Till Weinhold holds diplomas in Art and Design Education and Fine Art Painting from the University of Applied Arts Vienna. For 12 years, he has taught at a secondary school in Vienna, with subjects including Art and Design, Crafts, Digital Design, Game Design and Game Cultures. He has also taught at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, exploring digital game cultures as impulses for Technology and Design education. His practice connects artistic and design processes, analogue and digital making, game cultures and education.
Making Space for Games: Twelve Years of Playing with Art Education and Beyond
FROG 2026 – Talk
What happens when an art teacher starts taking games seriously?
This practice-based reflection looks back on more than a decade of bringing games, game making and game cultures into art and design education. Its starting point was an encounter with game studies during teacher education in 2014, including FROG and impulses around games, learning and participation. What began as experimentation gradually developed into different formats across secondary-school teaching and teacher education.
These formats range from playing and discussing games to modifying and creating analogue games, translating artistic work into game worlds, using Minecraft and Minetest as spaces for artistic experimentation and community building, and developing courses dedicated to Game Design and Game Cultures. Rather than presenting a single method or project, the contribution draws on selected examples to reflect on what becomes possible when games are treated as cultural and artistic practices within education.
Game making appears particularly promising as a multidisciplinary activity: it can bring together visual design, storytelling, systems thinking, technology, collaboration and cultural references. Yet its frequently assumed motivational power also deserves scrutiny. Creating digital games poses technical and institutional limitations, and teachers do not necessarily share their students’ gaming knowledge or technical expertise.
The contribution therefore asks what art educators actually need in order to engage meaningfully with games. It argues for an open educational stance that takes students’ everyday experiences with games seriously, allows their expertise and cultural references to enter the classroom, and creates room for experimentation without requiring the teacher to become a game developer. In doing so, games can become not only tools for learning, but subjects, materials and spaces for artistic and cultural education.