This year’s Creative Gaming Festival is all about games and bodies. According to the motto “Let’s get Physical – Game and Body”, the focus will be on bodies in games as well as the player’s bodies. Among the topics are: Why are games played while sitting? Where does the human body end and where does the gaming interface begin? How can impaired people use games? How about diversity in games?

PLAY in the heart of Hamburg

Three institutions around the central station will be part of the Creative Gaming Festival: Kunsthaus Hamburg,  Zentralbibliothek and the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe. Further venues will be the Gängeviertel and Bigpoint.

A teaser is worth a thousand words. So without further ado, here is the first PLAY16 trailer:

From 15th to 19th September 2015 you can play with games in Hamburg! More than 150 events show the creative potential and emotions you can find in games. PLAY15 is annually hosted by the initiative Creative Gaming e.V. and proves that games, culture, education, economy, science and politics go together.

The program is divided into four parts: SEE, DO, TALK and PARTY: PLAY15 offers exhibitions, workshops, talks, performances, aconference and many more events that present to you the culture of digital games. This year, it is getting emotional! The topic “emotions and digital games” is this year’s focus: Do artificial intelligences have feelings? How does a game trigger emotions? Like a common thread emotions lead through all our events.

All tickets and prices are listed below:

Early Bird Festivalpass: 60,- Euro
valid for all events on all days incl. PLAY Conference
(limited number of tickets available until September 2016)

Festivalpass: 80,- Euro
valid for all events on all days incl. PLAY Conference

Tagesticket: 30,- Euro
valid for all events on one day incl. PLAY Conference

Kombiticket Ausstellung: 10,- Euro
valid for all exhibitions (Kunsthaus, Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe, Zentralbibliothek) on one day

Einzelticket PLAY at Night: 10,- Euro
valid for one event of “PLAY at Night”

Gruppenticket Schülerworkshops: 150,- Euro
valid for one workshop on one day for classes with up to 25 students

Familienticket: 25,- Euro
valid for all events on Family Day (Sunday) for 2 adults + 4 children (up to 18 years of age)

Reduction for (Early Bird) Festivalpass and Tagestickets: 50%
valid for students, apprentices, civil servants and conscripts, welfare recipients, severely disabled people
(Evidence has to be provided during the festival at the festival headquarters at Kunsthaus Hamburg )

You can book tickets at the event or at out ticketshop.

This text is only available in German.

Manu from Insert Moin, a podcast about the vast worlds and culture of gaming, and Nina Kiel, gaming journalist and game designer, talk about sexuality in games, ore specifically in virtual reality. By the way, you can experience the latter at the PLAY exhibition and dive into the virtual world yourself.

Unfortunately, this podcast is only available in German.

You can imagine the outcome: after a few clumsy first steps, she discovered the questionable magic of transitions, prefabricated styles and drag and drop effects, and – like a child with a brand new toy – went completely haywire with the sheer endless possibilities at hand.

The result was a visual cacophony of jarring colors, fonts and motion templates. Aggressive vortex tweens immediately followed by bright lens flares, accentuated by abrasive 3D-cube rotations, page flips, ripples and weird honeycomb transitions that make me wonder who put them in there in the first place.

What truly fascinated me about aunt Rhody’s presentation was not that it was so atrocious it would make anyone with the slightest sense for aesthetics think of committing seppuku on the spot – it was her unbridled, almost maternal infatuation with her creation; that spark in her eyes each time she frantically mashed the spacebar to initiate the next jaw dropping transition, eagerly scanning the audience for delighted gasps and blown minds.

Just like a person who learns a foreign language is physically incapable of hearing their own accent, aunt Rhody was actually convinced the result of her labor was, in fact, really really good, incapable of realizing that it was… garbage.

What’s the point of this anecdote, you’re asking? It’s a metaphor.
In which we are aunt Rhody and Virtual Reality is PowerPoint.

Ever since Palmer Luckey, co-founder of Oculus VR came up with the idea of slapping two LCD displays on a pair of skiing goggles, the Virtual Reality craze has steamrolled the video game industry… again.
I say “again”, because It’s actually already the third wave of the VR movement, presumed to be dead two times already, once in the late 80s and another time in the mid-90s. Each time abandoned by the realization that although it makes for a nice gimmick, the technology is just not there yet to make it practical enough for widespread consumption.

But then, one day, the moment came for me to strap on those VR glasses and I suddenly found myself truly on the inside of an artificial, three dimensional world. And even though my inner ear kept screaming how something about all of this was just terribly wrong – that forgotten dream of immersing oneself in video game environments and make believe worlds in the most holistic way imaginable was suddenly back. A dream that lay dormant ever since that borderline epileptic seizure I got from trying out Nintendo’s Virtual Boy when I was 9. (Yes, that really happened.)

The fact is: Third-Wave-Virtual-Reality works; it’s finally affordable for the masses and the sheer volume of possibilities have both consumers and developers rhapsodizing it in the same way Aunt Rhody marvelled about honeycomb transitions.

So naturally, that one question keeps turning up like a bad penny: Is Virtual Reality going to be the future of gaming?

Hundreds of pages of forum discussions on the internet and thousands of hours of academic debate have been devoted to answering this very problem already. Some people are convinced that it will, one day, take over the way video games are accessed forever. Others are determined it’s merely a trend that will rise, shine and slowly fade to be remembered as The 2020’s of Gaming.

I keep thinking: Who cares?

In Zen-Buddhism, you can answer questions not only with yes or no, but also with the letter mu, meaning something like: “The question is wrong.”

Right now, we’re in the infant stages of exploring a completely new medium. We’re like that kid playing around with their brand new toy, experimenting and inevitably failing time and again – and that’s great! Developers are exploring all kinds of crazy ideas for never-before-seen interactions with virtual worlds.

Games like Elite Dangerous and Star Citizen finally put you in the very cockpit your own spaceship – authentically accompanied by a HOTAS flight interface, Ubisoft makes you paraglide and climb mountains with specifically designed input devices, Farpoint for the Playstation VR requires you to aim down the iron sights of a gun to actually hit something, Animal Equality lets you experience the final moments of a pig in a mass-slaughterhouse, acclaimed violinist Joshua Bell plays private concerts for you, Horror experiences like The Brookhaven Experiment stress your fight-or-flight response like nothing before, the porn industry gives the term POV-shot a whole new meaning (of course appropriately bundled with a plethora of grotesque mechanized sex-toys) and Mark Zuckerberg fantasizes about a Facebook for your face.

There aren’t enough adjectives to describe the current state of the VR movement.
Exciting, exhilarating, weird, futuristic,… scary with a pinch of dystopic even?

In the early 90’s, when the CD-ROM was introduced to personal computers and gaming devices, people proclaimed the dawn of a new era for PC-Gaming: The full motion video. The comparably gigantic storage capacity of the medium allowed developers to finally move away from hand-pixelated sprites to make use of real actors and cameras to make video games. Video games tried to impersonate Hollywood. It was nothing short of jaw-dropping at first and it was widely believed to be the future of video games.

But developers at the time almost unanimously tried to make the same games as before with their brand new set of tools and the results were, in retrospective, unintentionally hilarious (think of games like Night Trap or Gabriel Knight 2: The Best Within) and Full Motion Video ultimately died out because no developer found a good game design approach for it that underlines the strengths of the medium to add new value to gaming.

Only now, more than 2 decades later, with games like Sam Barlow’s Her Story or Remedy’s Quantum Break digging up this forgotten concept, designers seem to finally come up with original and clever ways to incorporate full motion video as an interactive storytelling device.

The question if Virtual Reality will be the – or at least one possible – future for video games remains yet undecided, as it is solely in the hands of this generation’s designers to find inventive ideas, concepts and mechanics that alleviate it to something more than just a temporary trend; something that prevails, something that adds so much value to the way we experience games that we won’t be able to imagine a gaming world without it.

I can’t tell you the answer, but you know what?
That doesn’t matter in the slightest. Because right now is the time of blissful ignorance, in which we enjoy going haywire with silly honeycomb transitions while loving every second of it.

Ragnar Ulricson, better known as RagnarRox, is an independent game designer, horror enthusiast and video essayist. Unintentionally pretentious at times, he’s older than he looks and nicer than you think.
On his youtube channel, he goes into game design, video game history and the cultural relevance of the medium. Feel free to check him out when you have no errands to run.

There are 100 days left until PLAY16 begins and in order to make these days better, people from our cosmos will talk about the topic of this year ‘’Lets Get Physical – Game and Body” and share some interesting facts about the festival.

In the beginning, the guys from Pixelbros, an independant and entertaining podcast that has been around since early 2015, recorded a special episode for PLAY16.  The conversations between Patrick, Marlon, Simon, Sebastian and Philippp are published several times a month. These conversations can be found in the iTunes charts for quite some time. Their 33rd episode is about their experiences with motion control and virtual reality – from childhood memories to predictions on the future of gaming.

Unfortunately, this podcast is only available in German.