Joscha Steffens –
NEXUSVALLEY.IO waits for you and invites you to play with it. Your role is the one of an agent, a researcher who is following and surveying a generation of young gamers.
7PM a Chinese Counter Strike clan travelled to Spain and for the first time ever competed with US and EU based athletes at the all female tournament Showdown that took place in Valencia.
Young professional gamers are on their return from a trip. They return from a big collective high inside a specific virtual space, where they are moving as auratic avatars.
Whereas all other competitive e-sports only feature male teams the brutal Ego-Shooter “Counter Strike : Globale Offensive” offers stages and money to young women.
Games are turned into portraits; a fake battlefield becomes a game of rules and commands, a timeless island houses a Nazi time machine.
Imagine Kurt Cobain on the island of the Phaeacians -- this will give you a first impression of the therapy station in Hannover where game-addicted youth are prevented from giving in to their purported bliss.
Monsters, cuddle some strange beings, witches or knights and druids are controlled and manoeuvred through digital battles by home users and by professional gamers.
Hectic movements, clicks, more similar to shivering than to an actual touch. These touches with fingertip are not only controlling the avatar but together represent the only real physical contact to a digital world and its virtual slaughter.
Recreational warriors face down the ultimate "otherness", while references to real theatres of war are interwoven with fantasies in a completely arbitrary manner.
On the boarder of society and legality a group trains close combat situations common for civil war scenarios in rural Russian landscapes and forests.
Two uniformed males are fighting. They are fighting with words. The moment it turns out that one of them is loosing, he escapes.
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