A Weekend Among Dreamers
Video games are the only thing that can pull my brain out of its own self-destructive patterns completely. I’ve known this about myself for a while now—how they distract me from the spiral, from reaching for my phone to let some pseudo-social feed numb everything. My best memories, the ones that actually matter, they’re tangled up with games somehow. Winning a Super Nintendo on Austrian children’s television as a kid. That feeling of wandering through flea markets hunting for treasures with the PlayStation logo on them. Fighting impossible odds with a party held together by hope and the last scraps of health bars.
I went to GG Bavaria last weekend, this small gaming convention in Munich that somehow feels like the comfortable little sister to Gamescom. I wasn’t expecting much, honestly. But the moment I walked into that hall, something just clicked. There was this density of actual developers there—people whose games you’d just watched someone playing at a booth, and you could just walk over and talk to them. That doesn’t happen at the huge conventions. You usually get a faceless industry. Here you got creators and community actually meeting.
What really got me, what I wasn’t prepared for, was seeing friends there. Michi had brought Incredibug—this adorable little physics platformer where you play as a pill bug uniting crustaceans against some menacing smart home system. And then there was Bardcore, this game by Flo and Tomas and Svea and Ludwig that I’d playtested with them, the one with the bards and the quirky skeletons and the black bat dragon. There’s something about watching people you know show the things they’ve built to strangers. Watching those strangers’ faces light up. It’s a small, perfect kind of moment.
The evenings are where the convention really came alive. They’d shuffle everyone out of the main hall and then the DJ would start—all anime openings and Nintendo soundtracks, which sounds so niche until you’re standing there with a couple hundred people singing along to One Piece, Case Closed, and Neon Genesis Evangelion theme songs. I remember standing there with a free drink and a cookie, watching other people create little characters on screens, and just feeling this strange, genuine warmth. This is where your people are, you know? Everyone speaking the same language.
I drove home in Ludwig’s packed car with four other people crammed in, all of us talking about nothing in particular—university, water damage, the specific problems of village life. And I realized I was happy. Just completely, simply happy.
I’m thinking about going to Gamescom again. It’s been years, back when I had a press badge and could slip away from the chaos into the quiet rooms. But I’m also wondering if I have the energy for that right now. My body doesn’t always cooperate with what I want from it. What I do know is that GG Bavaria 2026 felt like an event that caught exactly the right moment. Like it understood what it was supposed to be. And if you’re even slightly into any of this—games, art, the weird beautiful intersection of all these people who speak the same language—I’d say get a ticket next year. Good game, Bavaria.