A team of researchers from four universities has been researching the entire history of Switzerland as a games production and publication market for three years now. We spoke to the team about entering the project’s last year, and how Switzerland’s past formed its present indie boom.
With the interdisciplinary research project “Confoederatio Ludens: Swiss History of Games, Play and Game Design 1968-2000” (CH Ludens, for short) at Bern University of the Arts, four disciplines have come together in 2023 to examine the history of game development in Switzerland.
“My go-to answer to that question would be that there was no industry in the 1980s and maybe even in the 1990s.” - Adrian Demleitner
The project, which is funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation’s Sinergia collaborative fund with the Swiss Franc equivalent of about €3,194,000, brought together an interdisciplinary team of researchers from four universities. It is led by Eugen Pfister from the FSP Communication Design Department at Bern University of the Arts, Tobias Hodel from Digital Humanities at the Walter Benjamin Kolleg at the University of Bern, Mela Kocher from the Design Department at Zurich University of the Arts, and Yannick Rochat from the Section Sciences du Langage et de l’Informa Lettres at the University of Lausanne. Various renowned game studies researchers from German-speaking countries are and were involved as collaborators, including Arno Görgen, Beat Suter, Adrian Demleitner and Aurelia Brandenburg.
Since the project runtime is set for four years, that means CH Ludens has now entered into its last year. It’s not hard to find successes of the team through the last three years, since the project’s website is filled with case studies, meeting reports and research papers from the team’s participants, many of whom are writing their dissertation in the project and are publishing their research cumulatively. Not just that, CH Ludens has also produced several insights that have tangible effects for the gaming industry in Switzerland and the other GSA countries: Namely, a full database of Swiss video games from 1980 to 2000, as well as an archival collection of German-language video game magazines from the time frame. That are impressive results on their own, considering that the project is still running a full year. We sat together with Adrian Demleitner, a researcher of CH Ludens, to talk Swiss gaming history, the context in which the Swiss games industry is evolving and the project trajectory in the next twelve months.
GamesMarkt: You are researching the past of Switzerland’s game development. What did you find out? How did the game dev landscape look like in the last century?
