The playful meet-ups are back in town
“One day we will be 20 people sitting here!” said Marie Janin to an audience of no more than eight people (counting speakers and organizers) at one of the first COLLIDERS meet-up back in early 2023.
COLLIDERS has been happening every month, featuring talks from artists and makers, games selected by the Sickhouse team, and open screens for people to present their prototypes. The meet-up invited visitors to explore and share the richness of playful media. Month after month the audience was growing, bringing together all kinds of game enthusiasts and slowly forming a solid community.
After hearing the news that Sickhouse needed to move from its former location at Stationsplein, COLLIDERS and the other programs of Sickhouse became nomad. Thanks to the support of other cultural institutions like the Rijksmuseum Twenthe or Grensfrequentie we were able to keep the meet-up going. Together we played, reflected and dreamt about having our own venue where we could meet more than once a month. After a long journey full of challenges and nightmares about rot concrete structures, cryptic permits, and walls covered by toxic fiber, the new Sickhouse space became a reality, opening its doors in February 2026.
With the new space ready, Enschede finally had back a dedicated space for playful art. To celebrate that milestone, the first COLLIDERS at the new location, was themed around the topic of building home. We inaugurated the CINEMA hosting two talks from fellow hosts of playful art: Roque based in Spain and Krish based in Amsterdam. Roque told us about his project Jugar Jueguitos on curating exhibitions about the hidden layers of games, connecting it to how he experienced the Overkill Festival back in 2024. Krish, co-organizer of the [untitled games event], was also present at the big screen, in this case, as the developer of ‘Don’t Get Your Hopes Up‘. The game is based on his personal experience of finding an apartment to rent in Amsterdam, presented in an interactive comic-like visual novel. The game, available to play for visitors for the upcoming month, was among other games connected to the topic of building home. We unpacked boxes full of memories, reflected on finding ground when moving abroad, decorated our dream house or discarded our dreams of home ownership and became a house flying around, meeting eligible structures and romancing them.
During March, we participated in the celebration of International Women’s Day together with Amnesty International, Enschede Feminists, Creative Broedplaats Enschede and Dolle Mina Twente. We hosted a film screening and a queer market, as well as opened Sickhouse for the 8M march after-care. The energy we got during those celebrations impulsed us to invite female and non-binary friends in the video game scene to recommend us some games made and played by women to be featured in the COLLIDERS of April. The games made us walk through the stories of women living under Islamic law in Iran, navigate the midlife crisis of a woman called Hanna, play memories evoked from small treasures or experience the small yet significant struggles we all feel.
Zeynep Burcu, in addition to recommending us some games to play, also gave a short presentation about the initiative Feminist Gaming. The initiative is involved in projects, such as the Women Only Game Jam, or in creating an inclusive 3D asset library for everyone to use, named the Open Access Asset Library. She also told us about tiny tools and how they can make the process of game development more accessible. Toni Cantino (astoryinpieces), the second speaker, built on that by sharing how they make games using GB Studio, an open source tool that allow users to create games for the Game Boy through a drag and drop interface. We already played one of the games from Toni, Bee-Fore the Storm, as part of the Friendly Secrecy System exhibition. However, we wanted other works from them to also be part of this COLLIDERS. In two game boys, connected with a flash-light, we had LesbiAnts and the demo of the upcoming horror game of Toni, as well as MOXIE // Graffiti Burst, made by PlatinaXO, a friend of theirs and fellow GB Studio maker.
Inspired by the talks from Burcu and Toni, the interview with Janne Schimmel about his exhibition at Sickhouse, the pixel art hike, and the planned visit of the artist in residency, Chloé Desmoineaux, we decided to theme the COLLIDERS of May on the topic of Tiny Tools. We wanted to discover new tools, see what people were making with them and inspire the curious players to become makers. The evening started with a talk from Pixel, a local artist who showed us how they modded a keyboard to make an interactive video installation with Blender and Godot. This was followed with the talk of Chloé, who told us about their practice as a playful artist at Fluid Space and their fascination with bitsy and its variants. Surely bitsy was the protagonist of the evening.
We played The Capitol (made in the original bitsy engine), Catching the Train (made with bitsy HD, which doubles the resolution of the sprites), and I am still here (made with bitsy 3D, adding a new dimension to play with). Apart from bitsy, we played Woodworm, made for the fantasy console Pico8, Joyride, made for the Game Boy with GB Studio, and a re-imagination of the classic snake using recorders as game controllers, Scylle 3000 made in Processing by Chloé.
To warm up for the opening of Josefin Arnell’s solo exhibition, Belly of the Beast we started looking into games that would fit the themes she would be presenting. The first game we picked was Horses by Santa Ragione, due to its cinematic setting and the way it confronts us with the bizarreness of modern society. From there, we collected more games to play in June that expose the grey areas of what does it mean to be Good Citizen. Those game included topics, such as the mechanisms of hierarchical societies, safety, control and surveillance during crisis, alcoholism disguised by cultural heritage, and transgender struggles with toilets.
To dive deeper into these topics, we had two talks, one online from Matěj Hložánek and another in-person from Alexandria (Lexie). Matěj from the collective Herdek, told us about how they portrayed the Czech drinking culture in their game Prši. He also told us about the independent Czech game making scene and introduced us to the FinalFinal festival, exactly the type of game festivals we like, which will happen in October. In her turn, Alexandria shared practices for making your own digital tools and how to publish them in open-source and modifiable ways. For her “being a 'good citizen' in the digital arts entails being generous with your work and knowledge, and she believes that explicitly welcoming people into modding practices helps further that goal.” Being interested in tool-making, she created VisunovOS, a playful visual novel-making web-toolbox, which was a refreshing view on how to exist in the internet. Great inspiration for those, who join the hybrid monthly Neo-cities coding nights, co-organized with .Zip in Rotterdam.
At one of those coding evenings, we met with Thomas van den Brink, who had published his own role-play adventure. We invited him to tell us more about the process of writing such stories at the last Colliders before the summer break. This edition was happening simultaneously with the Film Camp, so the theme was, you guessed it, Filmmaking. This was, by far, the most popular edition, bringing together around 30 participants. We tested the interactive installation of a group of students from the University of Twente before their showcase at Gogbot in September. Another visitor to the Neo-cities showed us his custom-made engine and a collection of games he has been developing over the past years. In addition, regular visitors brought improved prototypes of their games. Alongside with the open screens, we had a curated a collection of games that explored the blend between filmmaking and game development. There was a game from an animation filmmaker exploring the narrative elements of the game loop; a narrative game about deciding what should be filmed; a horror-puzzle game that inspired a recently released movie; an experimental game continuing the story of a series of shortfilms with heavy inspiration in game aesthetics; and a short typing game with special attention to photography.
Thanks to having our new space, we were able to slowly strengthen the community of game makers and playful artist of the east of the Netherlands. This first set of COLLIDERS at the new location helped to grow our community, bringing together every month even a bit more participants than those 20 people we initially hoped for ;). We have both regular visitors and curious ones that drop from time to time. It is incredibly inspiring to see all those people being interested in games and hear the stories behind their development. We are very grateful for our dedicated playful community - thank you to everyone, who joined us! We are looking forward to the upcoming meetups and curious to see what you will be developing in the future.