Chloe Germaine, lead of Work Package 6: Hacking Games to Reimagine Consumption, will be delivering a workshop on their card game Happy Shoppers at Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz this February.
The workshop forms part of the international symposium, “Is this still play? Ethnographic perspectives on deep, dark or serious play,” taking place in the Department of Anthropology and African Studies, JGU Mainz, 6–7 February 2026.
The event is organised by Jan Beek and Konstanze N’Guessan and brings together international scholars to explore dark, deep, and serious forms of play as lenses for understanding power, politics, and contemporary life.
THE MECHANICS OF DARK PLAY: HAPPY SHOPPERS, CONSUMPTION AND UN‑FUN GAMES
Co‑created by Paul Wake and Chloe Germaine, Happy Shoppers is an unsettling re‑imagining of the Victorian parlour game Happy Families. Where the original celebrated wholesome family units and branded consumer identities, Happy Shoppers replaces these with “families” of harmful products, steeped in extractive labour, ecological devastation, and corporate violence.
Players must collect sets by boldly declaring the harms tied to each product—foregrounding complicity, discomfort, and the politics of consumption. The workshop includes:
A look at historical Happy Families decks and their relationship to branding
A full playthrough of Happy Shoppers
A guided discussion of deep play, dark play, and ideological game mechanics
This session aligns with STRATEGIES’ research on game hacking, using playful rule‑breaking and system‑subversion to expose hidden structures of power.
OTHER TALKS AND WORKSHOPS AT THE SYMPOSIUM
The Mainz programme is a rich, international exploration of serious, dark, and transgressive forms of play. Highlights include:
Is this still academia? Play as epistemic practice is a hands‑on session led by Konstanze N’Guessan and students, showcasing games created for anthropological teaching.
Paper Session I: Serious Play, explores a paper on “Interactive Trauma: Gamifying the Holocaust” and “Playing Jesus”
Paper Session II: Playing (in) Capitalism explores “Three Rights to Play: Liberal, Fascist, and Liberatory” and "Chance Work and the Work of Chance – labour, risk, and cryptocurrency cultures”
Paper Session III: Playing with Violence, which explores “Console Wars: Video Games as Tools for Militarization” and “Violence Training Through Play in Police Scenarios”
For the Manchester Game Centre, this appearance highlights our community’s commitment to game design as cultural critique—and to play as a method for thinking differently about systems, power, and everyday life.