Flock together

We flutter through concrete, fluorescent-lit hallways and outside into a permanent golden hour. Above our heads, a gigantic flamingo looms, frozen forever in almost-flight. The bird has been the symbol of A Maze Berlin for a while now: founder Thorsten S. Wiedemann associates the brightly coloured animal with playfulness, provocation, and of course John Waters’ outrageous cult film Pink Flamingos. “The flamingo is a strong animal,” Wiedemann tells us. “It looks beautiful. They have this social aspect, gathering in herds, and also this kind of balance, you know?” The flamingo is everything he wants A Maze to be, and to champion in the videogames it showcases each year – contemporary, inventive and avant-garde.

A Maze Total Digital, then, is perhaps the most flamingo-like the show has ever been. It’s a fully virtual event: to attend, we must simply download the free build from . When we log in, we’re dropped into an edited version of artist Moshe Linke’s virtual art gallery Brutalism: Prelude On Stone, which has been adapted to house, among other things: a giant screen livestreaming a variety of speakers and talks; a fully playable exhibition of the games up for awards this year, all able to be voted on by visitors;