German-Finnish | 3rd Meeting

Meeting on November 4^th, 2020

I believe this is a Tampereen classic: The Vapriikki museum (center). And it indeed hosts many exhibitions and smaller sub-museums like the Natural History Museum, The Media Museum Rupriikki, an exhibition about Ostia and about Finlayson, the Finnish textile manufacturer. By now I have seen them all but, on that day, Niina and I spent probably most of the time in the Finnish Museum of Games.

I never could imagine how somebody can get lost at a “boring and old” arcade machine (e.g. Flipper). However, now I know. We tried out every of those (approx. 14 to 18 machines) and although most of the game engines were super simple, they somehow all manage to hold you in front of the screen. Simply fascinating.

Then we came to a time period from which we both knew most of the games (from our childhood). But there were also some unique Finnish / northern European games I did not know. Hugo for example from the Danish developer studio ITE which Niina seemed to know quite well.

A thing that was quite interesting (yet shocking) was that there were some old Finnish board games, too. These included old geographic maps and old flags, for example, the German Kaiserreichsflagge (imperial flag) which was also used as the Reichskriegsflagge (empire war flag) and later on as the Reichsdienstflagge in Nazi Germany (until it was fully replaced by the swastika). That is why these colors (black, white, red) have a bitter aftertaste. Especially, because today some groups within Germany who call themselves “Reichsbürger” (“empire citizen”) tend to use this flag again as they are not accepting democracy as well as the German government and wish back monarchy 🤦‍♂️

After that, we went to see also the Rupriikki Media Museum and the Mineral Museum. Both were really interesting (and visually appealing), too. In the end, we had coffee at the Museum’s café, shared our thoughts about the day again, and made plans for gaming together, possibly with some other people from our course of study soon as we both have been enjoying video games since we were children. So again, time flew by and I am still glad to be able to make these interesting and exciting experiences!