UCLA Game Arts Festival

The UCLA Game Lab in collaboration with the Hammer Student Association (HSA) presents an evening of innovative gaming curated by Game Lab director and associate professor of Design Media Arts Eddo Stern. With games ranging from the bombastic and performative to the intimate and personal, these ambitious and participatory projects use a variety of media and modes of expression. Browse the games or participate in a tournament while enjoying live music, refreshments, and game-inspired artwork.

Ranging from the provocatively serious to the profoundly silly, the more than 35 games selected for this year’s festival include:

Perfect Woman (Lea Schoenfelder and Peter Lu)

This motion-based performance game charts the course of a woman’s life through seven stages, probing the social expectations placed on women.

Laser Cabinet (Khalil Klouche)

Featuring side-mounted buttons like a pinball machine for controls, Laser Cabinet turns its seemingly blank wooden surface into a playable videogame.

Objectif (Aliah Magdalena Darke)

Objectif is card game that, as the game designer and UCLA student Aliah Magdalena Darke explains, “challenges our perceptions of race, women and beauty while simultaneously revealing the assumptions we make about ourselves and others.”

UlakTartysh, or that goat-carcass polo game (acquired by Jason Tochinsky).

This rare, 1983 arcade game simulates the Central Asian sport of buzkashi, which is akin to playing polo with the carcass of a headless goat. It’s true.

The Propheteers (Nick Crockett)

The Propheteers is a board game of faith, money and power. Or, as the rules state, “He or she who has collected the greatest earthly wealth in the name of the LORD shall be the victor, and the rest be DAMNED. Amen.”

Bollywood Wannabe (Chrysaor Studio)

Dance, dance, dance for movie stardom in this rhythm platform game that allows players to create their own choreography.

In a Permanent Save State (Benjamin Poynter)

Banned from Apple’s iTunes store, this game by Benjamin Poynter is based on the 2010 suicides at the Foxconn plant where many electronic products are mass produced.

Featured UCLA Game Lab Backpack running the game Exit Pallette (Stephen Ou and Stefan Wojciechowski)

The ultimate, portable arcade machine is designed to be worn as a backpack, will feature Exit Pallette, a puzzleplatform game based on RGB subtractive color theory.