Advertisement.
Last weekend, the Equal Esports Festival took place in Berlin at the Telekom Hauptstadtrepräsentanz and shook up the international gaming scene. It was the first festival of its kind to take place in Germany – and it was about time.
You won’t be surprised to hear that the world of Esports and gaming is pretty male-dominated – like so much tech-related stuff. But it’s not that girls and women don’t play games, in fact, there are a lot of female gamers out there. And there are also a lot of non-binary gamers and other members of the LGBTQ+ community. But it’s not easy for them to get recognition or space in the scene.
Read on…
by Frank | Events
Whether you just moved here yesterday or have been settled for several years, we are all well familiar with the joys of flat hunting in Berlin. I’m sure we’ve all heard the horror stories, scamming stories, funny stories, and even the nudist stories.
And now this collective flat search experience has been transformed into a hilariously cathartic online game known as Berlin Flat Quest.
Created by Bastien, the man who runs the Settle in Berlin blog, Berlin Flat Quest commemorates this rite of passage by combining people’s flat search stories gathered from the Facebook group berlin EXPATS.
Read on…
by Aisha | Entertainment
The holidays are the time of the year when time moves really really slowly. It’s lovely to spend some days with your friends and family if you can. Maybe you are even back in your hometown. But you basically spend your days eating, watching telly and waiting for the next meal (unless you are the unlucky one who prepares all the meals, then you are stuck in the kitchen for days).
To avoid falling into a hole of boredom I feel like playing games this year. Any game will do – no matter if it’s a complicated board game, a simple game of cards, scrabble or just a huge puzzle. I’m actually really into Monopoly, but I will also be ok with UNO. Anything so we can avoid watching the Helene Fischer show on ARD…
But what if you don’t have any of those games at home? Well, we have a solution for that! We thought up a few games for you that you can simply print out at home on a regular A4 sheet. Now let the games begin…
Read on…
by Frank | Misc.
For me, as an art and design lover, any visual proposal that allows me to discover new ways to look or to see my environment is always exciting. It’s very inspiring to find different or unusual things that unravel in front of your eyes. When I think about architecture I automatically tend to picture either classic art history examples or really futuristic constructions with large windows, clean lines, and diaphanous spaces filled with carefully designed and placed furniture. But in reality, we can’t escape all the trashy and clumsy examples that frame our sight on our daily way to work or while we walk the streets of Berlin.
In the German language, there is even a word for those concrete blocks that make Berlin look like a grey Tetris game and it’s called: Plattenbau. If you heart Berlin as much as we do, you probably have already found The Hidden Beauty of the Plattenbau architecture, or you might even know the Cuckoo Blocks clocks, a really ingenious reinterpretation of this style of construction.
Read on…
by Amanda Artiaga | Products
illustrations: Sophia Halamoda
They say every city can be a bittersweet experience, but Berlin has a penchant for taking everything to the absolute extreme; it’s syrupy like Glühwein and pungent like take-away coffee from a Turkish run späti. No mouthwash – not even Pfeffi – could ever make you forget its taste.
How did you feel when you realized Berlin is the World’s Greatest Circus, and upon moving here, you could leave the audience and get on stage? Everything is improvised, it can get ugly – and the only character that’s even trying to be funny is the BVG. But you stayed, watching others, trying to learn the cues, and ultimately you fell in love with the beautiful mess around you.
How well do you know it now? Can you tell the cliches from the truth? Have you been to the wild side? Are you even vegan?! In other words: how much of a Berliner are you, really? Let our quiz be the judge.
Read on…
by Michalina | People
Hello stranger! So you really want to live in Berlin? Getting a room here is such an uphill struggle with high rent, mould, and German bureaucracy that finding the right flatmate is usually left to the workings of fate. Our Flat Roulette game – being a simplified version of this real life scenario – introduces you to some of the most characteristic Berlin personalities and gives you a sneak peak into what you sharing a roof with them will really mean.
The game is a collaboration with illustrator Sophia Halamoda that many of you will know from the Berghain, Real Berliner and Bürgeramt comics. It’s part of our upcoming book “Like A Berliner” that comes out in 2018. Stay tuned for more games!
Click here to play the game!
by Michalina | Misc.
This weekend online market place eBay staged a large installation of a selection of some of their most successful products in the high-concept shopping mall Bikini Berlin offering visitors a chance to win their favorite product. With the event eBay once again showed how diverse their product range is and that there really is the perfect product for everyone.
We live in a world surrounded by purely digital products: online shops, smartphone apps, social media platforms. We spend so much time with these virtual entities that we somehow completely loose touch with the companies behind them. An event like this is a great opportunity for users to connect a “face” with something we otherwise only use as a tool. I see the events that we’ve done with iHeartBerlin over the last 10 years as the same thing. It’s a way for us to manifest the blog in the real world, get to know our readers, and showcase that we do more than just writing about things, we can also create them and take part in the cultural ongoings of Berlin.
Read on…
by Frank | Products
photo: iHeartBerlin
Maybe it’s a bit of a secret, but some of us are actually nerds just hiding in cool clothes. We might really prefer a Pokéball in our hands (or maybe the playcards or Nintendo DS) than a Club Mate or rollie cigarette. Perhaps it’s been a while since the classic Pokémon universe has been a serious fascination for most of us (unless you count the Rick & Morty smartphone game Pocket Mortys – an awesome homage to Pocket Monsters with the great characters and humor of the Adult Swim show!), but a new phenomenon now arrives in Berlin: Pokémon GO!
Read on…
by Keith | Products, Videos
It does not take a lot of imagination to think of Berlin as a giant playground. In times of Pokemon Go and other augmented reality games, the street-running movement and immersive theater experiences, everything – and everybody – seems ready to play.
But I don’t think that the origin of Berlin playfulness is based on technology, fitness or even cultural trends. I remember vividly how years ago I met on a subway ride a young dude that outed himself as a philosophy professor. (The combination of young dude and philosophy professor was a surprise at that time. Nowadays I am not as easily surprised ;-)) He told me that he is part of a creative project called invisible playground. In this project, he told me they tried to research and examine how a daily portion of playfulness can affect your overall happiness.
But invisible playground is not the only creative project celebrating the idea of a playful city. The Berlin-based artist duo 44Flavours have already left their footmark in the local creative scene. Experimenting with all kind of art forms, from murals to posters, and painting to sculpture, the two friends Sebastian Bagge and Julio Rölle, have worked together since they were students. Their success formula is a vibrant combination of teamwork and creative chaos. For the #LiveThere exhibition by Airbnb they created an interactive playground where you can tell your personal Berlin story. There you can listen to murmuring teapots, talk to enchanted mirrors and have fun with all kinds of everyday objects transformed into a creative installation. The idea behind this project is to share different stories about Berlin and to emphasize how with a spark of creative inventiveness and playfulness every trip to Berlin can become a one of a kind experience.
Inspired by that idea, I thought of how we could be more active in experiencing our city as a playful place. I started thinking about the rules and I realized that the games you decide to play on your personal urban playground don’t have to follow any rules or even the norms of standard morality. Between lust and pain is the instinct to play. Therefore I dove deeply into my own imagination and created a set of Berlin-specific mind games. Follow my colorful, funny but sometimes also sensual and dark inspirations to transform your everyday life in Berlin into a crazy game-like experience.
Read on…
by Claudio | City Guide, Design, Photos
Darkness, silence, a locked-up room – no solution, no escape…
What sounds like a horror movie at first is the opposite of it and in fact really great fun. We’re talking about a more or less new trend that has arrived in Berlin a few years ago and is now becoming increasingly diverse. In so-called Live Escape Games you voluntarily let yourself and your friends or colleagues include in a complex of rooms and have to find a way out of the premises before the predetermined time runs out. The aim is to work together, to solve tricky puzzles and to pay enough attention to even the smallest details because they could lead you to the right solution. Each game includes a detailed story and there are many – you can take on the role of thieves and steal an exhibition object, escape from a bunker or convict a murderer.
After the jump you can get a glimpse of the game procedure.
Read on…
by Olga | Entertainment, Mitte, People, Prenzlauer Berg
