Last week I've been on A MAZE - an event in Berlin advertsed as "7th International Games and Playful Media Festival". I went there together with a large group of people from Polygon - gamedev interest group from Warsaw University of Technology. I liked it a lot because it's something different from what I've attended before, and I've been on many events, like gamedev conferences (e.g. GDC), demoscene parties (e.g. Revision), gaming expo (e.g. Poznań Game Arena), cybersport events (e.g. World Cyber Games), or events decated to retro computers.
A MAZE could be described as independent games festival. Majority of events took place between Thursday and Saturday. Its main part was game exhibition, where booths with many games were available for visitors to play or talk to their developers. They were indie games, so either very artistic, containing some original gameplay ideas, unusual controller, or somehow politically involved. Contrary to expo at GDC, there were no AAA titles, no big publishers, IHVs or middleware developers. There were some really polished and commercially successful games though, e.g. SUPERHOT.
Second big part of the event were talks happening on two stages. Again, they were very "alternative", often delivered by artists or academics. They either discussed some ideas or artistic vision behind some game, touched politics (of course all from the left side of political scene, e.g. about helping migrants, women, and other minorities), or they were purely fun. There was very little about programming and nothing about advanced rendering technology. Most of indie developers use Unity. I attended one of the workshops about Unity, but it was very basic - speaker explained what is bool, int etc.
Besides, there were concerts every evening with bands or DJs playing, VJs making visualizations, lots of beer and other festival fun :) I recommend attending A MAZE at least once to anyone interested in games or game development, just because it's so different from other events. Plus it happens in Berlin, and I love the atmosphere of this city :)
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