PLAY18

PLAY19 – Creative Gaming Festival is confirmed for November, 2019

Hamburg, November 8th, 2018. From November 1st through 4th the Creative Gaming Festival invited games enthusiasts, media representatives, culturally interested parties and games developers in Hamburg to discuss the significance of computer and video games for the society of tomorrow. Also, this year the organizers can draw successful conclusions about the results.

Several thousand guests from all over Europe attended the PLAY18 Festival from last Thursday through Sunday at the Hühnerposten and the exhibition in Barlach Halle K in the center of Hamburg to together discuss and experiment with how games can shape and change our social and political future. The approach of the festival organizers to involve the audiences even more than in previous years produced a particularly high resonance. Visitors of the Studio Zukunft could traverse the various stages of game development or contribute through talks in the Speakers’ Corner to the general discourse of the Festival. In performance events and talk shows the visitors witnessed how from the “old” – a PlayStation destroyed by children – also the “new” in the form of an innovative game controller can be created. Guest speakers like the Spanish author and lecturer on game and play design, Miguel Sicart, discussed with their audiences how games enable us to create ever newer worlds, and how important that is for the development of society.

Of course, games were also played at PLAY18. In the exhibition hall selected games asked the question, how and at what cost new worlds can be created. This provided a great deal of fun, but also moments of reflection. The best of these games was even able, in the final session of PLAY18, to take home a “Creative Gaming Award”. The “Most Creative Game Award” went to the development studio Fictiorama from Spain for the game “Do Not Feed the Monkeys”. This game is based on an innovative scenario where the player must deal with surveillance and voyeurism. “Symbio”, a game developed by a group of students from Uppsala University in Visby (Sweden) took home two awards. “Symbio” is a mixture of game and installation where two unacquainted players must literally hand in hand solve numerous tasks. It not only convinced the jury to award it the “Most Creative Newcomer Award”; it also won the audience prize.

PLAY18 ended with an optimistic look into the future. During the Award Show, the continuation of PLAY next year was announced. PLAY19 will be held from November 14th through 17th, 2019.

PLAY18 confronted the future. In doing so it renewed and modified many longstanding Festival formats. Parents together with their children could develop and tryout new games ideas, teachers could acquire innovative impulses for media pedagogic education and visitors could examine scientific and philosophical questions about games culture and could dialog with expert guest presenters. The result was a Creative Gaming Festival in which attendees with very different backgrounds could, in a friendly atmosphere, exchange thoughts on the future of gaming and gain new perspectives on gaming culture. “For that we are incredibly grateful, happy and proud. We would like to thank our co-organizers and supporters; without them PLAY18 would not have been possible”, so the Festival direction team Christiane Schwinge, Vera Marie Rodewald and Andreas Hedrich in their closing remarks.

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