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CH Ludens at the Vintage Computer Festival Zurich 2025

by Adrian Demleitner & Eugen Pfister

Setting the Stage

“The Vintage Computer Festival Zurich is committed to the preservation and revitalisation of historical computers and technologies and brings past eras of computer technology to life.” (https://vintagecomputerfestival.ch/ translated by the authors). The first Vintage Computer Festival (VCF) took place in 2013, originally in Winterthur. In 2016, the festival moved to Zurich, where it is still held annually today. Here former and current developers meet early adopters from the past millennium. And they are all increasingly taking their children with them so that they can share part of their own story with them. “Visitors can take a fascinating journey back in time to the early days of computing and experience the development of this ground-breaking technology at first hand” (Idem). This is why our colleagues from the ZHDK have naturally been regular guests at the festival even from before our project. With the start of our project, guests became exhibitors and speaker. In November 2023, Larissa Wild presented her CH Ludens sub-project for the first time at the VCF with the title “CH-Ludens: Exploring the game design scene in Switzerland in the 80s & 90s”. In addition, our colleagues from Zurich wo/manned a booth to draw attention to our project and find interview partners for our research. In fact, the VCF was and is an excellent opportunity for us to get in touch with people who have developed games over the past century. This is also the reason why we presented CH Ludens again at this year’s VCF in the Kraftwerk Selnau (that is 2025) with our own stand and a presentation.

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Our delegation in Seville for DiGRA 2023

by Yannick Rochat, Larissa Wild, Pierre-Yves Hurel, Sophie Bémelmans and Eugen Pfister

A project like Confoederatio Ludens requires that we regularly attend conferences in order to present our results, gather constructive feedback, and keep an eye on what our international colleagues are discovering. This year, the annual conference of the Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA) – the main research community in game studies – happened in Seville, Spain, on the site of the universal exposition of 1992. We sent 6 delegates to the conference: Sophie Bémelmans (UNIL), Pierre-Yves Hurel (UNIL), Mela Kocher (ZHdK), Eugen Pfister (HKB), Yannick Rochat (UNIL) and Larissa Wild (ZHdK). Here is an overview of their week.

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