Flock together
Arthouse game festival A Maze Berlin returns with a revolutionary digital event that celebrates connection
Videogame art festival A Maze Total Digital celebrates connection
We flutter through concrete, fluorescent-lit hallways and outside into a permanent golden hour. Above our heads, a gigantic flamingo looms, frozen forever in almost-flight. The bird has been the symbol of A Maze Berlin for a while now: founder Thorsten S. Wiedemann associates the brightly coloured animal with playfulness, provocation, and of course John Waters’ outrageous cult film Pink Flamingos. “The flamingo is a strong animal,” Wiedemann tells us. “It looks beautiful. They have this social aspect, gathering in herds, and also this kind of balance, you know?” The flamingo is everything he wants A Maze to be, and to champion in the videogames it showcases each year – contemporary, inventive and avant-garde.
A Maze Total Digital, then, is perhaps the most flamingo-like the show has ever been. It’s a fully virtual event: to attend, we must simply download the free build from Itch.io. When we log in, we’re dropped into an edited version of artist Moshe Linke’s virtual art gallery Brutalism: Prelude On Stone, which has been adapted to house, among other things: a giant screen livestreaming a variety of speakers and talks; a fully playable exhibition of the games up for awards this year, all able to be voted on by visitors; a cinema room; a functioning merch stand; a showcase of an international zine project; a Kickstarter monument; a togglable live text chatroom overlay through which visitors can talk to each other; beershaped Easter eggs to hunt and ‘drink’. Oh, and an entire flock of flamingos, of which we are one. Each represents a different visitor, with usernames floating over their heads. As we browse the showfloor, we spot indie developer friends strutting about on their long pink legs – we even bump into Weidemann checking out the games on show.
It is bizarre, and a little bit shonky in parts – there are a few crashes here and there while we’ re trying to boot up games, and sometimes we have to reload the build to fix a technical hitch or two – but it feels like a revelatory first step into a whole new sphere of the industry. In the wake of Covid-19 shutting down in-person conventions, others seem to be testing the waters, too: we briefly admired indie horror game Eek3
2020 last month for giving us a feeling akin to being at the world’s biggest and brashest videogame conference; shortly afterwards, Devolver Digital released a similar, but higherproduction-value, tongue-in-cheek “marketing simulator” in which you had to watch its game trailers to progress, continuing a time-honoured tradition of having its cake and eating it, too. Neither of them, however, were anywhere near as ambitious or sophisticated as the multiplayer – multivisitor, perhaps – experience of A Maze Total Digital.
Then again, Wiedemann and friends had something to prove. Last year, after the German Senate’s
Department Of Culture rejected the festival’s request for funding, A Maze’s future looked uncertain. But with the help of the #AMAZENOTDEAD Kickstarter campaign, they were able to crowdfund over £45,000 to ensure the show could go ahead. And then the pandemic hit. With this year due to be A Maze’s big comeback, it was difficult to accept that the festival might not happen, especially after so many people pitched in to keep it alive. “We were kind of preparing very, very quietly,” Wiedemann recalls. The first idea was to postpone from April to July. But in May, the German government decreed that there were to be no large-scale events until the end of August. “We had to just rethink everything,” he says, “because I didn’t want to postpone it again. And also, I didn’t want to just not do it this year – because somehow I thought A Maze has to happen.”
Almost immediately, an alternative plan started to take shape. One of the main funders, Medienboard BerlinBrandenburg, “really supported us – they said, ‘Hey, do it digital, and do whatever you want, and how you think is best.’” Thanks to their sponsors and the Kickstarter money, the team had the capacity to make something more than a minimally engaging stream, something that would truly represent A Maze: multiple attendees in a beautiful setting, live talks and music, an awards show, a garden, flamethrowers and all.
“I didn’t want to just not do it this year – because somehow I thought A Maze has to happen”
It would be free to attend, and the key to the entire affair would be “to actually bring people into the space,” Wiedemann says. “People should communicate, and have fun. A Maze is a community festival, and people are coming from places all around the world. And we tr y to keep them together. This is the main goal of A Maze: it’s an inclusive festival and should be diverse, and people just should talk to each other and learn from each other. But not just because of the talks or the workshops. You find your people, and maybe some people then work together in the future – those are really the kind of stories I want to hear.”
A digital space of some kind, then, would be critical. Fortunately, Wiedemann had many friends who were well acquainted with such things, and could provide insight on what it would take to make and run a similar project: he had calls with StikiPixels, the creators of virtual art gallery Occupy White Walls; likewise, the people behind The Museum Of Other Realities – and Paolo Pedercini of Molleindustria, who had recently set up browser-based multi-user experience LikeLike Online, a virtual version of Molleindustria’s real-world, Pittsburgh-based playful arts space.
“I was like, ‘Wow, this is insane,’” Wiedemann says. “I mean, he was actually programming everything by himself. And it was so easy – you can play all the games, and basically it’s really working. You gather people and you can create your style. That was actually my main inspiration.”
At the same time he was talking to Gianluca Pandolfo, the developer behind game showcase app Flipper, about bringing him on as lead developer and using the Flipper technology for the festival. “And then he was saying, ‘Maybe you should talk to Moshe Linke. He’s a 3D architect, and he’s already built all these kinds of galleries.’” Linke was delighted at the thought of one of his spaces being used for a digital A Maze show, and came aboard the project to help Wiedemann and team adapt
Brutalism: Prelude On Stone into a more suitable venue. “The space itself has this kind of character,” Wiedemann says. “It’s stone, cold. But the artwork he places in there is kind of brilliant.”
Brutalism: Prelude On Stone was originally a very solitary experience, but the A Maze team wanted to complement the social aspects and atmosphere of the festival as much as possible. Setting an entire flamboyance of flamingos among it would look striking, Wiedemann figured: “The grey stone and the pink flamingos… It’s a very nice contrast.” They would keep the narrow corridors so instrumental to the space, but otherwise “we opened everything up,” Wiedemann says. “It’s not so dark anymore: it’s bright, and pinkish, you know, the A Maze colour. I was actually not giving so much direction, I was just saying, ‘Maybe we have to have this room, we need to have that room, and maybe we can use this for this part of the festival’ – like, this could be a very nice club space, and this could be a very nice lobby where we can have the big screen.”
Indeed, we find both to be extremely enjoyable. The lobby is a gorgeous, high-ceilinged place to stand – and fly – about in with other attendees: we crowd onto the stairs to hear Kayode ShonibareLewis’ talk on Black representation in games, and Lena NW’s breakdown of the music in (the now A Maze award-winning) Nightmare Temptation Academy, with one brave flamingo managing to perch on the lighting rig above the screen. The circular club room, meanwhile, ends up streaming all sorts of live music acts – from a show by Super Hexagon and Dicey Dungeons composer Chipzel, to the customary A Maze closing set from DJ Storno, Wiedemann’s beat-dropping alter ego – as we watch others bob and spin about wildly to the rhythm, or chat with friends. It’s a game conference in which the confetti bombs we all have access to do double duty, functioning as both visible applause for a great talk and a type of jubilant communication with our fellow flamingos.
Confetti bombs (and kickable watermelons) aside, however, it was important to Weidemann that the focus remain on the people and the games, not the space. It was for this reason that he shelved the idea of swimming pools that would teleport you to another space, such as the garden, when you jumped into it. “We were like, ‘People are just going to jump into the pool, and that’s it,’ you know,” he explains. “So we added a lot of things to also have this kind of calm experience.”
There’s a little of that restraint in the audio design of A Maze Total Digital, too. The screens on game booths only begin playing trailers once we stand close enough to them, reducing the usual showfloor cacophony. Meanwhile, the audio from the main stream becomes more muffled the further we move from the lobby, a detail that really helps to contribute to the overall feeling of being at a real convention and in an actual space. (The team did, at one point, consider tr ying to implement spatial audio for voice chat with other festival-goers, but deemed the idea too complicated to be achieved in just a couple of months.) When we pop into the cinema (which is playing Hidden Conflicts, Jona Kleinlein’s fascinating ‘hybrid documentary’ that uses footage from Arma 3 to illustrate the military sim scene) we find a menu option to turn off the stream audio completely so we can focus on the film.
It’s not exactly like a real-world convention, then. It is different – it was always meant to be. And it has, on balance, been a roaring success that has left A Maze in a better position than ever: there’s already interest in a future collaboration from the Goethe-Institut, and the A Maze team now has a virtual space that can be reused and updated
The event has, on balance, been a roaring success that has left A Maze in a better position than ever
next year in the event that the world is still battling the pandemic, or even run alongside the physical event in a kind of “hybrid” formation, as Wiedemann suggests. After all that’s happened in the past year, we wonder if the official mascot of A Maze ought to evolve, too: from a flamingo to a phoenix, perhaps. You just can’t keep this thing down.
But one thing about the future is for sure. “The physical version of A Maze Berlin is not replaceable,” insists the press release that we’re initially sent (it also explains that tickets bought for this year’s event will remain valid for either the 2021 or 2022 festivals). “A Maze is a lot about hanging out together,” Wiedemann explains. “It’s grouping, it’s about hugging, it’s about high fives – and also playing games together and talking about the games, and reflecting on what is happening, what happened in the past and how A Maze is involved, how the people are involved. I mean, there’s a lot of people, from 2012 until now, they were coming [to the festival] all the time – and the way they do games now has completely changed. This is something that you probably can only have when you really go to a festival, and be there, and hang out with like-minded people. You have this feeling that you’re part of something bigger. You’re not alone.”