Opening remarks by Björn Bartholdy (Co-Founder and Director of Cologne Game Lab)

Since the nineties, the games industry has been shaped by four major forces: technological leaps, market globalization, evolving monetization, and changing player behaviors. These shifts didn’t just redefine games — they redefined the roles, skills, and leadership styles of the people making them.

How do we encounter ourselves and one another through bodies, technologies, and stories? The Embodied Encounterssummit explores embodied experience as a site of transformation in games, performance, and immersive media. Bridging academic discourse and artistic experimentation, the program invites reflection on presence, identity, and agency in times of rapid technological and societal change.

The summit begins with a keynote by Richard Lemarchand, acclaimed game designer (Uncharted series) and game scholar at USC Games. In Identity Trouble: Body Swapping, Mind Hopping, and Other Transformations in Storytelling and Games, he examines how avatars and player-characters challenge our sense of self, drawing lessons for future creative practices. The evening concludes with the invite-only playtest of the interactive audio-dance performance The Future Is Us in development by Anna-Carolin Weber & Tobias Kopka (VR Dance Club). 

The Astistic-Scientific Summit continues on Wednesday, 24 September. (see below)

Summit Coordinator:

• Katharina Tillmanns (Cologne Game Lab)

Over the past two decades, video gaming has evolved from a mass entertainment medium to a practice of social and cultural significance. Video games often intertwine with other fields, such as: health, ethics, education, history, and environmental sustainability, amongst others. At this summit, we will explore those manifold intersections.

Summit Coordinators:

• Sonia Fizek (Cologne Game Lab)
• Emmanuel Guardiola (Cologne Game Lab)
• Odile Limpach (SpielFabrique & Cologne Game Lab)

Summit Schedule:

10.00 am – 10.10 am | Opening
Emmanuel Guardiola and Sonia Fizek (both Cologne Game Lab

10.10 am – 10.30 am | Presentation 1
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10.30 am – 11.00 am | Presentation 2
Sandra Camarda (Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History, Luxembourg University)

11.00 am – 11.30 am | Presentation 3
Ruth Dorothea Eggel (Cologne Game Lab, TH Köln)

11.30 am – 12.00 am | Moderated Roundtable Discussion

12.00 am – 12.15 am | Coffee Break

12.15 am – 01.15 pm | Green Gaming Workshop
Matthes Linder (SpielFabrique)

In this interactive workshop, we will present the preliminary results of our recent surveys conducted with policy makers on the topic of sustainability in the games sector. Together, we will explore key trends, needs, and challenges identified so far. Participants will be invited to give feedback on the findings, share their perspectives, and help shape the next steps. The goal is to ensure that game professional voices are meaningfully reflected in future policy recommendations.

01.20 pm – 01.30 pm | Closing Remarks

As generative AI technologies rapidly reshape the digital landscape, a new paradigm of play emerges — Synthetic Play — where artificial intelligence acts not merely as tool, but as agent,medium, and mirror within the creative ecology of games.This interdisciplinary track explores current transformations in the field of game development through three intersecting lenses:

• Game Design – From procedural storytelling to metric-driven mechanics and AI-based NPCs that no longer just react but learn, adapt, and participate in emergent narratives.
• Game Arts – AI as co-creator in the artistic process: assisting in ideation, generating characters and concepts, and employing machine learning as a new choreography for motion, atmosphere, and aesthetics.
• Game Programming – The rise of AI coding assistants is reshaping development work flows: debugging, prototyping, and writing dialogue systems powered by large language models are no longer theoretical, but increasingly standard.Bringing together local and international voices, this track critically examines the promises and perils of AI in games — contextualizing current trends with a grounded perspective on Cologne’s vibrant games ecosystem, North Rhine-Westphalia’s broader creative infrastructure, and global developments at large.

Summit Coordinators:

• Christoph Kohlhass (Games Syndicate Cologne e.V. & Köln Business)

Summit Guests:

• Lars C. Grabbe (Dean, MSD – Münster School of Design, University of Applied Sciences Münster)
• Roland Klemke (Cologne Game Lab & Welten Institute of the Open University of the Netherlands)
• Krist Shingjerji (Open University of the Netherlands)
• Klaus Gasteier (Universität der Künste Berlin)

latest publication: https://link.springer.com/book/9783658497972

The summit program continues with two public performances of The Future Is Us in parallel with the experiential workshop Somatic Design for Media Creators. The performance immerses participants in choreographed encounters with AI-driven sound and projection, making the dynamics of filter bubbles and algorithmic influence palpable. The workshop offers a complementary path: through guided somatic exercises, participants explore how user bodies affectively respond to stimuli and how these responses can be used as a creative compass in immersive media design.

Together, these encounters—philosophical, artistic, and somatic—form a unique celebration of embodied knowledge at the intersection of games, performance, and research.

The Future Is Us is an interactive audio-dance performance  in development by Anna-Carolin Weber & Tobias Kopka (VR Dance Club) for up to 24 participants per show. It explores how political attitudes, artificial intelligence, and the construction of reality intertwine. In a cycle of listening, seeing, moving, and positioning, participants encounter each other – often without knowing what moves the others.

As algorithms, search engines, and social media increasingly shape our opinions, digital “bubbles” reinforce our worldviews. This dynamic creates fertile ground for manipulation, with far-reaching consequences for democratic discourse. The performance translates these mechanisms into embodied experience: participants wear headphones with AI-influenced audio tracks and are guided by facilitators who give choreographic impulses. A motion-tracking system responds to their movements in real time, feeding back into the shared soundscape.

This loop of action and feedback makes filter bubbles and algorithmic influence tangible, while opening a reflective space on media behavior, plurality, and shared responsibility.

Kicked off during an artist residency at the Cologne Game Lab, the project is currently in development and an early prototype will be playtested here for the first time.

Supported by Kulturamt der Stadt Köln and NRW Landesbüro Freie Darstellende Künste, in co-production with Cologne Game Lab, TanzFaktur Köln, Digitales Koproduktionslabor, and Akademie für Theater und Digitalität Dortmund.

In this hands-on workshop, participants engage with somatic strategies to become embodied themselves. Through guided exercises, they learn to sense how user bodies affectively respond to stimuli and how these responses can be used as a creative compass in immersive media design. The session introduces somatic techniques that support attentiveness, presence, and embodied meaning-making—tools that expand the palette of media creators beyond technology and visuality into the felt intelligence of the body.

Over the past 15 years, bigger audiences brought bigger budgets, team consolidation, and new investor expectations – reshaping how games are made. This summit examines how these shifts have affected creative risk, studio identity, and day-to-day practice: artistic choices, evidence-driven playtesting, consolidation and funding droughts, and the leap from classroom projects to breakout releases. The session gathers developers across studio sizes to ask a simple question: how have the past 15 years actually changed how we make games?

Summit Coordinators:

• Björn Bartholdy (Cologne Game Lab)
• Jonas Zimmer (Cologne Game Lab)

Summit Guests:

• Rami Ismail (Public Speaker, Consultant, Agent, and Mentor)
• Jörg Friedrich (paintbucket games)
• Tim Schröder (Massive Miniteam)
• Pablo Lopez Soriano (Principal Animator at Media Molecule, Sony Interactive Entertainment à Solidarity in a volatile industry)
• Raven Rusch (neoludic)

• Su-Jin Song (Cologne Game Lab)
• Federico Alvarez Igarzábal (HBK Essen)

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Ah, the irony: studying games—an art form rooted in creativity and play—within the university, an institution in the stranglehold of bureaucratization. But are games still merely an art form? “When cultures change, so do games,” McLuhan famously claimed. So, what are our games? The movies of the 21st century, a mirror to reflect ourselves and training wheels for our insecure selves? Or are they the Drosophila of AI research? At least, that’s how they were born 75 years ago. Or a medium blending the real and virtual into indistinguishability, as in wargaming and warfaring? And crucially: Does McLuhan’s claim also apply to game studies? The discipline is much younger than its object of study, barely 25 years old. Maybe it needs to grow up? Or does its youth hold revolutionary potential? Could it transform the university, just as the humanities did in the early 19th century and social sciences since the mid-20th century? Quite a handful…