hello everyone!

this is a bit of a last minute announcement - I am going to perform my call-center video game “quantcept” during the indie game festival AMAZE. in Berlin on the 13th of May at 9PM! this will be part of the opening evening of the festival, at the Betonhalle stage at Silent Green.
https://amazeberlin2026.sched.com/event/2Lu1v/quantcept

quantcept got an “honorable mention” for the prize which is of course really cool, but I’m mostly really excited to get to perform in Berlin again. so if you are in town, come over! feel free to reach out if you want to meet during the festival as well :) ~ https://2026.amaze-berlin.de/nominees/

i’m preparing a little booklet/zine for this performance, for which I wrote down the origin story of this project - i’m chucking it here so you can have a look :)

*********

between the years 2014 and 2019, I used to work as a call-center operator at the trend.test offices in Berlin. as a french speaker, I was part of the roster of agents calling on the behalf of Ipsos, a well-known statistics institute in France, which gave us an aura of respectability with the people we would call, and led them to think they would get to give their opinion on politics or other important matters. actually, trend.test was just sitting at the end of a chain beginning at Phillip Morris, and we were conducting market research for the tobacco industry. we weren't allowed to reveal this information to the people answering our calls - "we don't know who is the commanditor of this survey" was all we could say. we were also supposed to say "all numbers are composed randomly" when asked about how we got someone's mobile phone number or the number of their office. we would often discuss how this was also probably a lie during our smoke breaks.

there wasn't only french speakers at the office, and not everyone was working for phillip morris - I could hear other operators conducting surveys in russian about automobiles, asking "how would you react if you learned that your neighbour is a homosexual" - I was told french-speaking surveys were better paid so I carefully avoided revealing that I was a russian homosexual and didn't even know how to drive a car, and focused on trying to get the smoker I finally managed to get on the line to list all the cigarette brands they knew of.
in this office I spent a lot of time being bored and hungover and told some of my colleagues that I was working on a video game about the call-center - everyone was very supportive and curious and was asking me "how is the call-center game going?" and I got to show a first prototype at the artgames meetup and gave a talk about it at 'talk and play'.
I chose to call it 'quantcept', which is just almost the name of the software 'quancept' we were using at the office, which looked like the command line visible in the show. the game didn't actually get anywhere, my life and my head was a total mess, i couldn't get it to the finish line. ultimately I ended up getting into VR and this led me to spend the subsequent years working as a freelancer on many video game and virtual reality projects for many artists - my personal projects took a second seat and the call-center faded away from my mind for a while. finally in 2024 some of the people from artgames became the collective Fantasia Malware and invited me to perform at one of their events - I picked the call-center video game idea back up, and made it into the performance it is today.

*******

cheers!!!

alpha

                             .........
                           .'------.' |       Plug and Play
                          | .-----. | |
                          | |     | | |
                        __| |     | | |;. _______________
                       /  |*`-----'.|.' `;              //
                      /   `---------' .;'              //
                /|   /  .''''////////;'               //
               |=|  .../ ######### /;/               //|
               |/  /  / ######### //                //||
                  /   `-----------'                // ||
                 /________________________________//| ||
                 `--------------------------------' | ||
                  : | ||      | || |__LL__|| ||     | ||
                  : | ||      | ||         | ||     `""'
                  n | ||      `""'         | ||
                  M | ||                   | ||
                    | ||                   | ||
                    `""'                   `""'