Urban Cowboiz

# UNTYPICAL HORSE GAME
Take the reins! As the user of Urban Cowboiz you play a young Irish-Traveller, who is riding all across London with his horse and who is searching for attention.
In this endlessrunner game you try to convince the people of London with tricks on your horse.

Entertaining the people of London is not as easy as it seems, because they are constantly distracted. Your goal is to stage your skills as good as possible to gain a maximum of followers. How many followers can you get? Your pursuit of compliance is the driving force of the story.

Be the most popular person in the city! In Urban Cowboiz, the need for recognition and acceptance by the society can be experienced in an interactive manner. The user passes through mechanisms of recognition found in young urban culture. It is a showcase of special skills, all of them provoking the central question: When can you see me? Am I gonna be recognized? What should I do to achieve attention? And above all: When can I be satisfied - if I got 10 or 50,000 followers?

serious game with humor.
In a satirical manner Urban Cowboys is tracing these questions. The answer delivered is as pompous as banal: As long as you stage something only for an audience, you’re going to be nothing more than a supernumerary in your own life. Likes and followers alone don’t provide satisfaction. On the contrary: Strategies of self-staging only confirm the staging itself. The question is, what authentic extent of a personal confirm can be drawn out of it?

The user switches into the role of Cowboi, a young Irish-Traveller. Their culture is defined by the appreciation of horses as one of their most important status symbols. The Irish Travellers - formerly travelling people - were urged to settle down at the outskirts of the Irish and English society, where there is no room for keeping horses. This culture is threatened by extinction and could become a folkloric relic in the foreseeable future. The culture of the Irish Travellers is authentic because the travellers do not have to stage for the purpose of external representation, but rather for internal tradition reasons.

The attention is not an end in itself. It’s not about how others will see me, it is rather about my self perception. This applies to the individual as well as the culture. This kind of self-perception is also characteristic for Irish Travellers.

Is it a magazine or a game? Show your Style! Urban Cowboys plays with elements of today’s pop and youth culture. It processes the aesthetics of contemporary music videos and works with the style of editorial photography.


Ride with the Technobeat! The music focuses on the action and complements the visual of the pop cultural world in an auditive dimension. It is a mix of “Big Beat” and “Acid House”, which reflects the urban lifestyle.

Based on a project at the Filmakademie Baden-Wuerttemberg www.interaktive-medien.animationsinstitut.de