At this year’s General Meeting in Göttingen on the 9^th of June, the SAZ elected a new three-man Executive Board: Hartmut Kommerell as chairman, Stefan Kloß as deputy chairman and Markus Hagenauer as treasurer. Marco Teubner and Arve D. Fühler no longer stood as candidates.

In the statement of accounts, the outgoing board was able to point to a number of successes in the past term:

• The support of the German Cultural Council on the demand to include games in the collection catalogue of the German National Library
• The inclusion of game authors and game designers in the activity catalogue of the German Artists’ Social Security Fund (KSK)
• The tax clarification with the Federal Tax Office and the Federal Ministry of Finance that game licenses from foreign authors are normally subject to copyright and, therefore, no withholding tax deduction occurs
• Completion of the new website

Other points were some legal and copyright problems, which also played a central role in the discussion.

On the following weekend the 36th Game Designers Convention took place in Göttingen, where the SAZ first appeared as a co-organizer next to the city of Göttingen. Almost 200 game authors presented their still unpublished works to the representatives of 41 publishers and agencies and were met with great interest. The scholarship for the promotion prize for junior authors of the jury game of the year went to the student Paul Schulz, who is commonly known at his Alma mater as “Spiele-Paul”.