Exactly two playable games made it into the Venice Biennale
Elliott Burns went hunting across every national presentation and came back with KAZANA, Bulgaria's copper-clad political compass quiz.
Elliott Burns spent part of the summer walking the 61st Venice Biennale with one question: where are the games? The running count, posted to SideQuest, the research program Burns writes on artist-produced computer games, came to exactly two playable works across every pavilion and collateral palazzo. One of them is Black Myth: Wukong, parked in the Chinese Pavilion's expo-style Dream Stream show with a life-size figurine of its monkey protagonist. That leaves one.
Trailer for Veneta Androva’s Spray and Pray, one of the four films feeding KAZANA. Courtesy the Bulgarian Pavilion.
The one is KAZANA, the connective tissue of The Federation of Minor Practices, the Bulgarian Pavilion's fictional research lab that looks back at our present from a kinder future. Four newly commissioned films by Gery Georgieva, Veneta Androva, Maria Nalbantova and Rayna Teneva feed a copper-clad gaming station built by Zlatka Uzunova and the virtual and augmented reality lab Uzunova leads at Sofia Tech Park. Burns calls it a "walkable political compass quiz": you drift through canyons and caves answering ostensibly ethical questions until the system hands you a personality badge. I. The show runs through November 22, and you don't even need the flight: the game is on Google Play.
The third sighting borrows the grammar without the controller. In Pinchuk Art Centre's Still Joy, Roman Khimei and Yarema Malashchuk's Open World (2025) sends a teenager displaced from Zaporizhzhia back home through a robot dog, staged as a livestream.
Two playables across dozens of national pavilions is a finding, not a fluke. Consoles keep moving into the museum , but the Biennale proper still treats play as garnish. Which makes it funny that the most convincing political work there is a quiz—we have argued before about where most political games go wrong, and KAZANA's answer is to stop lecturing and start cooking.
Inside The Federation of Minor Practices, and the artists with curator Martina Yordanova. Installation photos courtesy the Bulgarian Pavilion; group photo: Maximilian Pramatarov.
SideQuest counted two playable games in the whole Biennale. Killscreen has been counting them everywhere else since 2010—the free newsletter brings you the work the institutions miss.
