A joystick is a navigation device. A selection device. An orientation device. A pleasure device.
Madison Bycroft's “Joystick” play environment is an invitation to unlearn everything we know about finding our way. With patience and curiosity and no goals, wander through a fantastic flooded world made of collages. In Joystick, orientation and intentions are not static, they change depending on our location, the weather, sea level and other environmental factors in the game.

You may encounter one of the seven bosses that populate the islands. Each of them sings a song about their location (Up, Down, Beside, In Front, Behind, Elsewhere and In Between).

In this work, the player/viewer uses a custom game-controller that has two joysticks and one button. 

Joystick is a participatory multi-channel project, created during 2021 - 2024, initially in collaboration with Ubisoft, and Carreau Du Temple.

BIO
Madison Bycroft (they/them), born in 1987 in Tarntanya (Adelaide, Australia), lives and works in Marseille, France and is the tutor of the group FKA Critical Practices at Artez, in Arnhem. Bycroft is a graduate of the University of South Australia (2013), the MFA program at the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam (2016), and is currently a fellow at the Villa Medici in Rome.

Working with video, sculpture, and performance, Madison Bycroft’s current interests extend into forms of reading and writing, expression, and refusal. The politics of illegibility and legibility are explored through language and material, asking how ‘sense’ is framed by historical contexts, biases, and structures of power.

Bycroft is interested in how we might re-imagine “reading” (in its expanded sense) and understanding, not as goal-oriented towards accomplishment, but as a relationship that hovers and makes space - opaque, errant, fractured, and floating.


Joystick is part of Sickhouse's year research “Radical-Joy-Resistance” exploring the role of play within activism and the power of joy, pleasure, humour in movement of resistance. The results of this research will be presented at The Overkill Festival from 20 to 24 November. (



DATES : 28-09 to 24-11
Opening 28-09, 15:00
LOCATION : Concordia Langestraat 56
ACCESS : Free

Joystick

THE OVERKILL FESTIVAL 2024 is around the corner! November 20 to 24 is when all the fun will unleash. Have you already bought your ticket?

The Overkill is a playful festival featuring
+ indie and arthouse games
+ interactive arts
+ alternative films screenings
+ immersive and interactive exhibitions
+ a selection of workshops & talks
+ live performances!

Interdisciplinary, experimental, and international, The Overkill brings together game makers, digital creators, and playful artists from around the world. Following a central theme, the festival tells a story, linking one piece to another and inviting visitors to engage with multiple worlds. Besides, it serves as a space to play, meet, experience, share and collaborate.

, exploring the role of playfulness in activism and the empowering aspects of joy and pleasure in resistance movements. The event is curated by Marie Janin and Aike Lütkemöller from Sickhouse, alongside playful curator Zuraida Buter and artist-researcher Erik Peters.

Join us for the festive opening on Thursday, November 21st, at 18:00 in Enschede, featuring a performance of LASTESIS collective.

Follow our new 

The Overkill Festival 2024

SICKHOUSE PLAYFUL ART SPACE unwraps games as means to engage in diverse social topics with light, serious, absurd and challenging programs. Sickhouse is encouraging multi voices and multi disciplinary encounters.

Frontpage

From 20 to 23 of June, 3 groups of Saxion CMGT students presented their new games at Sickhoes. Inspired by the theme of The Overkill 2024 " Radical Joy Resistance" the groups had to create a multiplayer from scratch. 

The three groups took very different approaches to what multiplayers can be and the results were very fun! 

Team Spectrum Spectacle build a game where 2 players have to share a keyboard and run out of a boring, dark office! There is no way out but with the help of the other player until you find the outside world together!

Team CTA associated colour meanings to different activistic convincing tactics. You could choose your character and find out the best way to spread your arguments! Sometimes staying still also pays off !

Team Chaotic detectives hacked a telephone to transform it into a controller. Looking for Ilvy in a small American town, your way of playing left a trace for the next players!

Very proud of the works presented and super happy to work with such enthusiastic students we are very excited to present the finale versions of these games at The Overkill festival coming up in November! 

Saxion-CMGT new multiplayer games reflecting on activism

YOUR FAVOURITE PLAYFUL CONTEST IS BACK, AND YOU CAN JOIN!

formerly known as Sickhouse Eurogaming) will be held on the 18th of May and YOU can be part of it! 🥁🐔 

🕹️ The Ultimate IndieMash is a contest for playful makers from all over the world, to present their work to an international audience. 

> Hosted live from Enschede and streamed online, the participants get 3 minutes each to show their game, interactive project, immersive installation or playful performance, through a live video connection from wherever they are in the world. 
> The challenge is to make the public and the jury want to play their game the most.


> At the end of the program, the public and a jury of professionals will vote for their favourite project. 
🕹️ 🏅

Besides receiving the Sickest Trophy, the winner of the Ultimate IndieMash will also get a spot at The Overkill Festival 2024! 



Not only are we looking for the most original, extravagant and alternative playful concepts, The Ultimate IndieMash is also a celebration of diversity within the indie-game community. We strongly encourage applications from candidates who are likely to be underrepresented in the gaming world. From coding mothers to queer visual artists and indigenous storytellers, everyone is welcome to show their unique projects and creations to our audience online and in the theatre, so sign up now! You don't have to come to the Netherlands to participate, all contestants get to show their project through a video connection! 


This year, for the first time, we’re collaborating with the 

from Wierden, to create an exciting show with music, glitter, glamour and of course the main acts of the evening; the playful contestants!

! You have until April the 24th!  Our team will choose the 10 best fitting concepts to show their work on the 18th of May! 


If you have any questions about the concept, the application, or anything else regarding the Sickhouse Ultimate IndieMash Game Contest, please email niels@sickhouse.nl or join the 


See you all very soon!
💜 Lots of love,
The Sickhouse Ultimate IndieMash Playful Contest team

The Ultimate IndieMash : Playful Contest

Sickhouse celebrated their sixth anniversary and it was fun! 

Without a physical space to gather, Sickhouse is looking for different ways to be present, support its community and share playfulness. This is why we are publishing this magazine, to find you again, share some thoughts and take you on the new reflective theme for this year.

At the start of 2024, Sickhouse does not have a space to present and host its program. Finding a new location is a challenge we have been working on since a few years but the last months have shown how difficult the path towards a fitting space is. And we are not alone in this struggle, revealing a great fragility within the cultural middle field of Enschede.

One could wonder why Sickhouse needs a space, when it could be nomad, presents programs within the institutions Enschede/The Netherlands already has, rent a desk in one of the few co-work spaces of the city, mingle with entrepreneurs, free itself from the burden of rent and focus all its budget on content.

But this position fails to see that the large part of Sickhouse’s content is its community. The programs centre around the encounter, the gathering. Designing and crafting its physical space allows  Sickhouse’s visitors to feel safe,  encourages experiment and supports diversified encounters. As a playful art space, Sickhouse does not only support the makers of games or interactive art, it actively uses play as a means to engage in the difficult discussions we urgently need to have in times of polarisation.

One could argue that, as specialised in video games and virtual spaces, Sickhouse could gather online and again free itself from the burden of a physical space. That’s something Sickhouse definitely explored, in the times of the pandemic and when hosting hybrid events. It has been challenging, it has been fun, it needs time, it needs courage and it needs a solid base.

Sickhouse continues to work on such online spaces, trying to find the right balance between the gathering and the playground open to our (international) community. But when our ambition is to support the construction of bridges between virtual and physical, such space can not live alone. The ways to inhabit the world are neither online or offline anymore but in hybrid and layered realities. As an experimental space, Sickhouse is actively reflecting, supporting and creating new navigation systems.

But what physical room, alternative organisations, artists based communities or experimental programs can find, in a realty market at the hand of private owners, rich real estate developers, multinational retail companies? Confronted with this reality, Sickhouse is wondering what impact eternal temporality would have? When we want to create rooms from the glitches, what is stability? Not forgetting that the struggles inherent to alternative, critical, queer, underground spaces are political choices, we are creating our path of resistance. When our societies are dealing with one crisis after another, symptoms of hurtful politics and an economy based on inequality, Sickhouse creates critical and caring programs supporting deeper transformations.

At the time of writing this editorial, Sickhouse is working on its next temporary situation and it will be fine and it will open soon. In 2024 the city is implementing the new “culture nota” and if we believe culture needs more fundamental support, these steps, that many of us worked on with the Gemeente, are promising and hopeful. Finishing this editorial on a positive note is not a way to ignore the situation the world is in, it is an invitation to consider resilience, hope, care, patience as significant tools in a movement that demands a lot of endurance.

SICKHOUSE 6

SICKPROD 2024 - OPEN CALL INDIE / ARTHOUSE GAME STUDIO

In 2024 Sickhouse follows up on its program ”SickProd” to support the creative process of local* independent and/or arthouse gaming makers/studios!** We are looking for indie/arthouse game maker(s) interested to work with us in exchange for :

 from our mentor, Zuraida Buter, including brainstorm sessions, interviews with other professionals, studio visits and festival/exhibition tours

 with a young public. 
(A group of young gamers and art curious will be associated to this trajectory as a first community around the, to be developed, game experience.)

 of 250€ between March and November 2024

 (tbd) to present the gaming experience at The Overkill Festival 2024

between April and November, meaning selecting indie games to present at Sickhouse for the public to play and hosting the event together with the Sickhouse team.
The selection obviously is expected to support the research of the gaming studio. (from local makers to international creatives. Our mentor will help the studio invite these guests and the Sickhouse team will produce the events).

present a gaming experience at The Overkill Festival

Participate in workshops, network and presentation

To apply for this trajectory, please send Marie (

A CV with your game maker experience (if you apply as a studio please mention all the team)

A motivation letter explaining how this trajectory could support your creative process

A portfolio with links to projects you are proud of

If you have a question don’t hesitate to send an email to ask.

* Local means working in Overijssel or close enough and able to work from Sickhouse and join our events on a regular basis.

** If you are not a professional game maker but you are interested in this field and your experience and knowledge would allow you to create a gaming experience, we are interested too. Joining the Jam is also recommended to discuss the possibilities.

If you are interested in this trajectory you are highly recommended to participate in the global game jam hosted from the 

During the Global Game Jam you will be able to meet the team, find out how we work and what our space can facilitate.

Zuraida Buter is an award-winning playful culture and playful arts curator based in the Netherlands. She curates, initiates, consults and documents events focused on playful culture and games. With her international network she brings people together for creation and playful experiences.

 she is involved in curating talks, play and game exhibitions at different festivals, events and institutes such as Incubate,

(WiGNL) she aims to stimulate diversity in the game industry.

 in the Netherlands as well as the popular DGG network lunches as project manager at Dutch Game Garden (2008-2010). She was worldwide Executive Director of the 

 (2010-2014) and founding board member of Global Game Jam, Inc. In the past she has been a lecturer at different universities. For 8 years she taught game design theory at Interactive Performance Design at the Utrecht School of Arts (HKU).

In 2020 she received the IndieCade Game Changer award, which is given to "an individual whose extraordinary contributions to games deserve special acknowledgement". In 2013 she won the EA Award for Achievement and Innovation (London). In 2014 she was nominated for the Ambassador Award at Microsoft's Women in Gaming Awards (San Francisco, GDC).

Shaman Garage is a narrative studio which aims to brew the essence of storytelling and explore new experimental ways of expression. Pablo San Gragorio and Ivan McGill from Shaman Garage followed our first Sick Prod trajectory in 2023. Together we hosted 5 game nights, we started Colliders our new game maker monthly meet-up, we went to AMAZE in Berlin, to INDIGO and Dutch Game Garden network lunch in Utrecht, to Dutch Game Day in Hilversum, and we presented the new one button game “

To discover their work check their website : 

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2644670/Data_Garden/

Make your game with Sickhouse

End of November, we officially heard that the building of the former fire station on Hengelosestraat 77, where we moved at the end of September, is not fit to welcome public events due to concrete rot in the basement. This means Sickhouse can not settle in this building and is again looking for a new location. With this statement we want to inform everyone of the consequences for Sickhouse and its  community.

The Gemeente Enschede together with Jeroen Diepemaat apologised about the situation and we are now conjointly and actively looking for fitting spaces for Sickhouse, Grens Frequentie and Blackbrick. At the same time, Saxion, as an external party, has been asked by the city to evaluate how the whole process went and will conduct interviews with everyone to create a report.

For Sickhouse and our community it means that we will not be able to reopen in February like we wanted to. We are aware that this is difficult for our community that will not be able to gather as regularly as before and might find itself isolated. We also realise that the cultural sector of Enschede is greatly fragilised and the artists, makers, organisations are again under the pressure of uncertainties.

The program of 2024, for which Sickhouse received support from Stimulering Fonds and the city of Enschede, will have to be adjusted and hybridised. It means for Sickhouse and its community that we will have, once again, to adapt, be strong together and invent new ways to exist. In all honesty this is all a great disappointment after we set many steps to professionalise, strengthen our focus, and participate in the development of a better cultural climate for the city.

But Sickhouse is also surrounded by many caring partners and with their help we believe we’ll be able to carry on until we can be our own physical space again. From January on we will be collaborating closely with Concordia, Tankstation, Rijksmuseum Twenthe and Tetem to be able to host, rethink and develop our programs. We are very thankful for the very supportive cultural sector of Enschede.

We are starting the year with the Global Game Jam, hosted in Concordia and we will share more information about our programs in January.

We hope the end of year will bring some peaceful moments to everyone and we believe next year will bring many new and beautiful experiments that we are so fond of! In these challenging times, we will keep doing our best to create a safe space for our community and visitors.


Marie Janin & Aike Lütkemöller, Co-directors and the team of Sickhouse.

Statement Sickhouse Space

 is an annual festival where we combine arthouse games, playful art, films and music together in a beautiful blend to research challenging topics. This year curated in collaboration with 

Rather than evading the (digital) wetlands, The Overkill wishes to design a route through

its muddy paths. Artists navigating the Postdigital constellation think of the swamps as a playground to hybridise, as material under transformation and a womb for monstrous mutation. Today the swamp is reconsidered as a space for agency, it is inhabited by amphibious entities and exiled varieties of the self, the swamp is a liquefying space expanding on the different ecosystems.



The Overkill festival will showcases interactive and participative art installations, indie/arthouse games, an alternative film program, experimental musical performances and activities such as workshops, network meetups, D&D sessions, talks and more. Follow the newsletter, our website and our social media to get updates about the artists, games, programs etcetera!

The program of the festival is created with the support of playful curator 

Unique for this edition, The Overkill will also host a LARP: ‘

A LARP is a live action role playing game. You choose a character that you want to become within the story, with their own magical powers, appearance and backstory! You are becoming this character for the weekend, try to think like them, feel how they would feel, and find new ideas for our future together. You will join one of four ‘clans’, the Boho Elves, Swamp Goons, Carbon Knights or Anarchistic Goblins, and then you’re ready to go on your adventures!

Step into a post-climate change realm, where a once-neoliberal dystopia has given rise to pandemics, mass extinction, and social unrest. Prepare to navigate the eternal grey skies caused by large-scale solar radiation management gone awry, as sulphuric mist clouds the horizon. It’s a realm where the failure of green capitalism has left a power vacuum, paving the way for new factions to rise and claim their destiny.

Join us together with the designers of the LARP, 

 in this adventure that defies conventions, immerses you in a world of enthralling possibilities, and sparks your wild spirit. Experience the synergy of environmental consciousness and thrilling gameplay as you journey through “

” Are you ready to rewrite the fate of the realm?

The LARP will be at the heart of the festival connecting the art and games installations, disturbing the programs and inviting every visitors to take on playful challenges, but there’s of course more to see, do and experience!

As a sneak peak, we’re highlighting a few amazing participants already here! Keep an eye out for our

and the coming newsletters to get to know more artists, games, films and events!


We will be showing the video installation 

 It depicts a slow, aquatic journey to a fictional brine lake at the bottom of an unnamed ocean. Protagonists float in and out of the story, semi fictionalised versions of invertebrates, hybridised and constantly shifting.


The Paris based, Cookie Collective is bringing a new playful installation specifically created for The Overkill! Inspired by the theme of the festival, Leon Denise, Emilie Breslavetz and Rémi Georges created 

 an interactive installation with a dedicated custom controller and procedural generative audio. Imagine you control a group of tadpoles surfing the web!

FRIDAY PLAYFUL PROGRAM WITH TALKS AND WORKSHOPS


New this year is a full program of talks , panel discussions and demos, curated with

! On Friday the 17th we welcome professionals of the game industry and the art world to dive into their multiple practices. With 

 about world building and more to be announced soon. Friday is a day to get inspired, might the makers and discover new perspectives!

There will be much, much more to come! For now, here you can read what will happen on which days during the festival, so you know when to take your days off and come celebrate with us!


Official Playful Opening 19:30 with the curators and programmers of the festival
Launch of the LARP with Kostis Stafylakis and Theo Triantafyllidis
EXPO - LIVE PERFORMANCES - LARP - FILM




Playful Talks and workshops curated together with Zuraida Buter.
EXPO - LIVE PERFORMANCES - LARP - FILM - LIVE CODING NIGHT curated by Cookie Collective




NK Chillen, Dutch Finals competitive leisuring presented by Derk Over
LARP Final Assembly
EXPO - LIVE PERFORMANCES - LARP - FILM - GAME SESSIONS - WORKSHOPS - FLUID- MODULAR NIGHT


EXPO - LIVE PERFORMANCES - FILM - WORKSHOPS - GAME SESSIONS


News
Saxion-CMGT new multiplayer games reflecting on activism

News
The Ultimate IndieMash : Playful Contest

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SICKHOUSE 6

News
Make your game with Sickhouse

News
Statement Sickhouse Space

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The Overkill festival - 2023

Upcoming Events

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NewsSaxion-CMGT new multiplayer games reflecting on activism

NewsThe Ultimate IndieMash : Playful Contest

NewsSICKHOUSE 6

NewsMake your game with Sickhouse

NewsStatement Sickhouse Space

NewsThe Overkill festival - 2023