At the University of Bayreuth, video games are more than entertainment—they’re tools for learning, storytelling, and systems thinking. Over the past decade, the university’s Game Innovation Lab has brought together technical game development and the humanities, giving students a foundation that blends code, culture, and critical thinking.
The lab is led by media scholar Jochen Koubek, who describes his relationship with games as a “cold love.” While he doesn’t chase the latest blockbuster titles, he is deeply interested in what games reveal about culture and technology. “We are interested in studying games from a media scholar’s perspective,” he says, noting that their potential continues to grow “because of new technologies and the emergence of artificial intelligence.”
A core idea underpinning the program is that game design is about much more than play. “Game design is system design,” Koubek explains. “Understanding how to develop games is understanding formal systems, because they are computer programs at the end of the day.” He adds that “game design is also social design, as you are designing experiences in an interactive, dynamic system.”
As a participating organization in the German Research Network (DFN), the University of Bayreuth can provide students and faculty the network security, reliability, and bandwidth to explore new forms of interactivity and easily collaborate remotely with their peers and the greater gaming community.
That philosophy recently came to life in Salzsammler, an interactive augmented-reality game created by students for the Regensburg UNESCO World Heritage Visitor Center. Designed to engage younger visitors, the game turns medieval river trade along the Danube into a shared, physical experience where players collaborate to move boats, goods, and resources across the floor.
For student developer Nic Schilling, the project showed what games can do when history becomes playable. “The Game Innovation Lab gave us the space to explore ideas where history becomes interactive,” he says. “That support inspired us to design experiences that let kids engage with the past in playful, meaningful ways.”
For Koubek, projects like Salzsammler echo the impact of early educational games. “Many people even today will say that almost everything they remember about that part of history came from playing that game,” he says, reflecting on The Oregon Trail. “It was a much more intense experience, and that is what we want to cultivate in our students.”
At Bayreuth, games aren’t just played. They’re designed to help people understand the world — one system at a time.
This is an edited version of an article written by Eric Gedenk (DFN-Verein) story first published in DFN Mitteilungen Ausgabe 108 December 2025 edition.
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