DIY games in one dimension – Robin Baumgarten in Belgrade!

Robin Baumgarten,
Artist
23.11.2022.
Have you ever played a 1D game? Robin Baumgarten's guest appearance in Belgrade as part of A Maze. pop-up exhibitions give you exactly that opportunity. We talked to the author of Line Wobbler, one of the actors of global DIY hardware art.

As part of this year’s Playing Narratives program, jointly organized by the Goethe-Institut, the French Institute in Serbia and SGA, from November 16 to 25, a unique exhibition of the A MAZE festival will be presented. from Berlin, with a dozen video games by authors from all over the world, which players can usually try out in gallery spaces or at festivals – so-called “arthouse games”. This a unique opportunity for young game creators and the widest audience to get to know a new dimension of video games, which is not aimed at commercial success but at exploring the limits of creativity and the medium itself.

In cooperation with the Nordeus Foundation, SGA, the Goethe-Institut, and the French Institute in Serbia, as initiators of the project, organized two workshops for high school students, through which 40 participants had the opportunity to work with Robin Baumgarten a prominent hardware designer and interactive artist from Berlin. Robin is a developer of experimental hardware games based in Berlin. Starting from AI and commercial game development, he now builds on the development of interactive art installations and award-winning experiments using custom game controllers, such as Line Wobbler and Wobble Garden.

It was Line Wobbler that was presented as part of the exhibition Playing Narratives x A Maze.: Pop-up Arthous Games Show, in the Grafički kolektiv gallery, from November 16th to 25th. We took this opportunity to talk to Robin about his work and longer, experimental and artistic approaches to interactive game design.

You come from an engineering background. How did you decide or end up in the interactive art domain? Was it a conscious decision or a spontaneous turn of events?

A bit of both! I was always interested in playing games – and since I learned how to program – also making games. I’ve been making games since I was 12 or so, and started making mobile games during my computing degree. A while later, I started experimenting with hardware aspects of games, like making custom controllers for PC games, or making my own playful installations altogether. These playful installations are both fairly challenging from an engineering perspective, but also considered quite artsy. And since I built Line Wobbler a few years ago, events, museums, and festivals have been excited about exactly these installations, which pushed me more towards the interactive arts side.

The games and projects you are involved with are kind of distant from standard gaming market formats and pressures of monetization. What are the spaces and contexts in which they are usually presented, experienced and played?

When you build a physical hardware installation, it’s quite tricky to sell to a wider audience, since there’s only one in existence (at least initially). This rarity makes it interesting for exhibition spaces that specialize on showing unusual and surprising forms of playful media, for example museums, festivals, and events. They don’t only want to show games on a PC or console, since you could just play those games at home. But a large interactive installation is something you can only experience in very few places, which makes my art so well suited for these venues.

On the other hand, are you thinking about creating actual finished products that can reach a wider audience, start inhabiting some public spaces, or homes for that matter?

Yes, it would be awesome to have a complete art product that you could buy for playing at home! There’s quite a few steps that are tricky and would probably require help from a business and manufacturing partner, which I haven’t figured out yet. In general, I want my playful art to be played by as many people as possible, and not only sit in a gallery somewhere.

How vibrant is the global alternative hardware scene? Does it overlap with the so-called maker movement too? Where to look to get to know more artists like yourself, aside from rhe A Maze. Festival?

The scene is small, but growing! Every year, there’s lots of cool hardware games being exhibited at alt.ctrl.GDC during the Game Developer Conference in San Francisco, for example. The border to the maker movement is very blurry indeed, just the starting point might be different. Online, there’s an interesting repository of playful hardware at Shake That Button, for example.

The projects you work on are part electronics and microcontrollers, part coding. And you work with a DIY ethos, so to say. Would you recommend some public, open resources for learning some of these skills?

Resources and tutorials around microcontrollers are flourishing online, especially surrounding the Arduino ecosystem. Any combination of sensors and outputs with Arduinos you can think of have probably been done in some form, and it’s easy to google tutorials for these. Another interesting approach for beginners that haven’t programmed are microcontrollers that support drag-and-drop development, such as the BBC MicroBit. They can be programmed entirely in a browser by dragging blocks onto the screen, and there’s plenty of tutorials to get you started.

You were based in London and now Berlin. How would you describe the two scenes when it comes to indie and experimental games?

They’re quite comparable, with London probably having a more mature scene with plenty of events and support networks. However, I only moved to Berlin two years ago during the pandemic, so my exposure to the Berlin scene is still more limited, and I’m exploring it as I go along!

You presented a one-dimensional game in Belgrade, which seems pretty unique. Please tell us how it works, and what is the “tech” behind it? Also, what is the future of the project?

That game is called Line Wobbler, and it’s a one-dimensional dungeon crawler. It’s played entirely on a long strip of LED lights, using a spring joystick as input and a fast arduino as processor. There’s some sound too, and the whole package is a complete game with several levels, boss fights, hidden stages, and high-scores. In the game, your avatar is represented by a green light, and enemies are red. You fight them by ‘wobbling’ the spring and your goal is to get past all these obstacles to reach the other end of the LED strip. I plan on supporting this game for a long time and hope I can show it more around the world. I also want to make variations, for example with a really long LED strip (I’m at 30m so far), or an over-sized controller, or a smaller version that everyone could put in their rooms!

This is not your first time in Belgrade. How were your experiences in working with the young people here?

I enjoy coming to Belgrade – it’s a vibrant and interesting city and I have a couple friends here. The young people in the workshops I’ve given in Belgrade were very interested and keen to learn more about hardware and my work. I’d love to come back and show more of what I do someday!

You can visit A MAZE. x Playing Narratives exhibition until November 25th.