Glass prism cube on a holographic background. A single white light source is dispersed into different colours, coming back out of the prism. The cube is made of four triangular prisms joined together. Free to use under the Unsplash License. Credits: David Clode.
Introduction
The “Prisms of Gundolf” project consists of a series of short texts and illustrations by colleagues, students, and friends—collectively forming a prismatic tribute to the remarkable Prof. Em. Dr. Gundolf S. Freyermuth: an incisive scholar, writer, and visionary institution-builder whose work has left a profound mark on the Cologne Game Lab and on the broader field of Media and Game Studies. Alongside his co-founding role at CGL, his many years of teaching and research at the ifs Internationale Filmschule Köln shaped generations of students and colleagues across film, media, and game studies, helping define Cologne as an internationally recognized site for critical reflection on audiovisual culture, media change, and digital transformation.
As co-founding director of the Cologne Game Lab, Gundolf S. Freyermuth was instrumental in shaping it into a place where game development, critical reflection, and scholarly research could stand on equal footing, and where games were taken seriously as cultural artefacts worthy of rigorous academic inquiry. This vision is perhaps captured most succinctly in the prologue “Playing, Making, Thinking Games”1: a conception of the field in which digital games are understood at once as a “new audiovisual form of expression and narration”, as an object of creative production and design, and as a subject of historical, theoretical, and critical inquiry. With intellectual precision, curiosity, and a rare ability to connect disciplines, people, and ideas, he helped establish the Cologne Game Lab as one of the most important institutional homes for game studies in Germany, while also shaping it as a distinctive intellectual and practical architecture bridging academic research and professional practice: one in which game development, critical reflection, and scholarly research could develop together.
Across the many prisms gathered in this homage series, one reflection remains constant: colleagues, students, and collaborators alike have experienced him not only as a prolific thinker, community leader, and visionary institution-builder—a dreammaker who turned the ideas of a generation into shared realities—, but also as a challenging, generous, and deeply formative mentor whose influence reaches far beyond any formal title. This collection of short texts is offered in recognition of that legacy and in gratitude for all that he has made possible—at CGL, at the ifs, in Media and Game Studies, and in the lives of so many who have worked and learned with him—a legacy that extends across past, present, and future.
Introduction by Pedro Mota
- Freyermuth, Gundolf S. (2015). Playing, Making, Thinking Games. In: Gundolf S. Freyermuth/, Games | Game Design | Game Studies (11-30). Bielefeld: transcript Verlag. https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839429839-001 ↩︎