The exhibition opened on February 16, and will continue until March 3, 2021, and includes newly created games in the rooms of an apartment in an upscale neighborhood, where visitors flock to participate in the event and play, along with the creators of those games.
At the entrance to the apartment, the Italian director of “Sheesh Beach”, Vectaria Kornekia, was receiving the arrivals to the exhibition, and alerting them in an acquired Arabic language, to adhere to the precautionary health measures imposed to confront the outbreak of the Corona pandemic; Wearing a mask, and disinfecting hands with sterilizer.
Speaking to “Sky News Arabia”, Kornekia explains when the idea started and how it turned into an exhibition in the end, where the organizers of “Sheesh Beach” from the centers of “Medrar” and “Makouk” met to lay out the guidelines for its organization.
She indicated that the exhibition was announced, on the pages of the two centers on social media, and the conditions for applying to it were presented.
And she continued: “Each participant recognizes the talent of the other .. There are those who are good at design and those who are fluent in drawing.” Then the participants are divided into 5 groups, each of which works on creating and designing a game, not only providing some entertainment to the players, but also carrying a philosophy. What, provided that the exhibition provides materials for the participants.
Manual and digital media
The exhibition presents a variety of games, based on different manual and digital media, from board games, cards, video and virtual reality technologies.
The names of the innovative games were launched. There are “Not a Game” by Ingie Mohsen and Azza Ezzat, “Spinoza” by Mona Essam El Din, Nasreen Mamdouh and Nira Mustafa, “Ghosts of the Sea” by Amir Eid and Ahmed Tariq, and “Sheraton Mosques” by Helena Abdel Nasser, Hazem Shaltout and Aya Abdeen, and “A. Najem” by Atef Rostom and Amira Al-Shaer, as stated on the exhibition page on Facebook.
One of the game’s creators, Ahmed Tariq, said that he and his colleague Amir Eid worked for 20 hours for 10 days to create a game they called “ghosts of the sea.”
Tariq told Sky News Arabia that in the game “Ghosts of the Sea”, one of the participants drives a boat around “a continent” to collect “wheat”, and he must defeat the “ghost.”
He continued: “The arrival of the ship to safety is a collective responsibility, in addition to the necessity for only one winner among the participants, and here the game shows how each participant is managed, and how he can perform his collective and individual role at the same time, without gaining hostility or” being thrown into the sea”.
While the game “A-Star” took the horoscopes as an input, but it not only affixed qualities to the person based on previous archives, but rather the person acquires these characteristics from the evaluation of the participants with him in the game, and asking questions among them.
Atef Rostom told “Sky News Arabia”, that creating a game like this, with the participation of Princess Al-Shaer, did not take long or painstaking efforts, but it brought them great happiness and satisfied them with an old passion for games.
Cornekia ends her speech and says: “The exhibition does not involve mere games as a joke, but it is based on some philosophy … a game about power and information sharing, and another related to limiting man’s power over nature.”
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