Gaming & the City

Whoosh is a cartoon word for energy and child-like noise and chaos. We want to bring some fresh energy to the city, and a little more play. Whoosh co-creater Eugene misses the creative joy and spontaneous potential in London, and aims to deliver some of that also into his new home town. Do we have too much Ordnung here in Wien, vielleicht?

Whoosh has won prizes in so many categories, because we play with convention, and fight against cliches.

So here are our first 15 gamification projects in Central-Europe, with many more to come. Call us if you want to play and explore new formats for your group...

For the opening of Mahü in August 2015, Eugene was commissioned to bring walking alive with a competitive format. The Silly Walks Contest was born, with judges, prizes, loud music, and wild competition.

When George Soros' Central European University started their political move from Budapest to Vienna-Favoriten, so of course the students needed orientation for their new home town. We were asked to create an alternative, gamified treasure hunt, to show them the details of their new District.

With 36% of adults not allowed to vote in city and national elections, Whoosh decided to turn the integration debate around, and see how many Austrians are actually local enough. For Vienna Design Week, we turned the focus onto locals, and organised the Austrian Citizenship Test, as a pub quiz for locals, to see how many could get their own passport (and therefore be able to vote - you can only have one passport in Austria).

Wien Museum want to reach out to new audiences, and asked Whoosh to create a format to bring exhibitions alive, with playful new formats. We developed questions to surprise a hardcore local audience, on themes ranging from democracy to drinks, winter to diversity, feminism to Christmas. Every event sold out. And so it will be adapted with urbanist questions, for the Urban Future conference in Slovenia, in 2026..

Wir sind Wien is the annual celebration of local districts in June, starting with the Innere Stadt on 1.6. To bring a buzz to Döbling on 19 June 2016, we organised a singles wine walk, to open up dialogue between singles, up in the romantic hills, with live music, and fine local white wine to smooth the interactions.

PowerPoint Karaoke is a new format to show how ridiculous modern business presentation has become. At prestige conferences, professionals are given an unfamiliar set of slides, and must present them to an audience. It is surreal, strange, ironic fun. And also shows the power of spontaneity and skill to adapt to unfamiliar material. Audiences love this game! Eugene was moderator for a wild session of PPK at Urban Future in Poland n May 2025.

In cooperation with researchers at the University for Applied Arts (UAK), we made a tour in 2024, giving awards and stickers to the most hostile design in our (mostly friendly) city. This pushed participants to see the city from a new perspective, exploring how Billa, Raiffeisen and even ÖBB make the city less open for outsiders. We awarded our ugly sticker awards all over Vienna, to show how the city might improve, and humiliate corporations.

Oliver Hangl creates cool, artistic interventions all over the city, from Baulücken Konzerte to Guerilla Walks. And he is most famous for the Silent Discos, where rival DJs compete for the same audience in public space, with 200 participants. This is a competitive and colourful format, recommended to all Whoosh fans. Eugene was one of these rival DJs on Wientalterrasse, and twice in Rudolfsheim Fünfhaus. Dancers rent free headphones, and can change channel anytime, from reggae to techno, funk to rock, etc. It is brutal sport for the DJs.

When Eugene used to walk his son to school, we found eight ways that all lasted eight minutes. So josef decided to find the best way, where he would meet ths most friends. He collected all the statistics in his little book, and discovered the most social route, which he then used every morning and afternoon. Kids driven to school meet zero friends on the way. this photo is in his pre-school days, when he wanted a straight path from our home to the market square opposite the house.

Whoosh colleague Dominik Nostitz is one of the most playful, and dynamic, creators in our city, and he worked with Eugene Quinn to make a taste adventure on the Meidlinger Markt, where kids were blindfolded, and then had to eat 15 unusual foods, and identify them. The crowd loved it.

We need to spread more love and warmth in the world. And so we got a group together to offer FREE HUGS all over Meidling, in 2012.

Route 28 was an unusual way to bring the notion of a united Europe to life, while staying in Wien. There were stops in typical spaces from each land in the European Union, and Eugene was asked to present the UK. So we counted down the top 10 Funeral Songs at Brit burials in 2017, played loud in Impact Hub. This macabre melancholy spoke to the Vienna soul.

To show the skills and knowledge of Gepruefte Fremdenfuehrer*Innen to the Vienna public, Eugene proposed to bring 10 famous statues alive. Official guides dressed up as those stone monuments, spoke in the German of their time. Key stops: Strauss Denkmal, Goethe on Burgring, Schwarzenberg, Maria Theresien, Lueger, Sowjetisches Denkmal and Sissi. The project was both serious and humorous, in cooperation with Freizeit & Sportbetriebe der Wirtschaftskammer Wien (thanks to Gerti Schmidt and Susanna Oberforcher, Susanne Eiselt and specially Barbara Wehr).

How to Die Better is our playful way to persuade more Viennese to donate money to good causes, after their death. We made it in partnership with Caritas Wien, and toured the pompous gravestones of Zentralfriedhof, and later the more modest, tragic Friedhof der Namenlosen.

And finally, Vienna Ugly is truly interactive, since our walk asks the audience to vote on whether they find each building bad enough to belong to the tour. And they often voted against Eugene's taste, meaning there are now 3 less stops on the tour. We started a debate about which kind of city we want to live in.