Instead, we are at home, working on a new project. A project that doesn’t have a name yet. You can follow what we’re doing on Tumblr where we post some of the reference material that we’re collecting to inspire and inform the design.

We can’t say much about this project yet. Because we don’t know what it will become yet. We have a basic idea but that can still change. It has something to do with flowers, and with locks, and with diagrams of the universe, and with sex. It’s very different from any game we’ve made so far. There’s no story at its basis. There’s no characters. And it might even feel like an actual game -though we’re definitely applying the notgames dogma to this one.

We’ve also done something unusual with the design method. Auriea and I have split up. The new project consists of two very different parts. Auriea is designing one and I am designing the other. And then we’ll bring the two together.

The current phase is a prototyping phase that will run on and off until some time next year. This phase is supported by the Flanders Audiovisual Fund.

To all our friends at GDC: enjoy the event! :)

From the press release:

The Graveyard offers a player the opportunity to imagine themselves in a certain situation. It’s not a game in the sense that there is a way to win or lose or a puzzle to solve, or even a story to uncover. But the interaction does immerse you in a virtual world filled with narrative, an equally powerful feature of the medium of videogames. The iPhone version of The Graveyard is the same as the PC version. Only a few elements have been removed or simplified to allow it to run on the iPhone hardware. But the fact that you hold the game in your hand and touch it with your finger, adds to the sensation of fragility and preciousness.

The Graveyard was originally made for Mac OSX and Windows with Unity (2 years ago already). Since there is an iPhone version of Unity, we figured we’d just port the game. It wasn’t as easy as expected. The iPhone hardware is a lot less powerful than a PC, so we had to tweak the graphics a bit (no post-processing, no real-time overlays, no animated trees, no birds, and a vertical display area to reduce the visible part of the environment). Another problem was the lack of a usable format for sound compression which lead to the download being larger than the PC version (isn’t it ironic that an MP3 player is so bad at handling sounds?). Still, if you ask us, The Graveyard is one of the best looking and sounding games on the iPhone. Hope you enjoy it! :)

Over the next 18 months, we will be prototyping two new largish games. None of this work will be published. And even after the prototyping phase, it will take some time before we bring the projects to production and release. So it’s going to be quiet around here for quite a while.

That doesn’t mean we will disappear completely. While working on the prototypes, we will be doing a few small projects too, and we may release some things related to the old projects.

So, 1st gen iPod Touch users, you can now play too!

Also, a few helpful tips for things that may not have been so obvious.

TIPS:
- Use multitouch to levitate up to 3 objects at once.
- Find the authors of the quotes by clicking the url at the top of the info screen.
- It is easier to get a gold star at lower levels so, try your luck with the reset button on the 3rd info screen.

enjoy!

there was made an octagonal table. Michael spent quite some time making the matching octagonal radiation on the floor.

We created within a physical representation of the contents of the game. A little bird skull, dice, a tarot card, a twig from a tree, a key, dead leaves, a tooth, a shell, etc., and lots and lots of ladybugs. All under glass.

added 4 iPods. and then came the people.

see the whole set here

For all our nervousness it all went quite well. Surprisingly so. I think it created a nice environment for people to view Vanitas. It was exciting and fun to be able to watch so many people interact!

Thanks to:
* Wolfgang Wozniak for the Very Broken iPhone.
* E.K. Huckaby for his kind, indispensable assistance.
* Lord Whimsy for his good advice.
* whoever made the table, we give thanks.

This and all the other games made for The Art History of Games exhibition at Kai Lin Art in Atlanta, GA will be up and playable until March 2nd.

Vanitas is a memento mori in your iPhone. A meditative app without rules or rewards with Zoë Keating on solo cello.

“Despite using contemporary technology, we are artistically inspired mostly by pre-modern art,” admit creators Auriea Harvey and Michael Samyn. “In the 16th and 17th centuries, many Dutch and Flemish painters created still lives with symbols that referred to man’s mortality. They were named after a famous quotation from the Bible by Ecclesiastes: “Vanitas vanitatum omnia vanitas”. Or “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity”, implying that everything we do in life is without meaning. Creating a “Vanitas” painting for the iPhone felt like the appropriate response to the commission by Ian Bogost and John Sharp.”

Vanitas was commissioned for the Art History of Games symposium and exhibition by the Savannah College of Art and Design and the Georgia Institute of Technology Program in Digital Media. The symposium opens tonight.

Our first iPhone app Vanitas will be launched on February 4 at the opening of the Art History of Games symposium for which it was commissioned. Vanitas will be exhibited in a special installation (including live ladybugs!), next to games commissioned from Jason Rohrer and Nathalie Pozzi & Eric Zimmerman, at the Kai Lin Art gallery in Atlanta, Georgia, USA, from Thursday, February 4 until Tuesday, March 2. The opening reception will take place Friday, February 5 from 8:00 pm until 10:00 pm. More information here.

There’s still some tickets for the symposium and exhibition.Register here!

And don’t forget to check the App Store as of 4 February!

Today we’ve submitted our first app for iPhone/iPod touch to the Apple app store for approval! Excitement!!

It is called Vanitas.

Vanitas has been commissioned for The Art History of Games, a public symposium which is taking place February 4th-6th, in Atlanta, Georgia, USA, at the High Museum of Art. Where we will be attending and speaking among good company. We are one of 3 developers selected to make something on occasion of the event. The other two being Jason Rohrer and Eric Zimmerman. All 3 projects will be at a special exhibition at the Kai Lin Gallery during the conference and for a month afterwards. We’re planning something special for the gallery … ;)

Vanitas is not a game. Hopefully the approval process won’t get complicated. It should be available in time for the exhibition opening, then you can find what its all about!

The start of a new decade feels like an appropriate time to get ambitious. Out with the old, in with the new! Not that there’s going to be any extreme changes around here. My resolutions mostly concern a change in attitude, in philosophy. But, with any luck, they will take us further. And in the right direction.

While these resolutions have been bubbling up for a while, two things were direct triggers: Auriea’s realisation that her favourite games of the decade are all over 5 years old and our recent visit to the Belgian incarnation of the historical Game On exhibition where it became very clear how much more fun the old arcade games are than the new pseudo-narrative shiny next gen titles upon which I had based a lot of my hopes.

Independence!

We don’t want to make obscure art. This is a big part of the reason why we choose to work with digital media. We don’t even want to make art per se. We just want to share beautiful moments and elegant thoughts with people who are open to them. And perhaps, in our most audacious daydreams, we’d hope to make a small contribution to a more harmonious world.

Accessibility is one of the reasons why we don’t shy away from commerce. Commerce is an efficient way to distribute things in a capitalist system. And thanks to the abundance of the digital, we can sell our work very cheaply. But commerce also has a way of confusing an artist, of holding you back. Commerce forces you to think about seduction -even when it’s not appropriate- and to favour projects with commercial potential over others that might be more relevant artistically. We like our work to be accessible. But we want that to be an artistic choice and not an economic requirement.

We’re not very good at commerce anyway. We don’t have clever business minds. And our work is just a bit too far away from the ordinary to appeal to people who do. But above all, thinking about commerce -however exciting it may sometimes be- always ends in bogging us down, to slowing us down, to depressing us.

I want us to become less dependent. Less dependent on money, less dependent on success, less dependent on quantity. And focus exclusively on quality. This includes improving the accessibility of our work! While commercial pressure may motivate one to lower the threshold of their productions, it only does so towards a specific target audience, effectively locking everyone else out. It would be possible to optimize our work to be very accessible for hardcore gamers. But at the expensive of other people we might also want to communicate with. We want our work to be more widely accessible. We don’t want to depend on any specific niche.

None of this leads to any radical decisions. This is just a resolution that can guide us when making future decisions. As of now, I want to focus on self-sufficiency. And favour non-profit or break-even operations over commercial ones. Or even figure out ways to make losing money bearable. It’s ok if that means working on smaller projects. As long as they are “big on the inside”.

Games over

This year, I’m going to care less about games. And as a result, I will probably enjoy them more.

I give up.
I give up on my hopes for videogames to become a valid cultural medium.
I’ve been fighting very hard. I’ve been putting my money where my mouth is. For several years already. Almost a decade.

But the games industry is merrily traveling in the opposite direction. Videogames are not changing anymore. They seem to have lost that capacity. Sure, the technology still evolves, so everything gets more shiny. But this is not leading to any sort of evolution, let alone the required revolution. The desire is simply not there.

Because videogames are happy just as they are. The videogame culture is extremely pleased with itself. A few years ago, people were still complaining about “sequelitis”. No everybody merrily plays Hip Shootgame #13 and Cool Jumpgame #26, with no objections. On the contrary! Everybody gets very solemn and deep when yet another war simulator hits the shelves. Only to forget it within the first week of release.

Gamers, publishers, journalists are all very happy! Who am I to spoil their fun? If they feel comfortable in a juvenile ghetto that is irrelevant to culture, good for them. I’m out of here.

Maybe this is another incarnation of my desire for independence: I want to be independent from the games industry. And from the games format.

Games are fun. Let them be fun. And let’s do something else, when we want to be serious. Let’s focus on interactive entertainment that is not games (let’s call them “notgames” for now :) ). With a technology that is so versatile and powerful, why should we limit our productions and enjoyment to the single format of games, a format that has been around for centuries and doesn’t even need computers to exist?

I realize that it has always been our mission at Tale of Tales to explore the potential of the interactive medium. But so far, this has happened in some form of conflict with videogames, based on our misguided belief that videogames had potential to grow, to grow into a medium (which, believe it our not, still seemed possible only 5 years ago). Simply letting go of the connection, will make our job a lot easier as it will help us explore with far less constraints. Leaving behind the idea that we’re making a game, opens up a world of creative possibilities!

Notgames

But more than that, I want to stimulate research and development of notgames. Instead of continuously having senseless arguments with game fans, developers and theorists, I want to gather together the brightest ideas concerning non-game interactive entertainment. Without the noise and the distractions. Maybe we’ll start a blog about the subject, with news, essays, opinion pieces, debates. A place where ideas can be explored and shared and discussed. I would also like to commission designers and artists to make new non-game interactive projects. Maybe there can be a competition like those ubiquitous game making competitions, but about making interactive entertainment that is not games -far more exciting and certainly a much larger area to explore. And finally, I’m looking into the possibility of starting a sort of label -like a record label- to publish and distribute notgames.

If you would like to contribute to any of this, please post a comment or send email.

Happy New Year! :)

Those who prefer to commemorate the dead from home, can visit last year’s Independent Games Festival finalist The Graveyard. For the occasion, today, the full version of the game can be downloaded for free.

Get it here:
The Graveyard for Windows – Free
The Graveyard for Mac OS X – Free
Only yesterday.

—
You can still download the trial version of The Graveyard for free here.

- groWorld plant game prototypes by Tale of Tales & FoAM
- groWorld gardeners web by Sixtostart
- Urban Edibles by Foamlab Holland
- urban gardening info-booths by FoAM & Foamlab
- biologically corrupt hard-drives & Biomodd game by Angelo Vermeulen
- PhoEf tribute to the sun by Bartaku
- patabotanical illustrations by Lina Kusaite & Theun Karelse
- experiments with plant sensing by Nik Gaffney & Dave Griffiths
- vegetal scents by Maki Ueda
- seasonal botanical refreshments by Rasa Alksnyte & Pieter de Wel
- sonic atmoshperes by Lowdjo & Antz

see more…

Alright, now I am going to use some antiquated terminology… try to stay with me….

We once made a “splash page” for this website called Rhizome. It was a website about “net.art” don’tchaknow…

Oh lots of websites had splash pages back then, it was a sort of introduction to the site you were about to experience. Of course, sites were a very different thing in my day….
People used this coding language that was known as “HTML” back then.
YES we just coded that up in your basic “text editor” we didn’t have or need these fancy-schmancy Web 2.0 thingamabobs or CSS or CMS and browser uploaders or whathaveyou… we just coded it up, uploaded the page to the server, and off it flew!
Now, this so-called “net.art” was very very interesting stuff…
And it was ART… well… at least to the Internet of the day it certainly was! We figured a new medium deserved a new kind of artwork. One that was about the medium and FOR the medium! We knew, even then, that this Internet thing was going somewhere! So what if we had to walk in the snow, uphill, without shoes, to get there. We liked it FINE! ;)

So, take this journey to the heart of the turn of the century internet with this selection of net.art pages from our humble selves, then better known as Entropy8Zuper!, and some of the all-time greats!

http://www.rhizome.org/art/exhibition/splashback/

Artists include: Annie Abrahams, Daniel Garcia Andujar, Ben Benjamin,
heath bunting, Gregory Chatonsky, Shu Lea Cheang, Andrew Childs, Curt
Cloninger, David Crawford, Mark Daggett, Joshua Davis, Entropy8Zuper!,
Andrew Forbes, Valery Grancher, Matthew Hoessli, Olia Lialina, David
Lindeman, jimpunk, JODI, Yael Kanarek, Lucas Kuzma, Antonio Mendoza,
Mouchette, MTAA, Robbin Murphy, Nettmedia, Scott Paterson, Pavu,
Waldemar Pranckiewicz, Reinis, Satellite01, Sigma6, Starry Night,
Eugene Thacker, Jake Tilson, Maciej Wisniewski, Young-Hae Chang Heavy
Industries

http://www.rhizome.org/art/exhibition/splashback/
http://www.rhizome.org/art/exhibition/splashback/
http://www.rhizome.org/art/exhibition/splashback/
http://www.rhizome.org/art/exhibition/splashback/
http://www.rhizome.org/art/exhibition/splashback/
http://www.rhizome.org/art/exhibition/splashback/
http://www.rhizome.org/art/exhibition/splashback/
http://www.rhizome.org/art/exhibition/splashback/

(url repeated, for that old-school flavor.)

Gamersgate is now offering both The Path and The Graveyard for digital download.
It’s like a Tale of Tales infection is spreading across the games industry!… ;)

And here’s a description.

What happens to your online profile after you die? Do you want it to remain online, so friends can leave a message in your memory? Or do you prefer having it deleted, so no confusion can arise about your death? These questions are the inspiration for the new exhibition Ik R.I.P., the third in the series about self-representation on the internet.
With The Travelers, a series of death portraits by Elizabeth Heyert, coffins from Ghana, the computergame The Graveyard, ‘test-dying’ in a casket, the new website www.ikrip.nl and more…
Opening hours: Wed – Fri from 12.00 to 19.00 hrs, and Sat + Sun from 12.00 to 18.00 hrs.

The show is running til April 12th.
more info here.

Description of the show on We Make Money Not Art.

I’d say it clearly is a game, but one which hits a somber note that is fairly hard to achieve in this medium.
Plugimi about “The Graveyard”

The Graveyard postmortem has been turned into a 10 page feature on gamasutra.com. Soon people will think that all I do is write. But I swear, working on The Path is my only job now!

Thank you, Simon. :)

Phew! It took longer to write the post mortem of The Graveyard than it did to make the game! ;)

A lot has happened since the release. One of the major things being that the lady who was a great inspiration for the design of the game, my grandmother, passed away last August. Which is why I wanted to finalize this article today, on All Souls Day.

Margriet was my godmother. She talked about dying all the time. And asked if we wanted any of her stuff. Her table is now in our living room. And we’re taking care of one of her plants. I know she was happy to go. Her husband had died a few years back. Her body was shrinking and practically falling apart (she was almost 100 years old). Yet she remained extremely lucid. Hence her desire for death, I guess.

I wish the final chapter of our awkwardly titled “post mortem” would have been a bit more solemn and quiet, but we had scheduled to talk about the public response to the game and evaluate the downloads and sales. So we’re sticking to the plan.

Please enjoy the final chapter of the epic saga that is The Graveyard post mortem:

Out in the world

The Graveyard has been nominated for the European Innovative Games Award. We’re up against none less than Heavenly Sword, Crysis and Wii Fit! I say: bring it on! :) May the best old lady win on November 6th in Darmstadt, Hessen, Germany!
Other nominees are Sharkworld, Rider Spoke, PES 2008, Blake White, Somersault and Remote Impact: Shadowboxing over a Distance.

vs vs

BATTLE!

The success of The Graveyard as an atmospheric piece is due in no small part to the lush soundscape created by Kris Force. Next to producing Jarboe’s soundtrack for The Path, she’s been an audio-millipede. From working with deep dark experimental musicians to creating whimsical sound and music for blockbuster games like The Sims, her knowledge and wisdom regarding the audible universe seems unfathomable.

So we produced some noise with our questions, to hear how she feels about The Graveyard and what else she’s doing. Part six of our Graveyard post mortem (almost done):

Spotlight on sound designer Kris Force

The Graveyard has been selected by IndieCade for their show in Bellevue, Washington, from October 10 through 17.

Joystiq has posted movies and pictures of all 25 finalists: 1-5, 6-10, 16-20, 21-25). Quite a few interesting games in there, and definitely a much more varied selection than the usual indie games fare.

We have organized this survey together with PhD student Eva Kekou and we’re only expecting official results in the Fall. But we’d like to share some things that are abundantly clear without scientific investigation.

Of the over 30 thousand registered members, almost 250 have taken the survey. That’s less than 1 percent. So a grain of salt is in order. Also because some of the participants have expressed enjoying taking the survey. So perhaps the results only represent Endless Forest players who like filling in surveys.

We knew that a lot of women and girls are playing The Endless Forest but the bare figures did come as a bit of a shock to us: only 41 of the 247 participants who answered the gender question in the survey are male. That’s less than 1 in 5. I’m not sure if we should feel proud or embarrassed.

The following graph shows how the participants are divided per age group.

So the majority of players are teenagers. At least those who filled in the survey. Something interesting happens with the gender balance as players get older, though.

As players get older, the gender becomes more balanced. In the age group of over 25, there’s almost an equal amount of men and women.

We always thought that The Endless Forest was a casual experience, in the strict sense of the word. Something you do leisurely, just once in a while. But that was probably because we were only thinking of adult players. As the next graphs show, teenagers spend a lot more time in the Forest.

The one child of under 10 who particpated in the survey, apparently plays the game every day. The older the players get, the less frequently they play.

Something similar shows up in the data concerning the time of an average play session. Some teenagers play The Endless Forest for several hours on end. I find that quite astonishing, and slightly worrying. Most play around an hour. As players get older, the sessions get shorter.

We also asked whether participants played other games than The Endless Forest. Most of them do (almost 90%). The games that were mentioned most were games in which your avatar is also an animal: Okami and Wolf Quest. The Sims and Zelda games scored pretty well as well, followed by World of Warcraft, Zoo Tycoon, Pokemon, Final Fantasy and, believe or not, Halo (almost 5%).

Another thing that caught our eye was how many of the participants had first learned about The Endless Forest through fan art on Deviant Art: 1 in 5 players! Followed closely by word of mouth (friends and family: 16%). Google searches came up third (almost 10%), followed by the community around the Wolf Quest game.

With the relentless creativity displayed by the players on The Endless Forest community site, it should come as as no surprise that over 90% of the players considers themselves to be creative, an artist or designer (either professional or hobbyist). And many of them participate in other forms of culture (mostly music and books, but also comics and cinema, and fewer visit concerts or theater).

Overall, we’re very suspicious of surveys and statistics. So we’re not taking this too seriously. But it’s an interesting indicator. I wish we could interest more boys and men in our games. But I don’t think we’ll add any guns and sports for that purpose. Maybe we should just admit that we make games for girls. I don’t see other developers being embarassed about making games for boys. ;)

The Graveyard was not made entirely by Auriea and I alone. We had some great help from some very talented people. One of these is Gerry De Mol who composed, played, sung and arranged the song “Komen te gaan” especially for the game. Gerry is a multi-talented artist -writer, composer and musician- with a broad musical knowledge and know-how. Before working with him on The Graveyard, he had made the music for The Endless Forest as well.

We had a talk with him about working with us on The Graveyard, we analyze the lyrics of the song and learn about some of the many other projects that he is working on in

Spotlight on music composer Gerry De Mol

Possibly one of the more interesting things that came up during this interview with Belgium based indie development duo Tale of Tales was the idea that they are, effectively, experimental outsiders in the games industry simply because of their focus on story based, artistically motivated work.

Isn’t that weird? Can you imagine what the film industry would be like if narrative works were substantially less popular than action based films?

If you have half an hour to kill, have a read!

In the fourth chapter of The Making of The Graveyard, we have a talk with Laura Raines Smith, who animated the character of the old lady. For all intents and purposes, Laura is the unofficial third member of Tale of Tales. She has created most animations for 8, including those for the Little Deaf Mute Girl in the Pretty White Dress (based on motion captures of my daughter, then aged 6). She animated the deer avatar in The Endless Forest. And at the moment she’s breathing life (and death) into the girls and wolves of The Path.

Without Laura, Tale of Tales would not be what it is. So it’s high time for us to pay some attention to her, here. Read on for some remarkable answers to our newbie questions in…

Spotlight on character animator Laura Raines Smith

The third part of the article about making The Graveyard is online. This time we talk a bit about the production itself, how the project evolved and what went right and what went wrong. Plus some revealing pictures of the process and an intriguing sound clip.

The Graveyard: Making the game

We have finished part 2 of our article about the making of The Graveyard. After part one about how the idea was born, now it’s about getting from idea to realisation: funding and technology. Read all about how we get arts funding for our projects and how we found working with Unity3D for the first time in…

The Graveyard: How to make an idea come to life

We are in the process of writing an article about the making of The Graveyard. We will be publishing each part as we finish it. Starting with Birth of an idea, about the concept of the game, where it came from and why we think it’s relevant. Next is a chapter about finding funding and technology. After that we will discuss the production itself, what went right and what went wrong. Then we will talk a bit about the important contributions of the character animator, the music composer and the sound designer. And we will conclude with an analysis of the distribution, sales, press and audience response to the game.

But first:

The Graveyard: Birth of an Idea