by Alison Hugill // Aug. 28, 2026
This article is part of our feature topic Play.
What are the implications of play taking place outside of its designated zones? In our interview, artist, curator and game designer Sebastian Quack discusses play as a form of experimentation that doesn’t shy away from friction, and can lead to critical reflections about the way our lives and cities are structured. From embedding Monopoly and other board games into public space to creating interactive games that confront histories of exploitation, Quack explores how changing the rules and the spaces in which we play can open up new ways of thinking about power and community. He also reflects on “critical play” as a practice that combines curiosity and openness with an awareness of play’s wider social and political repercussions.
Sebastian Quack in conversation with Anastasia Landa at SEAM Festival of Spiel und Objekt / Experimental Play Final Projects, 2026 // Photo by Michelle Mantel
Alison Hugill: As we get older, play and playfulness become less privileged in our daily lives. What are some of the challenges in bringing this mode into public space and interactions, especially in your work with adults? And what are its emancipatory potentials?
Sebastian Quack: In my line of work, there is a tendency for adults to delegate play to the kids. As soon as there are kids in the space, they have an excuse to step out of this more risky mode and hand it over to the kids. It becomes a chance to hide and not enter into uncomfortable situations.
I think this riskiness or unpredictability is what’s interesting to me about play. Adults play in a variety of ways, but our society has compartmentalized these experiences into very specific genres and spaces where it’s protected. Video games are one of these: you’re at a screen and there’s a whole culture around it. There are even very harsh separations from this world to other parts of culture, where there are always negotiations about how valuable this is, or what it means to be a “gamer.” Or other forms of play, like dance or ritualistic practices in clubs, they have their space in the club culture. Or the board game scene. The adult world is very organized in terms of where adult play is allowed to take place. Kids’ play is not spared from this logic, either. There’s a whole debate about “free-range kids” and a nostalgic view of how kids were previously able to just go out and play on the streets. Now there are concerns about safety, control. There’s more infrastructure for making kids play safely, which is another form of predictability. The history of regulating and controlling play is tied to this topic from the start.
Play also makes us think about regimes around it: becoming someone else, distancing yourself from your serious identity and trying out something new. It can allow people who don’t have access to positions of power to hold those positions. This is a kind of subversive play. But there’s also an idealistic discourse that suggests play is inherently healthy and good, that everything would be better if we just play more. It’s important to remember that games and play are also an integral part of the rise of fascism, and a way to form community around these more problematic causes.
Sebastian Quack: ‘Boardwalk,’ 2021, Skulpturenpark Berlin Zentrum // Photo by the artist
AH: In your recent project ‘BOARDWALK’ you embedded some classic board game boards into the ground in public space. Can you tell us about what provoked this project and how you imagined people might interact with them?
SQ: A lot of my work is about moving play into different contexts and trying to question the organizational forms for where play is allowed to happen. With this project I was really keen to look at these very well-known, classic board game boards—like Monopoly, Settlers of Catan, Snakes and Ladders, Risk—and to decontextualize them so they appear as foreign artefacts or archeological discoveries, which you find in the ground.
They are so associated with their boxes, as products, and they are normally played in the safety of the home, but some of them have a very sinister side as generators of colonial fantasy or bourgeois “safe spaces.” A lot of them are really uncritical continuations of extraction and domination power games. They are made safe, so the user can have this power rush and enact these relationships: it gives them a small taste of these dynamics that maybe they can’t access otherwise, and still feel good about themselves. I was very curious to see what would happen if I took the games out of this context and put them in the ground. I wrote new rules for the games, so there was a booklet you could take around to discover the boards in the dirt, and play different versions of them.
AH: So there was a walking tour element to the installation?
SQ: Yes, and as far as I know they are still there. We got permission to do it, but only for the time of the exhibition, but we left them there. It was for a group exhibition in a part of Mitte that used to be no man’s land, around the Berlin Wall infrastructure. Now there’s a lot of new, expensive housing developments there. It was also about the rules guiding this space and who gets to put their markers there.
Not all of the histories of these games are problematic, though. Monopoly, for example, comes from an anti-capitalist game called The Landlord’s Game, by Lizzie Magie, which was later sold by Parker Brothers. It was a satirical, critical game about the negative effects of monopolies and the abuse of property.
Sebastian Quack: ‘Boardwalk,’ 2021, Skulpturenpark Berlin Zentrum // Photo by the artist
AH: In your description of the ‘BOARDWALK’ work you say: “our capacity to invent new rules for old spatial arrangements is cause for hope.” Can you explain how you envision play as vital to the reinvention of our cities and ourselves? Why is it a hopeful tool?
SQ: My practice is in a tradition of site-specific art and reframing or recontextualizing the real world as much as possible. There’s a tension inherent in the game design field, where people are creating perfect fabrications and environments with a lot of effort, that separate you from the real world, to give you a thrill or allow you to live out a fantasy. I was always interested in using what’s already there, not having to rebuild or redesign everything. That involves inventing new rules for existing structures, and setting limitations for yourself. If you create new environments, you have a locking together of the player and the designer in a relationship that feels a bit unhealthy in the way it relates to consumption and addiction. The product so perfectly locks into the desires and needs of the player or the user, so much so that there’s no consideration for anything else. When you work in public space or make use of existing infrastructure or you share the playing space with other people who have different interests, like working, then you automatically have to use part of your playing mind to consider how this feels from the outside and whether it’s compatible with the other people around you. There’s a hopeful fantasy that in treating shared spaces a bit more lightly, we can cultivate a way to use them that considers difference, and different types of interactivity or community. That’s a skill you can develop if you engage with this kind of play, rather than play in more closed spaces.
Frederik Britzlmair & Co-Respondents Group: ‘soft corps’ at SEAM Festival of Spiel und Objekt / Experimental Play Final Projects, Berlin Zitadelle Spandau 2026 // Photo by Michelle Mantel
AH: You work with both digital and analog tools in your approach to games and play. How do you decide which media best fits the project? Do you have a preference for how best to interact with the public or is it always dependent on the context?
SQ: I use a lot of different tools and methods for projects. I was very inspired by an American game designer, Frank Lantz, who said: “we make games with computers inside them, not the other way around.” It’s a resistance to going inside the computer and doing everything there, but instead treats our world as something that is already digitized and has a lot of digital infrastructure, and actually making art that is wrapping around that. Phones and computers can be used to help facilitate play, pass around information or help people get into a storyline but not necessarily create a virtual world in which to encapsulate yourself.
Sebastian Quack: ‘Tracing Remembrance,’ 2022, Theater der jungen Welt Leipzig // Photo by the artist
AH: Kind of like your recent digital game ‘Tracing Remembrance,’ which plays with the disconnect between vibey real estate startups and the realities of spatial history and memory culture in Leipzig…
SQ: This was a commission from a program that the youth theater—Theater der Jungen Welt—in Leipzig was doing. They were funded to collaborate on a project with the Nazi Forced Labour Memorial Leipzig. The memorial commemorates and explores the Nazi program of exploiting workers for the war machine and their racist ideology. We were thinking for a long time about how to do a game around this and came up with a way to put it into conversation with a more contemporary gig-economy start-up, which also brings up questions of exploitation and consent around how your labor is being used.
There’s a tendency in German memory culture to stabilize and memorialize the Nazi past and make it into a very educational, feel-good thing: you know about it and confront it but you don’t necessarily look at how it continues today, or its relationship to other forms of exploitation.
We didn’t want to have people roleplay Nazis or victims, or go back in time. There are other projects that do this but we wanted a different path. The game is about imagining yourself as a worker for this new gig economy app in Leipzig, which maps the urban vibes of to-be-developed spaces in the city, but there’s a glitch in the system and as the story progresses you notice that all the places you’ve been mapping out and scanning in the app have this history of forced labor from the Nazi era. The story becomes about how the start-up reacts to these glitches: do they care about this? Do they change their product and try to suppress this history?
It was a phone-based game, where you walk to different, real historical locations, and map them as a worker. Some of the actors from the theater would appear as your colleagues and bosses from the start-up, and you’d have chats with them about what you’d seen.
Sebastian Quack: ‘Tracing Remembrance,’ 2022, Theater der jungen Welt Leipzig // Photo by the artist
AH: You often collaborate with theaters and you teach in the “Spiel und Objekt / Experimental Play” MA program at the University of Theatre Arts Ernst Busch. Do you find that your version of play fits more naturally into a theater setting, with people who are more accustomed to this mode of play?
SQ: To me there are challenges and potentials in every context. In the theater context, we are still in proximity to people who are doing acting on stage, sometimes with very classical texts. There are huge traditions and skills built into this mode of play. There’s a clear audience.
In the MA course that I co-direct, we are trying to explore the alternative ways of playing with audiences outside stage dynamics. We look at Live Action Role Play, we look at technology, site-specific and community-based work, it’s a very broad outlook.
I also directed a festival in London called ‘Now Play This’ at Somerset House, as part of London Games Week, a big video games festival. It was about finding the artistic expression of video games or looking at the art traditions around play that are non-commercial. Each venue of play that’s established and has its own systems also provide a space to distance oneself from, or to explore the edges of.
Laurence Young: ‘How I taught my mum to play Elden Ring’ at Now Play This Festival of experimental Game Design, Somerset House London, 2023 // Photo by Ben Peter Catchpole
AH: I am particularly interested in the idea of “critical play” that comes up in your teaching and how you see those seemingly disparate concepts fitting together?
SQ: There is a great book by Mary Flanagan that explores this concept of “critical play.” To me, it’s really about play literacy. With the students, we are developing skills to access a playful part of yourself that’s a little bit more loose or isn’t clearly defined and has a lot of room for creativity and curiosity about re-use and reinterpretation. At the same time, we are not just letting this part take over completely. This is a skill that every adult could benefit from: allowing yourself to feel a strong emotional rush but also being able to understand where it came from, what situations produce these more irrational or embodied modes of being, and understanding how they work and what the specific set-ups and traditions are that accompany them.
Working as an artist or designer with play, you have to kind of feel it yourself and do a lot of testing and experiments, you have to be willing to listen to feedback because often you are totally wrong. Critical play, to me, is this way of simultaneously being open and cultivating an interest in playing, but also being cognizant of the societal implications. The Right, especially the Far Right, is very good at allowing people to feel the rush of domination or control, and the group dynamics that go along with games. I think it’s really important, especially for the Left, to insist on still having playfulness, and the joy and pride that come along with play, because we can’t leave those things to the Right.
