Mascha Camino, Co-Organiser Talk & Play Meetups

Mascha Camino is a game designer and co-organizer of the Talk & Play Meetups at the platform BerlinGameScene.de and gives an insight into the Berlin scene and the great variety of games events in the capital.

Your website is, as the name BerlinGameScene.com says, full of information about and for the games industry in Berlin. What kinds of services do you offer?

In general, we want to be a platform where people interested in the Berin game scene can find condensed information, to provide a platform to promote all types of local game-related activities, with a focus on video games. One point is also to make the game scene bigger, more diverse and more interesting. Therefore, we also want to highlight events that are smaller and get less recognition by themselves but which we find very help- and meaningful to the community.

We have a calendar that is filled with events in and around the berlin game scene. There you can find meetups, hangouts, game jams, festivals, conferences, etc.

Another category is our Job Board where companies can advertise their job offers. Most of the time this page goes hand in hand with our Talk & Play announcements. That means that the companies can also advertise in person during the event on stage. Speaking of Talk & Play, one category is just dedicated to this event. It’s kind of an archive where we announce each new edition of it and give a little overview of what it is all about. And we feature the Life and Dev Podcast, made and hosted by Elise Terranova.

As a member of Saftladen, you are at the source of everything that’s happening in the Indie developer world in Berlin. Is your focus on the Indie scene? Who is your typical event guest or website visitor?

I would say that we are open to everyone in general. So not only Indie Game devs but also developers from bigger studios! Furthermore, we are also open to non-devs but I think the content we have on the Talk&Play is more for developers. For the website it is mixed. Everyone can find information there. But it just happened quite naturally that the focus is on Indie Game Devs. We have such a big and strong indie dev community in Berlin, so it is just nice to see how they come together.

How did you come up with the plan to bring all this information together in this format? Have the website or the team behind it changed a lot since its launch in 2015?

I think here Lorenzo can say way more than I can, since I joined berlingamescene.com in 2017 and was not even in Berlin when he decided to run this website. So Lorenzo takes care of most of the things. He maintaines the website, Julian takes pictures at the Talk and Play. Nomi and Iwan took their next steps and can no longer help with it, but will always be in our hearts ^-^ I think essential is also Luca who helps a lot with coordinating the Talk and Play and of course also the volunteers we have there. What I mainly do is helping Lorenzo with the Talk and Play, taking care of our ambassadors, making the badges, hosting the event and basically take all the tasks that Lorenzo hands me over.

To be able to collect all important information, staying in touch with companies – big and small – institutions and associations is key. Do you have any networking tips for us? Do you organise any events on your own as well?

Now that we run Talk & Play and berlingamescene.com for quite some time people often also approach us, which is great. The Talk & Play is very open for networking, the friendly environment helps a lot to build new bridges and get to know new people. But it is also important to be open-minded towards other events and look out for all these awesome indie games and developers that are around everywhere.

Yes, I am involved in quite some other events. I am co-organizing Devolution, a game design focused project exploring the creative process and challenges of game development, consisting of exhibitions, interviews, lectures, an archive and so on. Another project very dear to me is “Femisphere, Highlighting Diversity in the Games Industry” which has a similar structure like Talk & Play.

I am part of the Indie School Trip Orga team, which is a project where we take a couple of game design students and game developers and so on a “School Trip”. So we combine the fun parts of a school trip, like a campfire, hiking, night walks, etc. and a game jam. Where we live together for a couple of days.

And until this gamesweek I was workshop, speaker and project management for Womenize! Games and Tech, where I was involved in the gamesweek edition 2018, Cologne Edition 2018 and gamesweek edition 2019.

What are you planning for the future? As a games industry hub, is there anything missing in Berlin? And if so, where do you see possibilities to fill the void?

Right now my concerns are all with the A MAZE Festival, which is such an important part of our culture and combines so many different organizations and developers. It would be incredibly sad if the Festival couldn’t contain itself anymore, because we are not able to get funding for it. There are so many different things going on in Berlin that not even we have an overview all the time about it. One plan for the future would be to grow with the community and the network even more and find new ways of building platforms for game enthusiasts.

The interview with Mascha Camino has been published first on GamesCapital.Berlin and is also available here.