It started as a thought experiment: What happens when a female-owned development studio produces a game specifically aimed at women? A game “by women for women”, as Franziska Zeiner from the “Fein Games” studio puts it in a video call?
The result is Finding Hannah: a hidden object adventure in which players must find hidden objects in a cluttered, colorful picture. A tennis racket, a rubber ducky, or a coffee cup on a crowded subway, for example. In addition, there is a loving design and the carefully thought-out story about Hannah, who is looking for happiness and self-determination.
Games like this are presented annually in Berlin at the A Maze Festival. This time it will take place from May 10th to 13th in the Kulturquartier Silent Green and the Bar Panke Culture in Wedding. The international fair for video and computer games has existed since 2012. Since 2020 it has also been broadcast in the virtual A Maze Space specially developed for the festival.
The festival is aimed at developers and offers opportunities for networking. The program includes lectures, art performances and parties, in special rooms developers and software publishers can get to know each other and present their projects.
Everyone who wants to deal with game development is represented, such as theatres, galleries and artists, says A Maze Festival founder Thorsten S. Wiedemann. “These works create a crossover between so-called high culture and games culture,” he says in a video interview.
Players can view the exhibition on Saturday at the “General Public Day”. Workshops for young people, a market, performances and other events are offered.
The A Maze Festival is dedicated to so-called arthouse games and playful media. Finding Hannah is an example of an arthouse game. Compared to commercial video games, these are produced by small studios and are often more than pure entertainment products. They can be thought-provoking, difficult or activist, opinion-forming, political or socially critical. This is how Wiedemann describes the core idea of arthouse games.
The addition “playful media”, on the other hand, is intended to reflect the variety of media forms that are presented at the festival. Everything that is not a classic video game falls under this category: mobile games for smartphones, virtual and augmented reality, game mechanics on the Discord chat server and other new technologies.
More diversity in the gaming industry
On Friday, Wiedemann will present the seven A Maze Awards. The prizes honor future-oriented content, innovative approaches or the development of particularly complex game worlds. “Finding Hannah” by Fein Games is among the five nominees for the “Gender Diversity” award: Games by female and gender marginalized developers are awarded prize money of 2000 euros.
“We need more female voices in the games industry and I wanted to be one of them,” says Franziska Zeiner, co-founder of Fein Games. According to the Game Association, almost half of gamers are female, but only about a quarter of employees in the games industry. “With your own company, you get invited to completely different events,” she says. “There you can present your reality and help shape the future.”
“Finding Hannah” is not about excluding men or fighting the image of women in commercial games. “The biggest problem is not the over-sexualization, but the range,” says Zeiner. “We have to create a more diverse offer so that more people feel addressed.” Arthouse games could help to tell more diverse stories. And at the A Maze Festival there is a chance to meet some of them.
