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)
• Odile Limpach (SpielFabrique & Cologne Game Lab)

Summit Schedule:

10.00 am – 10.10 am | Opening
Sonia Fizek (both Cologne Game Lab)

10.10 am – 10.30 am | Presentation
Emmanuel Guardiola (Cologne Game Lab, ISEDA)
How the ISEDA Victim Interview Simulator Helps to Fight Gender-Based Violence

10.30 am – 11.00 am | Presentation
Sandra Camarda (Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C²DH) University of Luxembourg)
Past Forward: Transformative Play in Public History

11.00 am – 11.30 am | Presentation
Ruth Dorothea Eggel (Cologne Game Lab)
From Eco-Anxiety to Action: How Game Makers Take Responsibility for People and the Planet

11.30 am – 12.00 am | Moderated Roundtable Discussion

12.00 am – 12.15 am | Coffee Break

12.15 am – 01.15 pm | Workshop
Matthes Linder (SpielFabrique)
Greening the Game Sector: Data-Driven Policy Dialogue

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.

Summit Organizer:

• Games Syndicate Cologne e.V. (more info)

Summit Schedule:

02.30 pm – 02.45 pm | Welcome & Framing
Games Syndicate Cologne & Cologne Game Lab

02.45 pm – 03.30 pm | Summit Keynote
Lars C. Grabbe (Dean, MSD – Münster School of Design, University of Applied Sciences Münster)
Design Research and AI. Design and Knowledge in the Context of the Techno-Imaginary
latest publication: https://link.springer.com/book/9783658497972

03.30 pm – 04.00 pm | Presentation
Roland Klemke (Cologne Game Lab & Open University of the Netherlands)
You are the controller! AI-supported multimodal interaction for games

04.00 pm – 04.30 pm | Presentation
Krist Shingjerji (Open University of the Netherlands)
FaceGame – gamified data collection for affective computing

04.30 pm – 05.00 pm | Presentation
Klaus Gasteier (University of the Arts Berlin)

Going (nano-)bananas – GenAI and it’s impact on creative education, creative industries and everyone’s cognitive capacity

05.00 pm – 05.30 pm | Coffee Break

05.30 pm – 06.15 pm | Panel Discussion
Synthetic Critique – Between Tool and Agency

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.

VR Dance Club:
Künstlerische Leitung: Anna-Carolin Weber & Tobias Kopka
Künstlerische Mitarbeit: René*e Reith, Helena Miko, Max Kolb, Phillip Dittmann, Philip Kühn, Alessandro De Matteis

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)

Schedule:

10.00 am – 10.10 am | Welcome and Introduction
Björn Bartholdy & Jonas Zimmer (Cologne Game Lab)

10.10 am – 10.45 am | Presentation
Tim Schroeder (Massive Miniteam)
Founded, Funded, Folded: The Journey of a Game Studio

10.45 am – 11.20 am | Presentation
Pablo Lopez Soriano (Principal Animator at Media Molecule, Sony Interactive Entertainment)
Solidarity in a Volatile Industry

11.20 am – 11.55 pm | Presentation
Jörg Friedrich (paintbucket games)
Games Became Culture. But Culture Is War Now.

11.55 am – 12.15 pm | Coffee Break

12.15 pm – 12.50 pm | Presentation
Rami Ismail (Public Speaker, Consultant)
Creativity vs. Production

12.50 pm – 01.30 pm | Presentation
Raven Rusch (neoludic)
How to Chase Your Fantasy and Accidentally Create a New Niche.

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

Looking back at 15 years of CGL: what has been built, what has shifted, and what continues to shape its work.

These days, we are witnessing the convergence of wargaming and warfaring. In my talk, I will connect this evolutionary leap to the history of play, particularly focusing on two longings that arose in the modern era. First, the desire for total immersion in alternative worlds, an ideal that evolved from the total work of art, the Gesamtkunstwerk, and total cinema, through digital utopian media such as the Holodeck and the Metaverse, progressively merging ludic and representative play. Second, the wish for immersive access to knowledge, an ideal pursued from the myth of a universal library, the concept of a Global Brain, or at least a Memory Extender – the Memex – to Cyberspace and the prospect of an AI-powered Singularity. I propose that the practical efforts to realize both longings have been driven primarily by a constant of human civilization: the Serious Game of War, played over and over again, for fun and survival. As Clark C. Abt observed: “The adult activity most clearly analogous to games is warfare.”