This year, we received 435 amazing works by international artists from 78 countries, covering innovative performances, digital poems, wild and cultural experiences, personal stories as well as stunning game worlds and works of interactive media art. With help of the selection committee, we nominated 33 of them and our independent jury honoured the most forward thinking, genre pushing works with one of the 7 awards. With the addition of the Audience Award, which is chosen by the community, the 2.000€ Wings Award and the 2.000€ XR-History Award - we are presenting a total of 11.000€ in prizes.
We thank everyone who submitted and encourage everyone to look at all nominations, honorable mentions and submissions. As every year, the selection is hard, but our artists entries excellent.
So without further ado - The winners of the winners of the 15th INTERNATIONAL GAMES AND PLAYFUL MEDIA FESTIVAL are:
MOST AMAZING AWARD
Trans Theft Horso
Ben Swithen
Oh to experience joy in a hostile world. In this game you just want to quickly help a friend out when you get caught up in a world of glorious absurdity. Side quest after side quest unfolds and pulls you into a meticulously crafted reality all glued together by a precious good: humour.
While you are still trying to run that errand you get entangled in comical fights, you break the law, you kill a creature or two, you devour pointless eggs, you make a bunch of frenemies. And while you roam through an effortless abundance of word play and beautifully silly songs you get to reflect on gender identity and gender performance.
This game reminds us that, as right wing policies are on the rise, it is a radically political act to create queer joy. Long live gender gladness.
The winner of the Most Amazing Award is: Ben Swithen with “Trans Theft Horso”
Laudation by Anan Fries & Julián Cordero
HUMAN HUMAN MACHINE AWARD
OTHERWORLDS
Sophia Bulgakova
A soft voice tells you about a new world you are about to enter, a world of experiential connection transformed through the digital realm. As you stand in darkness, surrounded by others, reality starts to fade. A kaleidoscope of sounds and shapes overloads your senses with a dense, almost ritualistic energy. The world fully slips away and you become aware of the interconnected nature of everyone in the room.
This experience filled us with a sense of awe through its visual presentation and exploration of traditional cultural practices. What makes this work unforgettable is how it takes something so ancient and leaves it not diminished, but amplified. It showed us the power of collective performance to reimagine relations and connections to nature, technology, and each other in ways that feel magically otherworldly.
This year’s winner of the Human Human Machine Award is: Sophia Bulgakova and the team behind “OTHERWORLDS”.
Laudation by Antonin Fourneau & Farfama
LONG FEATURE AWARD
Season 31
MainSequenceStar
Your role is clear, make number go up. whatever the cost: reduce safety, juice the numbers, increase the audience. make number go up.
But as you manage the twists and turns of the tracks, they suddenly untangle in front of you. the mechanics you've been working with gain a new meaning, revealing a more tense and existential reality than you are ready to handle.
What begins as a detached management simulator slowly evolves to paint a complex picture of the nature of power structures and decision making.
It feels deeply inspiring to engage with this kind of ambitious narrative structure. and for that, we are excited to announce that the winner of the Long Feature Award is: MainSequenceStar with “Season 31”
Laudation by Julián Cordero & Meghna Jayanth
DIGITAL MOMENT AWARD
coalescent || tidal rapture
Hanwen Xu & Hatim Benhsain
You begin at a moment of emotional devastation. You quietly yearn to feel the presence of another body. Within a vast sea, there are whispers of a new form of connection. Your curiosity cannot be held back and you plunge into something that feels alien. They call it "The Entanglement"
This game goes beyond normative depictions of intimacy and doesn't shy away from being meaningfully sensuous, mysterious, complex, and primal. Its world captivated us with its quiet atmosphere exploring a beautiful bodily act that is both destabilizing and transcendent.
The winner of the Digital Moment Award is: Hanwen Xu & Hatim Benhsain with “coalescent || tidal rapture”
Laudation by Farfama & Meghna Jayanth
EXPLORER AWARD
The EXPLORER AWARD goes where nobody has gone, beyond the boundaries of contemporary ways to play or make, into the collisions between disciplines: science, making, theater, engineering, and everything in between. Here, the only rule is that there are none.
InSync
DaChu Interactive
Something is waiting for you. Something furred, breathing, alive. It has a heartbeat, and it needs something from you that no button, no joystick, no screen has ever asked for before: your touch. Your rhythm. Your willingness to be in contact.
This is not a comfortable experience. Something sits at the edge of tenderness and strangeness. A pull toward a creature that shouldn't exist and yet somehow calls to you. To reach it, you must let go of everything digital experiences have trained into you. Just breath, patience, and the slow, intimate work of finding a shared rhythm.
This award is not for a technical innovation, it is for something harder to achieve and harder to name. This work imagines a situation that simply did not exist before, and places you inside it with no instructions, no safety net, and no precedent to follow. In a landscape saturated with experiences designed to be frictionless, this project asks you to be lost for a moment and to find your way back through contact alone.
The winner of the Explorer Award is: DaChu Interactive with “InSync”
Laudation by Anan Fries & Antonin Fourneau
WINGS AWARD
WINGS is very proud to return to A MAZE. and present the “WINGS Award”. Our mission at WINGS is to offer funding and opportunities to gender-diverse teams, amplifying the incredible work they do in games.
NAME OF THE WILL
Zeitgeist Studio
From the moment you wake up, you know something is not right, but you have nothing else to do but carry on with the day and the activities it includes. Until maybe — just maybe — if you do things right, everything will also feel right, and you will find hope?
This year's winner is so well written and directed that even from playing the demo, you begin questioning everything: every little sign, every neighbor, and everything around you. It’s scary, immersive, and beautiful.
Therefore, WINGS is honored to recognize this team with this well-deserved award.
The winner of the AMAZE 2026 WINGS Award is Name of the Will, by Zeitgeist Studio
Laudation by Astrid Refstrup
XR-HISTORY AWARD
Flesh Network
Sickness International
Flesh Network of the artist collective Sickness International is a physically experienced commentary on “techno history”, which invites us to not only understand the digital presence but to feel it. Through a performative, participatory game, an imaginary narrative of disability and internet culture emerges between the players and the apparatus, one that, within a diatonic setting, is linked to collective experiences within and of the human body.
It is precisely this focus on the tangible, the collective, the audible, and the perceptible—a playful staging that dissolves the boundaries of the work and blurs the lines between the exhibition stage and the experiential space, and all of this within a stage design that binds the body to the apparatus in an almost unbearable way—forms the core of an outstanding work that continues to evolve with every performance.
Like my fellow judges have already pointed out following an intense and stimulating jury discussion, the question here is: what happens when the history of technology isn’t just told, but can be physically experienced?
With “Flesh Network” the artist collective “Sickness International” delivers a remarkable answer.
This game-based performance combines physical movement, familiar—and less familiar—computer interfaces, and the logic of our digital present into a spatial, interactive exploration of the history of modern communication technologies. In particular, the intertwining of the internet and the body, as well as the ideas of correction, enhancement, and eugenics, generate strong discursive points of reference, as the work reveals how closely the development of digital technologies is linked to the breaking down of physical barriers and to questions of participation and accessibility.
Laudation by Margarete Jahrmann and Simon Strick
AUDIENCE AWARD WINNER
Selected by all participants as the winner of the Audience Award out of all exhibited works.
kitiklop
Flex & Dorian (France)
