Dr. Frans Mäyrä (University of Tampere), director of the Finnish Center of Excellence for Game Culture Studies, will open the summit with a keynote on the importance of multidisciplinary collaboration in game research. Katharina Tillmanns (TH Cologne) will then present her work on the augmented reality games app Porta Praetoria C.C.A.A., followed by Prof. Dr. Isabela Granic (Radboud University, Netherlands), who will present virtual reality projects in the context of neuroscience. Prof. Dr. Emmanuel Guardiola (TH Cologne) will then offer some reflections on the research challenges he faced in the production of the learning app "Antura and the Letters." Prof. Dr. Pippin Barr (Concordia University, Canada) will give the closing keynote on researching game design.

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Prof. Björn Bartholdy, Prof. Dr. Gundolf S. Freyermuth: Academic and Artistic Research on Digital Games

Welcoming and introduction of the Clash of Realitites@A MAZE. / Berlin track.

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Prof. Dr. Frans Mäyrä: Potentials of multidisciplinary collaboration in the study of future game and play forms

The work in the University of Tampere Game Research Lab (UTAgamelab) has been dealing with some of the key emerging game and play forms over the last two decades, such as location-based mobile multiplayer gaming, pervasive play, games with digital distribution and micropayments, social network games, and hybrid playful designs. Much of such work has been based on a combination of humanities, social sciences and design research work, with an aim to build bridges between theoretical and foundational research, and applied, future oriented work. In this talk, professor Frans Mäyrä will discuss experiences from this kind of combinations of academic and creative work, with reference on how such lessons have influenced the planning of new “Centre of Excellence in Game Culture Studies” (2018-2025), which he is currently heading.

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Katharina Tillmanns: Art & Artifacts: Location-Based Learning with Augmented Reality

Porta Praetoria C.C.A.A. is a location-based Augmented-Reality game app for smartphones that introduces players to the Roman roots of Cologne. By blending in first-century Roman architecture and artifacts within the contemporary cityscape, the app playfully demonstrates the development and origins of today ́s Cologne city center. Targeted at pupils age 10-15, Porta Praetoria C.C.A.A. ́s cooperative and explorative approach allows for an autonomous learning experience that provides historical facts while establishing relevance and an overarching motivational fundament for further studies. - The game app is being developed at the Cologne Game Lab at the University of Arts, Technology & Sciences TH Köln and currently in an advanced prototype phase. The project is funded by Rheinenergie Foundation and the ERDF program.

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Prof. Dr. Emmanuel Guardiola: Research challenges of the humanitarian game Antura and the Letters

Antura and the Letters is an Arabic literacy and psychosocial support free mobile game addressing 5 to 10-year-old Syrian child refugees. After two years of development and open beta the final version is now released along with the results of a large field test report evaluating the impact of the game on the most fragile audience in refugee camps.Throughout this applied research project the team was faced with different challenges: choice of the educational and the psycho-social approaches; game design methodologies integrating educational and psychological objectives; application of humanitarian principles as the ”do no harm” in a game production; integration of refugees in the design and production; design of the evaluation protocols in this complex setting; distribution specificities; communication methods to reach the families; etc. This talk exposes multiple points of view on this multidisciplinary project and highlights contributions in different research fields.

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Prof. Dr. Isabela Granic: The Art and Science of Virtual Reality Experiences that Promote Emotional and Mental Health

Innovative, scalable, deeply evocative and engaging experiences that can address rampant anxiety and depression rates are urgently needed. We combine neuroscience, developmental and clinical psychology with emotionally evocative VR game design to develop experiences that promote emotional health and well being. To illustrate our multidisciplinary approach, I will present DEEP, a novel biofeedback VR video game. In DEEP, your breath is the joystick and through this embodied play, individuals learn skills that decreases anxiety in their everyday lives. The promise of future innovations for applied games that use biofeedback tools and integrate VR and mobile platforms will be discussed. Through the combination of emotionally evocative design and evidence-based behavioural change mechanisms, these tools have the potential to dramatically improve the mental health of the next generation of youth.

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Prof. Dr. Pippin Barr: Materialising Game Design

Game design is invisible in many ways. By the time a videogame is played, the multitude of decisions that were made along the way, from mechanics to technologies to aesthetics, are frozen into place and non-negotiable. It is difficult for a player not to see the result as a monolithic block, unchangeable and unchanging. For the same reasons, it can be challenging for scholars to get a grasp on the living design process itself and they are most often left to analyse and deconstruct its results. Finally, creators themselves, who literally go through the process first-hand, often have no easy way to concretely consider, assess, and discuss their work.

In this talk, Pippin Barr will discuss two versions of "materialising" game design for these audiences. First, he will present a form of videogame design that foregrounds design and technology itself in the finished product, exposing the seams, decisions, and even the arbitrariness of a given game's structure. This represents a way to disseminate videogame design research in the form of videogames themselves. Second, he will outline and give examples of an approach he and his collaborators are calling "the method", a formalised approach to videogame design and development inspired by design research and prototyping theory with a practical focus on documenting the process as it happens for future analysis and consideration. This method yields both extensive materials for post-release analysis and research in the form of incremental builds and design writing in a version control repository as well as the opportunity for the designer to systematically materialise their design process as they perform it.In both cases, the hope is to perform the magic trick of rendering the invisible visible again.

Join Sagan Yee on a journey through the world of vaporwave, a music microgenre / Internet meme / legit art movement! Discover why videogames make the perfect vessel for the ghosts of Late Capitalism and the absurdity of modern existence!

(Note: this talk replaces Meg Jayanth's talk, which unfortunately had to be cancelled at the very last minute due to unforeseen circumstances)

This talk aims to speak about the kids in game development that they'd never heard about but definitely exist because the speaker is one of them.

A group of people practice their pitching skills and learn a little bit about communication along the way. But with permadeath.

Players emulate what they play into the community: when games don't take violence and adult topics seriously, they become joke subjects. We need games that encourage players to think and reflect, but it can be hard when the environment fights change. It's time to get serious about games.

Having made over 100 games, James Earl Cox III knows the importance of breaking from established norms for his own sake and for games as a whole. We’ll dive into the ways we all shape the medium, how it shapes us back, and what we can do to continue expanding it and making it a better place. Then, maybe we can add the fun back in :)

Mexico City, Seoul, Boston, Jakarta, São Paulo, Novosibirsk, Athens, and Bangkok: for eight game jams all over the world and beyond, ART GAMES unites programmers and game developers as well as artists and creatives. Along with Berlin-based developers Maschinen-Mensch, they will take you on a tour through indie scenes worldwide. In a series of micro talks, we will learn about the obstacles that game developers face on the other side of the globe. What drives them? How do you talk about issues in a society which is reinventing itself? How do games change their world? These presentations will be followed by a Q&A with all participants of ART GAMES, Maschinen-Mensch, and Lisa Mayerhöfer, project coordinator of the Goethe-Institut.

Drawing from their diversity, creative minds from all over the world developed (digital) games which renegotiate the boundaries between art, politics, and games. A selection of ten games from all locations will be exhibited at A MAZE. Festival 2018. Participants and partners from across the globe will travel to Germany to metamorphose the worldwide virtual network of ART GAMES into an analogue one and to meet you at the festival!​

Learn about the small but vibrant indie scene in Novosibirsk aka Silicon Taiga and why “Choo-Choose” wants you to run over a Big Mac! Find out how abstract shapes in “circled.” question what it means to be close. Or take the place of a radiant sun in “SunShine” and burn your own imperfect utopia to the ground. And if you are ready to leave planet Earth behind and become an alien tribe on another planet, we recommend travelling to the “2984 Little Brothers” in a faraway galaxy. “Struggling Dreams” asks you to look back and evoke memories of better times in order to envision a safer future. With “Babel-o-Rama” you can conquer any language barrier as long as you figure out how to talk to each other. Cooperation is also key in “Chain Reaction”, a lesson that you learn the hard way when you try to escape from a dungeon being chained to other prisoners. To get away with your crimes scot-free in return for showers of cash is the goal of “Make it Rain”. Delve into the beautiful virtual reality of “Cacophony” and conduct a choir of eerie figures. It is up to you whose lips are zipped and whose voice is heard! “Status” also puts you in charge of everyone else’s fate – who will be bedded in roses and whose buttocks will get wet?

ART GAMES is a project of the Goethe-Institut in cooperation with Maschinen-Mensch and is sponsored by the Federal Foreign Office of Germany.

Twitter handle and hashtag: @Gr8ArtGames    #gr8ArtGames

Mexico City: circled.
Produced by: Pablo Francisco Montes Romero, Mariana Mena Tello, Omar Ivan Toledano Landero, Nicolás Danziger, Rafael Escalante, Emilio Gerardo Estrada Lucero
Speakers: Mariana Mena Tello, Nicolás Danziger

Seoul: SunShine
Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uw4oE8C_0bQ
Produced by: Je-won Yoon, Yunjeong Kim, Aram Lee Miller, Hyijin Cho, Saehoon Lee
Speakers: Yunjeong Kim, Je-won Yoon

Seoul: 2984 Little Brother
Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HarvWG-TllA
Produced by: Yongjoo Yoo, Ga-young An, Deokwon Kim, Jaemin Park
Speakers: Yongjoo Yoo, Jaemin Park

Boston: Struggling Dreams
Produced by: Jeffrey Campbell, Zhuo (Aslanta) Chen, Joe Marchuk, Daniel Williams
Speakers: Zhuo (Aslanta) Chen, Joe Marchuk

Jakarta: Babel-o-Rama
Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hfm5uF7q4fo
Produced by: Jeffin Andria P., M. Tomy Kurniawan, Fandry Indrayadi, Siska Butar Butar, Cherina La Rubatt, M. Abdul Karim
Speakers: Tomy Kurniawan, Fandry Indrayadi

São Paulo: Chain Reaction
Trailer: https://vimeo.com/259054321
Produced by: Vitor Santana Melo Silva, Wellington Fattori, Isabelle Linares, Roberto Romão, Yukio L. K. Odani, Orlando Batista, André Mariano, Bruna Correa
Speakers: Vitor Santana Melo Silva, Wellington Fattori

Novosibirsk: Choo-Choose
Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRUR919rH6A
Produced by: Petrushkov Mikhail, Grigoriev Konstantin, Kalmykova Ekaterina, Avdeev Oleg, Yustovich Ksenia
Speakers: Grigoriev Konstantin, Kalmykova Ekaterina

Athens: Cacophony
Trailer: https://vimeo.com/258135335
Produced by: Christina Chrysanthopoulou, Vasileios Karavasilis, Anthony Theodorelos, Christos Kasimidis
Speakers: Christina Chrysanthopoulou, Vasileios Karavasilis

Athens: Status
Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVsm0Q8VKm4
Produced by: Tasos Protopapas, Michalis Lygiaris, Kiprianos Skafidas, Haralabos Andrianidis
Speaker: Tasos Protopapas

Bangkok: Make It Rain
Produced by: Saranpat Sereewiwattana, Charlie Sitthisakuldech, Thanapat Tassanavijitwong, Chanatip Buranawarodomkul, Swit Khomapat
Speakers: Saranpat Sereewiwattana, Chanatip Buranawarodomkul

From the caves of Lascaux to contemporary art galleries, drawing has held a unique place in history amongst the artistic mediums. Simple and direct, its communicative power is immediately accessible and can overcome cultural and language barriers. Considering its artistic tradition, power for intuitive communication, and intrinsic playful qualities, why is drawing so underrepresented as a mechanic in the history of games? Perhaps it's more common than you think. This talk will take a close look at digital and non-digital drawing games of all kinds.

Tim Rogers’s studio Action Button Entertainment has made a couple video games—such as VIDEOBALL! However, there are plenty of games they almost made, yet didn’t. Tim Rogers will show some of those games. Many of them are pretty stupid!

Hyper Talks are short and fun 5 minute knowledge-injections. Ten speakers (+ a special surprise one) will talk about projects, experiences, failures and sources of inspiration in their work. The Hyper Talks are a platform for both established artists as well as upcoming talents: some of the past hyper speakers ended up being winners of the A MAZE. Awards. The session is hosted by A MAZE. / Berlin programme manager Lorenzo Pilia.

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Anya Combs: 15 of My Favorite Flash Games
I am the former Developer Relations person at AddictingGames. Here are 15 of my favorite flash games.

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Claudia Miranda: How will you know when it is done?
A talk about her experience creating a VR environment / art piece that helped her understand her own use of disassociation as a coping mechanism.

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Christina Chrysanthopoulou: On Art and Virtual Reality
A short talk about the added value that virtual reality offers to interactive works of art and a brief presentation of such paradigms.

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Claire Morley: Accessible creative expression through small tools
Getting started with game development can be daunting, time-consuming, and inaccessible. I taught myself to code and use Unity over a number of years but started using 'small' tools like Bitsy and Flatpack last year, and have found that I am able to use them to articulate and complete my game ideas in a much more realistic time/energy-frame!

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Jazz Mickle: An Alternate History Of Game Development
With 20 years of modding history and progress, with relatively little interaction with other fields, the work coming out of the Doom community has creating completely unique takes on design and technical progress. Here's how it changed my outlook on Everything.

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Hannah Nicklin: N+1, bikes in games
An in depth analysis of bikes in games which are not about bikes but that contain them. By someone who likes bikes. And makes games.

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Malena Klaus: Kickstarted intimacy – Designing intimate spaces for strangers
Are you sick of having the same small talk conversations all the time? Are you craving real, deep connections instead? So were we!That is why we designed "Blanket Space", an analogue, 3-player experience which aims to create intimate, respectful connections between total strangers. And it works!This talk describes how we designed for intimacy, how emotionally straining the process was and how beneficial the outcome.

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Miguel Alva: Future II. Mapping reality.
A hyper explanation of Output, a documentary on games and interactive art designed for screening in 2067.

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Natalie Clayton: Small Train Dreams
A year ago this week, I released my own take on the queer artgame / first person walker genres.
Let's talk about how working alongside tight limitations helped me dream small.

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Xalavier Nelson Jr.: How To Run a Billy Ocean LARP on the Last Day of GDC Without Dying
Interested in how social dynamics and physical presence can affect the games you create? Narrative designer and PC Gamer columnist Xalavier Nelson Jr. walks you through the 5 fundamentals of social role-play and game design, using a real-world example from GDC 2018.

Bare it all!

In Under The Hood, three developers take the stage to show off the naked innards of their current project. Each team has 25 minutes to show the inner workings of one part of their game to the live audience. Come by, learn how the sausage is made and ask the most probing of questions!

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Eyal Stern (Mad About Pandas): Narrative Control in Hitchhiker
Take a close look at how we built a comprehensive narrative system suited for a narrative director to piece together the story piece by piece with complete control.

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Jennifer Schneidereit (Nyamyam): A comedy written in the stars: Astrology gameplay and storytelling in Astrologaster
Astrologaster is a comedy game based on the real-life casebooks of 16th century medical Astrologer Simon Forman. Players take on the role of Forman to help patient’s with problems, by interpreting answers found in the stars. In this session we will have a look at how the team at Nyamyam employs the use of real Astrology as core gameplay mechanic and storytelling device. We will also cover “Star Kit”, Nyamyam’s in-house design tool specifically created for Astrologaster.

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Johan Gjestland (Team Fugl): The joy of level creation in Fugl
Watch Johan Gjestland show and explain his GPU based level interactive editor to procedurally generate beautiful levels filled with towering rocks for the flying-game Fugl.

Join us on Stage 1 before the talks kick off, for a relaxing breathing & light yoga session with Charlene Putney (writer at Larian Studious).

A very open talk about the work, the luck, the emails, the numbers, the art, the practicalities, the team, the money, and the success of Hidden Folks.

This will be a conversation about the a new generation of virtual art spaces. As we exhibit this year at A MAZE. quite some works that come in an art-bundle like "Data Mutations", or as a virtual space to experience digital art like in "MOR - Museum of Other Realities" and "The Zium Museum". And then the work "Fountain" that builds an exhibition around one infamous art work to interact with it in unusual ways, that opens up to new imaginaries of presenting art – exspecially digital art, games, playful media in the future.

This conversation invites you to think forward of how game engines have an impact in the art world and where the time will lead us to.  

Why did we make the The Missing Game for a cause? What is its part in the larger campaign, the Missing Public Art and awareness campaign? Why is the use of art and technology important to engage the public? How has The Missing Game used the gaming space to address this serious issue? How can we move beyond empathy?

The Missing Game is a part of a larger campaign to engage the public on the role they play in the heinous issue of sex trafficking. There are 3 million people trafficked every year of which 1.2 million are young girls. The Missing Campaign uses art and technology to engage and break the status quo on this grave issue. The average age of a girl getting trafficked has dropped from 13 to 11 and now 9 years.

Warning: this talk will feature explicit sexual content.

The talk is based on 4-year research and reveals the ecosystem behind indie VR adult games subculture. It shows in details how existing fandom, indie artist and internet fetish based communities express themselves in VR and how indie developers create tools which form new communities.

The talk covers the current state of interactivity and hardware and explains future movements such as holoporn and XR based fetishes.

But most importantly, you will hear how VR helps people to express sexuality and how it brings to life wild fantasies to let people experience fetishes which aren’t possible in real life. As well as, how VR scene reframes content distribution and let individuals make sustainable projects while working with the communities.  

An in-depth interview with Piotr Iwanicki about the development of SUPERHOT, conducted by Sos Sosowski. How to break out of the FPS genre and evolve a game into success? How did the game change during its development? Why? Which features were added? Which were taken away? When? What were the interesting design challenges? What was the original vision of the game? How did the idea emerge? How did certain features evolved into their final version?

The conversation is a part of Devolution #4: SUPERHOT, a cooperation between Devolution, A MAZE. / Berlin 2018, SUPERHOT Team and Game Design // UE.

Journalism can use virtual reality both to convey complex meaning in a simple and effective way but also as an entrance point to stimulate in-deep reasoning and more research and attention in readers. By looking at the journalistic content produced for the Guardian VR App and by analysing how the journalistic content is delivered both through interactive and non-interactive approaches, the talk will explore the peculiar features that the VR language is showing more and more.

Independent game developers and academic scientists make surprisingly good and symbiotic partners. Owen has two of these collaborations in progress right now. Deep, a mental health game controlled by breathing, and Theia, a virtual reality cancer lab. In this session we'll take a quick look at these two different projects and how they are structured. We will talk about what is wonderful about working with scientists and why you might consider it. Finally, we'll take a look at some of the challenges in communication between these two groups.

The A MAZE. masterclass is a 1 hour long in-depth conversations focusing on the work of a veteran of the game scene. This year Jonatan Van Hove will be talking with Colin & Sarah Northway, a husband and wife indie team responsible for Fantastic Contraption, Fantastic Contraption VR, Incredipede, the Rebuild series, Word Up Dog, and a few other cool indie experiments, like Shader, the game that only exists on a single, Internet-and-external-connection-free laptop. They lived all over the world including Thailand, Japan, Turkey, Czech Republic, Italy, Malta, Scotland, France, Honduras, Costa Rica, Panama, The Philippines, Argentina and Brazil. Currently they settled back in Vancouver, Canada.

Having dedicated three years to solo-building his very recently released VR experience GNOSIS, Rob will be quasi- ritualistically getting some of that insanity out of his system in form of a synesthetically enhanced stream of consciousness. Sharing his influences, personal motivations, "post-mortem" reflections and deep technical trivia, Rob will be also very happy to engage in some discussion about what's around the corner for VR and the role it may yet play in society.

A short introduction to collaborative virtual reality improvisation, ANYTHING and Q&A session with Dogson, the platform's creator. Come prepared with important questions about life, art, and the nature of virtual existence.

FLOW as arts game mechanics, concept of immersion and VR with Neurointerfaces.
The panel will introduce and premiere the experimental Game Art Neuroflow Game, http://www.neuroflow.games

Participants:

Margarete Jahrmann, game artist Neuroflow Games, Zurich/ Vienna
Thomas Wagensommerer, lead developer Neuroflow Games, Vienna
Stefan Glasauer, computational neuroscientist, LMU Klinikum Munich

Supported by the Computer Games Museum Berlin and funded by Capital Cultural Fund Germany.
Unterstützt vom Computerspielemuseum Berlin und gefördert vom Hauptstadtkulturfonds.
Special thanks to Andreas Lange.

Walking alone at night, at the edge of my village, I flash the dark landscape with my camera. A series of images spark a passionate vision and urge me to go on an adventure - to independently create VR indie game Homescape with no prior game development experience.

Homescape is a hypnotizing and mysterious Virtual Reality art-game. Wearing the headset, players go through guided meditation and dive deep into a dark landscape, whose design is based on the fields surrounding Ma’as, the artist's Israeli hometown.

In the midst of the native biota, vestiges of colonial British rule, and ruins of Palestinian settlements, players encounter the inhabitants of the cultural unconscious, who reside together to form the sites of the artist’s childhood memories.

The independent exploration of this vast digital landscape evokes moments of cognitive uncertainty and form an alluring, poetic, and thought-provoking experience.

In this talk, I will outline the process of creating Homescape - a project that challenges the borders between film, game, and art. I will discuss the place of philosophy and poetics in Virtual Reality, and think out loud about art, friendship, childhood memories, darkness, technology, and politics.

For generations we have experienced stories which were presented in a frame before us - the television set or screen has after-all been a window into other worlds for over a hundred years. But now, as we enter the VR world, we are crossing that threshold. And with this change much of the narrative language we use to tell and understand stories is no longer possible. In this talk Beatrix Moersch will explore the impact which working in the VR medium has on our traditional storytelling tools, and how we can reinvent some of these tools for the new realities.

Spoiler: it wasn't easy, but it was very fun.

An absurdist mind-and-body romp through the highest clouds to the ocean deep, Museum of Symmetry is the explosive feel-good alter-universe of cartoonist and animator Paloma Dawkins—a room-scale VR experience with 2D animation in a 3D playground.

The German criminal code rightly prohibits the display of unconstitutional content with the exception to “further civil enlightenment, to avert unconstitutional aims, to promote art or science, research or teaching”. Video games, unlike film and other forms of art, are however excluded from this definition. As a result, video games like Attentat 1942, a nominee for the A MAZE. Awards cannot be sold or displayed in Germany.

The open discussion about video game censorship in Germany will discuss the implications of §86 of the German criminal code and subsequent (mis)rulings of German courts for video games. What role can video games carry to "further civil enlightenment, to avert unconstitutional aims, to promote art or science, research or teaching"?

Participants:

Marcus Richter is a radio host and moderator. He will be hosting the panel discussion.

Vit Sisler is the game developer of Attentat 1942.

Kai Bodensiek is a lawyer and expert on the legal aspect of the topic.

Marie Berthoumieu in charge of web content at ARTE.

In partnership with A MAZE. and the Volksbühne, we created a narrative game set in a machine learning powered underworld. And we will talk about how that is going!

This talk is about the ways in which the indie dev scene in video games push the boundaries of the medium of video games in various ways. I'll be focusing in the ways in which our games subvert the expectations of players both narratively and structurally and why is not only a good thing, but an important thing as well.

Have you ever lovingly crafted a video game, only to find it later rendered unplayable by an operating system or browser update? Predicting how software dependencies outside your control will change is tricky. However, there are ways you can mitigate the risk of not having a playable build of your game. This talk will discuss best practices for future-proofing your game, plus some approaches for attempting to resurrect your oldest and dustiest projects.

“The Shape Of Punk To Come” is a love letter to the future of disruptive pop culture and revolutionary entertainment. 


Arguing that, while rock/ punk/ DIY music acted as the most defiant media of the 20th century, with the passing of time, punk music is no longer the subversive force it once was. If punk is dead, in it’s wake, we need a new noise. We need a fresh tip of the spear of change, thrust into the heart of a stagnant old world. The Shape Of Punk To Come.



While acknowledging both the renegade creators that shaped video game history, as well as the many artists actively re-inventing games today, The Shape Of Punk To Come focuses heavily on the future. A future where small groups of passionate misfits and outsiders band together, imagining and manifesting better worlds through games.


The Shape Of Punk To Come was originally delivered at A MAZE./ Johannesburg 2015, immediately becoming a living manifesto for my own game punk band, Team Lazerbeam.  For it’s European debut, the A MAZE./ Berlin edition of the talk will include reflections on how the talk informed our work as Team Lazerbeam, and assert why, in 2018, radical games are more important than ever.