Zeppelin Museum Friedrichshafen starts German Gaming Exhibition "Choose your Player"

The Zeppelin Museum Friedrichshafen, gamelab.berlin of the Humboldt University and RPG channel Orkenspalter TV are curating a big gaming exhibition in southern Germany. "Choose your Player" features RPG elements for visitors and a lot of Zeppelin games.

The Zeppelin Museum Friedrichshafen in the southwestern German state of Baden-Württemberg at the shore of Lake Constance is hosting one of the biggest museum exhibition on gaming and culture in the German-speaking area. From May 16 onward, the exhibition "Choose your Player. Spielwelten von Würfel bis Pixel" (Game worlds from cubes to pixels) will engage with the phenomenon of games as a cultural medium for escaping the present and immersion. "It explores spaces of identity, examines how games reflect power relations between propaganda, war and resistance, as well as their contribution to shaping the future and the emergence of new communities. Zeppelin games from the museum's own technology collection from the early 20th century to the present are juxtaposed with works by contemporary artists and gaming classics from game boards to consoles and critically categorised", as the museum explains.

Through the exhibition, participants are lead in the form of solo adventure RPGs designed by the roleplay channel Orkenspalter TV.

The exhibition has been counceled by the gamelab of the Humboldt University of Berlin. Art from Larry Achiampong, the collective Keiken, LuYang and Afrah Shafiq is incorporated into the exhibition, dealing with arcade culture, decolonialism, equality and other cultural phenomena and issues.

Games that are part of the exhibition are, among others, the following: "Airships – Northpole Quest", "Anno 1800", "A Normal Lost Phone", "Battlefield 1", "Celeste", "Cloudage", "Der Luftkrieg", "Dota 2", "Durch die Luft", "Europa-Reise", "Fallout 4", "Frostpunk", "Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy", "Graf Zeppelins Weltreise", "Green New Deal Simulator", "Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes", "Mario Kart", "Portal", "PowerWash Simulator", "Roblox", "Super Mario World", "Terra Nil", "Through the Darkest of Times", "Unravel 2", "Viewfinder", "Wolfenstein", "World of Warcraft", "Zeppelin Attack" and "Zeppelin – Giants of the Sky".

Mháire Stritter from Orkenspalter TV explains: "Entwined with the exhibition, visitors are invited to play through a set of stories in Choose-Your-Own-Adventure booklets. Ranging from the adventures of a 1920ies journalist to the problems a young hacker faces in a dystopian 2060, the stories use the exhibition, your own imagination and the throughline of the fascination for airships to weave a narrative through time, space and the history of gaming. Over the course of several months the museum will also host a series of tabletop RPG shows that will be tie-ins to the booklet stories, inviting viewers online on YouTube and Twitch to join the real-world exhibition online."

Manouchehr Shamsrizi from the gamelab.berlin of Humboldt University adds: "In 2024, there can be no doubt: video games - the most far-reaching cultural medium of our time - and their derivatives, including eSports and gaming-platforms, play an enormous role in all societal contexts. From education to climate and biodiversity crisis, health, social and political activism, technology development in areas such as AI, virtual worlds, and quantum technologies, to large, so far only inadequately addressed aspects in the field of foreign and security policy. These impacts, their opportunities and risks, must be presented to the public so that they can discuss them - at an appropriately high level! This requires involvement of committed actors from the world of 'high culture', such as museums. It was and is therefore a great pleasure and a great honor for us, as a university research group with the desire to contribute to knowledge sharing, to be able to collaborate with the venerable Zeppelin Museum on this exhibition! We are convinced that both the selection of video games and artistic positions, as well as the concept of a role-playing-based experience of the exhibition - possibly tried out for the first time in this form in the German-speaking world! - do justice to the topic. The idea and concept of the exhibition remind us: video games are truly a ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’, and must be taken into account accordingly - in their opportunities and their risks. It is remarkable to experience that and how the Zeppelin Museum has taken up this topic, and - in the spirit of the new ICOM museum definition, on the basis of which our gamelab.berlin also works in the field of culture and cultural policy - in a novel way, interdisciplinary and transmedial, multi-perspectival, and as a partnership of equals between gaming-culture and 'high culture' offers 'education, enjoyment, reflection and knowledge sharing' on the subject of gaming."

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