The main reason why Bientôt l’été will be in French is that I find it important to point out that different cultures exist. For the same reason, the song in The Graveyard is in Flemish, the language spoken in the part of Belgium where I live. In the Anglo-Saxon corner of the internet that I inhabit, one may sometimes get the impression that we all share the same culture, that the only difference is that Americans and Brits are smart and everybody else is stupid, since they talk funny.

But there’s another reason for this specific choice. I decided to do the game in French when the Flemish nationalist party won the elections. They won because they succeeded in rekindling the ancient hatred in Flanders of Wallonia, the French speaking part of Belgium. In line with the global trend of fundamentalism and populism that plagues our post-modern politics, this is hardly remarkable. But I live here and I find the situation incredibly petty and sad.

So, in protest, I started taking French lessons again, even considered moving to Wallonia and decided to celebrate the beauty of the French language in a videogame. Amusingly, the arts funding for this project comes from the Flemish government, since some genius in the past figured it would be a good idea to split these things up in our already tiny country. Of course most artists oppose this segregation, but what do they know about culture?

The most painful part if all this is that I come from a family of Flemish nationalists, and that they don’t see how their anti-immigrant attitudes are rather upsetting to somebody married to one.

Even though my motivation could probably be called artistic, I don’t feel comfortable considering myself an artist. I was trained a designer and I still very much create from a design perspective. I never considered design to be in any way inferior to art, though. I even went through a period, in art school, when I thought that making art today was simply decadent and that every talented creator should be designing instead, to make the world more beautiful. Design could go places where art could not. It could penetrate daily lives, and bring joy to people who might otherwise never visit a museum, attend a concert or read poetry.

I am now a lot more tolerant towards the idea of art creation, and I am happy that some people do, but my choice to make videogames is still in part related to this desire to bring art to the world, rather than expect the world to come to the art. And that feels like design work.

It’s not just a matter of creating a Trojan Horse wrapper around the art to smuggle it into the homes of unsuspecting gamers and then let it escape once inside. It’s a lot more complicated. I want to present the content of the piece in such a way that different kinds of people can get something out of it. This is a tricky thing to do, because adding an element that might make it easier for one group to enjoy the work, may harm the joy that another group finds in it. Finding the balance between a large amount of such decisions I consider design work.

If I would be a real artist, I imagine I would choose the most optimal way to express my content, that is to say the way that makes this content most clear to me. But this is not how I think when I make videogames. Sure, most of the production time, I only have myself as a player, to test the effect of the design on, but I continuously imagine how other kinds of people might respond. For that purpose I read many accounts that people make of playing games, to get an idea of how they enjoy them and come to an interpretation. And I attempt to make my expressions more inclusive.

As a result, my work will never be perfect. There will always be something wrong with it for someone, and another thing for someone else. This disqualifies it from being art in my very personal definition as that in which nothing is wrong.

However, inclusiveness and wide appeal is a very difficult thing to accomplish for me. And this often requires more resources than we have available. Ironically, if I fail to achieve my creative goals, if I make something that only a small and non-diverse group of people appreciate, but appreciate thoroughly, if I fail, my work becomes art.

There’s something self-indulgent about Duras’ work. She allows her characters to dwell on emotions, to wallow in a certain melancholia. But it feels like an wonderful luxury. And incredibly beautiful in its fragility. The characters flaunt their weakness as an insult, a challenge. And so their weakness becomes their strength, the ultimate weapon.

And that strength is very seductive. I used to roleplay Duras-style a bit in art school with a girl friend. She was very good at it. Using the polite form while expressing intimate feelings. Speaking of oneself in the third person. Saying things twice, first in third person, then in first. It was a lovely game.

It’s very easy to make fun of this writing style, to parody it. But since her subject matter is always love, the joke is always on the joker. Maybe love is perverse in Duras’ work, maybe it is selfish, maybe it hurts. But she has lived it and that puts her in a position where no mockery can affect her.

The experience of beauty in art gives me a sense of belonging. Through art, I feel a connection with life, with the cosmos. A connection that cannot be expressed in words. And that may not even be true. But somehow, this feels irrelevant. Somehow, beauty is more important than truth to me, more real.

As a result, I actually feel rather comfortable with life, and its companion, death. I don’t really ask myself The Big Questions about the meaning of life. I know what the meaning of life is. Art has taught me it. And now I am in a position where I can have a dialog with reality, rather than panicking about it in fear of the unknown -or devoting all my energy to ignoring it. And that is what art has become to me today: a dialog with the cosmos.

It strikes me how, when put in these words, my life with art seems similar to the life of religious people with their belief, with their god. They also have a feeling of certainty, and they rely on this faith, to explore their relationship with reality throughout life.

Maybe the way I like to focus and concentrate with art is similar to prayer for religious people. I don’t actually believe in any particular creed, even though I adore the beauty in especially Christian art and mythology. But I have never been comfortable calling myself an atheist either. My spiritual relationship with art feels like a sort of blasphemy against atheism. And I like that a lot!

Beauty is addictive. One can develop an almost physical need for it. This need manifests itself especially after confrontation with less beautiful expressions. Ugliness is easy to ignore. But experiencing mediocre art can be draining. After a session of unfulfilled longing, I feel the need to touch real beauty. To energize myself again.

I can feel a habit forming. I don’t need high doses. But without some beauty, once in a while, I’m only half there, I only half exist.

It’s easy enough to forget, though. It’s quite possible to go through extended periods of life with not much beauty in them. You don’t miss it. But once you get the habit, some way, and you feel how beauty intensifies the experience of life, you become frightened of losing it. So you keep going back.

Also because you know that when you do lose it, you won’t remember. A dose of beauty once in a while makes you smarter, more perceptive, more sensitive (maybe only because of the focus required to experience it). Without beauty, you’re simply not smart, not perceptive, not sensitive enough to notice that something is missing.

Even though I want Bientôt l’été to be fairly accessible, to some extent its interaction is about experiencing art. Or at least similar. At least in my experience.

Regular entertainment affects one quickly and directly. We read, we watch, we hear, we play. We are immediately moved. We get it. Without much effort. Without even paying much attention. Or, in a way, we can’t avoid paying attention. Such entertainment is loud and/or spectacular. It attracts attention. It’s jaw-dropping. It’s awe-some. It’s epic!

This, however, is not my experience with art. At least my best experiences with refined works. It’s perfectly possible to stroll by a painting and not feel a thing. One can read an entire novel and not be moved. The most heavenly music can serve as a sing-along background when doing the dishes. It’s only when we stop and pay attention and allow the work of art to function, give it space in our mind and heart, concentrate, and are silent, that the true deeply felt bordering-on-religious-ecstasy, cosmic-transcendental art effect can take place.

Art does not jump up and grab you by the throat. Even in an humongous piece like Saint Peter’s’ basilica, we can see a never ending stream of people pass by, completely unmoved by the all to obvious splendor of the place. It’s perfectly possible to not feel a thing if you don’t allow yourself to.

As such the experience of beauty feels similar to that of love. But that’s stuff for another post.

The mechanic of closing one’s eyes to interact in Bientôt l’été is almost a direct expression of what experiencing art feels like to me. Or at least of creating the conditions for such an experience. Stillness. Concentration. Attention. Focus. Perhaps a bit of tuning, trying to find the emotional frequency where the signal is at its clearest. Sometimes walking away and then trying again. From another angle. Looking at a painting is almost like closing my eyes. Almost like eating it. I stare at it and I absorb it. I’m no longer looking at the object hanging on the wall, but feeling the presence that my brain is projecting on the inside of my skull. My entire body becomes a sensory organ. Directed inward! The imagination as a form of sensing?

Dehors, dans le parc, les magnolias élaborent leur floraison funèbre dans la nuit noire du printemps naissant.

I visited Trouville-sur-Mer to find Marguerite Duras but found something completely different, yet surprisingly related to the project nonetheless.

I think I had more or less ruined any fan-boy experiences I might have had in Trouville by obsessing over the place on Google Earth, through pictures and even in Duras’ own films. I had already designed an entire game world largely inspired by this seaside town (before I decided to have an empty beach instead). So I was actually quite familiar with it. When I saw Trouville in real life, I recognized everything, I knew my way around.

In a way this is kind of horrible and it somewhat confirms Walter Benjamin’s fears regarding photography: that the technological reproduction of images takes away from the “aura” of the photographed objects. A theory that was extended by Baudrillard when he claimed that these objects no longer really existed. That we are now living in a world that consists only of images.

But I digress.
Or do I?

What I did find in Trouville was something that is completely unphotographable (but that might be reproducable, or at least evokable, through an interactive medium). What I found was the sea. And the wind. The tide and the clouds. The enormous sky that surrounds our planet. And the moon.

What I found was a planet, a solar system, floating around in an unimaginably large universe.

I had never spent this long a time at the seaside before. To see the day turn to night and to day again, to witness the tide come in and then float back, to stare at the sky endlessly, to wait for the moon, follow the sun, to sleep in the roaring noise of the ocean and the continuous tearing at man’s constructions by the restless winds of the sea. The seaside is the place where this planet connects to its surrounding universe most palpably.

I had already decided that Bientôt l’été would take place on a remote space station. For me this is a symbol of how we inhabit and communicate through the internet. A fond memory of meeting my wife, too. But now, after this overwhelming confrontation with the universe, the space station situation is suddenly starting to trigger other emotions as well. No longer just looking inward and to each other, but looking out, at the planets, together, sitting next to each other on a rock hurled through an immense universe at immeasurable speed.

— Je ne suis pas sûr de vous reconnaître.
Le changement arrive avec la brutalité d’un passage de jour à nuit:
— Quelle est la différence?

Since the production of certain aspects of a game follows a linear path, I need to now step up my reading of Duras’ novels. Because this is required for me to compile the text that the voice actors will read that needs to be recorded and processed and then implemented in the game. So now reading novels has become the highest priority on my to do list.

And since I’m reading them in the original language, and French is only my third language, this is a slow process. Especially some books require quite a bit of concentration. In fact I’m going to re-read Moderato Cantabile and L’Amour, before I decide on the final text for the game. Even though I’d love to still read Yann Andrea Steiner, Des journées entières dans les arbres and Le Square, and re-read L’Amant and La Maladie de la Mort. Duras has produced so much beautiful prose!

I have read, and will probably include quotes from Emily L., Dix heures et demie du soir en été, Le ravissement de Lol V. Stein, L’homme atlantique, La Douleur and L’amant de la Chine du Nord, next to Moderato Cantabile and L’Amour. The latter is especially interesting because it almost entirely takes place on a beach, a beach that has a lot of similarities with Trouville-sur-Mer, which we visited for this project the other day.