Games about refusing violence played out at a Hamburg cinema
Gamerausch put a bullfighter, a deserter, and a stray dog on one bill
- When
- Oct. 30, 2026, 7 p.m. (Berlin edition)
- Where
- Filmrauschpalast, Berlin
On Sept. 29, the Berlin collective Gamerausch brought a triple bill called Unplaying Violence to Abaton Kino in Hamburg: two games played start to finish and one film shot inside a shooter, introduced by media scholar Lars Dolkemeyer. The announcement opened by reciting the oldest complaint about the medium, that games make children "sad, lonely, and aggressive," then answered with a category instead of a defense.
From the trailer for How to Disappear (2020) by Total Refusal, shot inside Battlefield V. The clip plays silent here; the full trailer has sound.
Mélanie Courtinat's Indulto (2025) walks a torero down a corridor toward a bull. The fight happens offscreen, and the final choice, kill or spare, ends the same way. Total Refusal's How to Disappear (2020) spends 21 minutes trying to desert inside Battlefield V, a game with no way to leave the fight. Alan Kwan's Scent (2025) gives you a stray dog gathering the souls of the dead while a massacre goes on around it.
None of the three is a peaceful game, which is what I like about the bill. Gamerausch's phrase was "un-violent" play: work that admits the violence is there and declines the verb. In each case, the refusal changes nothing. The bull dies. The deserter has nowhere to go. The dog can only watch, which Kwan told Killscreen last year was the idea: "being a witness without power." In 2011 we were passing along the complaint that Battlefield 3 left players with two actions, running around and shooting. These artists took that limit as their subject.
Gamerausch has spent four years putting games on the screen at Filmrauschpalast in Berlin's Moabit, one person on the controller and everyone else watching, the same arrangement Kwan built for Scent in Bristol. Founder Julius Hackspiel told Cineuropa: "A lot of people enjoy watching other people play games." The collective was in Hamburg with Futura Cinema's incubation programme and left with an honorary mention from CICAE, the art-house cinema confederation. Watching turns out to be one more way of not pulling the trigger.
A Berlin edition at Filmrauschpalast was announced for Oct. 30, with the artists joining for a Q&A.
Top row: Indulto by Mélanie Courtinat, in stills and as an installation. Bottom row: How to Disappear by Total Refusal and two stills from Scent by Alan Kwan. Images: the artists
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