PLAY16 - Creative Gaming Festival

Video games are often accused of trivializing war. The glorified battle against “forces of evil” is common for many shooters as is the reduction to strategic-tactical considerations in strategy games. Civilian perspectives, on the other hand, are conspicuously absent in these scenarios. This makes games very different not only from other popular media, but also from daily news in which the plight of civilians has become almost omnipresent.

This workshop will try to deconstruct this apparent contrariety by presenting several examples. In a first step, we will try to ascertain reasons for popular depictions of virtual wars. Following this, examples for alternate approaches that address civilian suffering as well will be given.
After this introduction, we will try to conceptualize two different games in work groups: One classical and one critical approach to war. Beside the basic conceptualization, a part of the respective groups will be tasked to create a convincing marketing. The overall goals of this workshop hence are to widen the view and to improve the overall understanding of games.