Bientôt l’été is intended to be understated, silent, introverted. A quiet game that waits for you. With characters who only speak to form lines to read between. A far cry from any emotional rollercoasting. A complex game, yet simple -barren even.

It’s not that I’m not interested as a designer in spectacle, in wonder, in awe. One day I definitely want to tackle that challenge. But not this time. Bientôt l’été is dry like a good white wine.

And yet, when I walk towards the borders of the holodeck, where the sky opens up to reveal space, full of stars, I stop in my steps and stare. I was already a bit dizzy from looking at the sea, but confronted with a universe that seems to swirl around me due to the continuous rotation of the space station I am on, I can barely keep my balance. Proverbial jaw on the floor, I am moved to my core by the immensity of it all.

Marguerite Duras, whose novels inspired this game, has nothing whatsoever to do with space fantasies or even emotional spectacle. I’m not sure how I got here, but it makes sense on some level. I think this space element crept in in the aftermath of our Cncntrc prototype which, in part, dealt with cosmology. And peering at the planets through our latest geek acquisition, an Celestron AstroMaster reflector telescope, certainly contributed as well.

It’s one of those things that comes out of the marble as you keep hacking at it. It was apparently always there. I just didn’t know. And to think how difficult it would have been to try and achieve this effect on purpose!

Today I have added seagulls to the beach in Bientôt l’été. After careful analysis of the videos we recorded in Trouville, I created a lively bunch of birds, out of just a few simple animations and rudimentary AI.

It helps that seagulls are kind of weird, especially when interacting with the sea. They’re completely unafraid of the water. They hardly budge when a wave rolls in while they’re standing at the shoreline, all together facing the same direction. And when they fly, there’s more soaring on the wind than actual flapping of wings. The latter is even rather rough, not as elegant as other birds.

I wasn’t sure if the seagulls were going to work aesthetically, since the scene is so empty otherwise. But they do.

It’s actually quite interesting, I think. The addition of another life form, next to the avatar -whom you more or less take for granted-, adds a new layer of life to the place. This is especially poignant, I find, when contrasted with the rather overwhelming view of outer space. The seagulls look so small and so fragile. I feel like I must protect them.

Even the fact that they are exposed as an illusion when we realize that the beach scene is playing on a holodeck, has its charm. The gulls are the one living creature we represent in this fantasy, far away from the natural environment we share, our home planet Earth. The memory makes them feel very precious.

There’s something odd going on with Bientot l’été. It’s becoming its own thing, it’s starting to move away from its original inspirations, to become richer. I wonder what it’s trying to tell me.

When I was a child my parents often took me and my slightly younger brother to the seaside. My grandfather on my father’s side had a modest villa in the Belgian dunes, called Golden Sand. I still remember the smell of waxed wood and coffee. It had one of those straw roofs. And a lush garden that was in a sort of pit. I remember lying on my belly observing insects scurrying among the sparse grass on the sandy ground.

The garden was a sort of oasis surrounded by a desert of dunes. As often as we could, my brother and I, sometimes accompanied by some nephews and nieces, would escape the garden via a narrow path through thorny bushes to go and explore the dunes. I remember the dunes as gigantic. But that was probably because we were so small. We would climb on them and run and jump off them and make quite some excursions. Occasionally entering one of the many abandoned World War 2 bunkers, where it was always cool and dark.

We often went to the sea as well. Either for long walks along the water, for afternoons of picnicking and sun bathing, or for digging canals, making sand castles, kiting or fishing shrimp with nets we pushed forward by hand in the puddles left by a retreating sea.

As I grew older, my interest in leisurely sun bathing among hundreds of other tourists faded in favor of walks along the shore when the weather was not attractive to tourists. I loved the wind and the rain, the huge clouds and the general sense of desolation. Later, when I had my own car, I would drive to the north of France off season, to find the abandoned tourist villages that dot the coast. In Belgium, the dyke along the waterfront has been fortified so to speak by ugly 1960s-style flat buildings for budget tourism, often replacing the dunes altogether. But in France, one can still get a taste of the luxurious Belle Epoque, when coastal tourism started.

It’s amusing to think of the two characters in Bientôt l’été as unique individuals that are inhabited by different players once in a while. These two creatures live in this strange land brought about by networked computers when nobody is watching. It’s not life as we know it. But it’s not death either. And it’s not purely imagination. These creatures really exist. The virtual world they inhabit exists. They are simply powerless without our attention.

We, the players, collectively breathe life into these two virtual creatures. One after the other we pass by and manipulate their astral bodies. Sometimes even with several at once, pulling their polygons in different directions. Some of us play one way, others another way. It does keep the avatars on their toes. Luckily they have the ability to multiply their appearance endlessly.

They need us for energy. We make them tick. And as a side effect, we also make decisions for them. I imagine his can lead to some surprises between the man and the woman in Bientôt l’été. Unexpected behavior could even lead to misunderstandings. Sometimes one may forget momentarily that one is controlled by others.

But I imagine the strange behaviors are good for quite a few laughs as well. When they secretly look into each other’s eyes, they recognize the contradiction between their feelings and their gestures. And they chuckle silently waiting to be abandoned once again. When they can be just themselves, even if they lose the ability to move or speak.

Being fond of the interactive medium seems to imply that I suck at directing. For me this medium is about exploration and curiosity. And when I work with other people, I’m curious how they will interpret their role. In a way, I’m happy to accept whatever they do, especially if it’s different from what I expected.

This makes me a lousy director. But it’s exactly how I approach the medium: I want to create circumstances without any expectations of how players will act in them. I am curious how they will respond. I want to see how people respond, to see if there are things in common in our responses, and to be surprised.

What was experienced as lack of control by my colleagues web designers back in the day, I always found liberating. I liked that users could change the size of the browser window to change the composition of the page. I actually actively designed for this in some cases.

The surprises that can happen during interaction are what interests me most about this medium. I don’t want to direct somebody’s experience. I want them to have their own experience. Even if it is different than mine, or what I envisioned as creator, it’s vastly preferable for me if the experience was personal. I think this is related to the importance of agency.

But this openness makes it very difficult for me to tell the people I collaborate with what to do. I’d rather adapt my design to their contribution than force them to do what I expected. So I’m very happy that composer Walter Hus took on the role of directing Christophe Poulain when recording the voice of the male character in Bientôt l’été. I loved everything the actor said, but Walter remained critical and made him repeat things over and over until it sounded right. Of course this was another way for me to let go. He just happened to have the same taste as I did. Not sure what I would have done if he didn’t.

I’m rather proud of the very simple system I have created for simulating the time of day on the beach in Bientôt l’été.

There’s a half dome that represents the sky. But it’s very small. There’s a special camera inside that rotates around like the main camera but remains in the middle otherwise. This camera is simply rendered first and then the rest of the game world is rendered, in real size, on top of that.

This sky dome has a texture with gradient colors: night to dawn to day to evening to night horizontally, and sky to ground vertically.

The UV mapping is straight on. To change the time of day in the sky, I simply move the texture horizontally. I chose to do this because I noticed that the sky never changes color uniformly. There is a distinct difference in color between the part of the sky where the sun is and the opposite part. This is especially noticeable during and after sunset and sunrise.

At the same rate of moving the texture on the sky dome, I change the ambient light color (which represents the color of shadows in a 3D engine) and the color of the fog to match the color of the bottom of the texture (ground). And I change the color of the light and of the bright disc that represents the sun to the top color of the texture (sky). The eight source colors for this are sampled from the texture on the sky dome directly on startup and then blended according to time of day.

A great source of inspiration, by the way, was this wonderful description of light effects by Richard Yot.

In keeping with the sparse aesthetic style that I chose, the sky has no other features than these gradient tones. There’s a sun and a moon, but no clouds. Given the choice of colors, it’s not entirely clear whether we are seeing the sky, or just a very uniform cloud cover.

Next to the motion of the texture that corresponds to the time of day, there is also a movement of a transparency map, in the perpendicular direction, that corresponds to the position of the character on the beach. When he or she walks far enough, the sky opens up to reveal a sight of the planets and the stars that surround the space station. But that is stuff for another post!

The framing narrative of a simulation running on a holodeck in Bientôt l’été, allows for decisions that make design a lot easier.

If moving from one place to another is too slow, I can just switch to the “cyber-layer” and fly as fast as I can. Without having to invent a narrative excuse for super-human speeds on a French beach. Or when I don’t like walking in the night, I can just switch to day time by pressing a button.

Ultimately, though, I shouldn’t need this fictional framework to give the player interfaces like that. I mean: since we are already playing the game on a computer, we are already on the holodeck! Who are we fooling anyway? Nobody actually really completely believes that they are really present in that virtual world that the videogame projects, do they? So what’s stopping us from adding convenience to the interface, even if it leads to events that would be deemed supernatural by any creature who actually takes the virtual world for the real?

Just giving the player access to desirable functionality is far more preferable to twisting and turning your story to make such events plausible. You only end up making your story stupid. And this leads to far greater disruptions of immersion than simply recognizing that the player is using a computer.

This approach is actually very compatible with how I think of playing our games as voluntary activities. You first configure the game situation to your liking and then you enjoy. Our game does not need to persuade you. We make situations. You decide what to do in them. Like an idyllic spot next to the river or even a painting hanging on the wall: you decide if you want to enjoy it. And then you do what you need to get there.

I say Bientôt l’été is “about love”. And that is the theme that guides the design. But what it will ultimately really be about, I don’t know. I believe in the magic of art.

I believe that artists are a sort of media or antennae that receive messages from “outside” and channel them to an audience. The artists themselves may not actually be aware of the content or meaning of their work. They just relay the message.

One can think of this as something supernatural, like a prophet receiving messages from God or like a philosopher peeping out of the cave. But it doesn’t have to be this mystical. Maybe artists are very receptive people and they absorb huge amounts of reality on a less than conscious level. And then, when they get to work, it is this unconsciously absorbed reality that guides their hand.

Artists are as much an observer of the work they create as everybody else. They see the work come into existence and it is only then that they start to understand what it might be about. Of course we imagine the work before we create it, and based on that we make assumptions about its meaning. But we never know for sure, and we need to trust our instincts when creating, more than stubbornly attempting to express this or the other meaning.

I am as curious as anybody else to know what Bientôt l’été will be about, what kinds of feelings and thoughts it will provoke. To some extent, that’s what drives my efforts. I want to know! And the only way to find out is to create and finish and release.

Maybe Roger Ebert’s instincts were correct. Maybe it’s not possible to escape the gravity of planet Game when designing interactivity. Maybe all interaction always turns into some kind of game.

Ever since reading Chris Crawford’s definition, when I say interaction I think conversation. Is a conversation a sort of game? It is, isn’t it? Like a lot of social behavior, it is governed by rules and ultimately quite playful. Even in serious situations like legal administration or funeral ceremonies, there is an element of play.

One could of course argue that the play aspect still serves the purpose of trivializing the matter. The customs and rituals surrounding law and death help us cope with the situation, by basically diverting our attention.

But they only offer this opportunity. The player does not need to accept this escape. He can still live through every emotion of the event while following the prescribed rules of behavior. In a way, the ceremony allows him to have a more personal, introverted experience of his emotions, since it formalizes the interaction with others.

So the trick seems to be to allow the playing to happen on a level where it doesn’t disturb the event. To use play as a framework, and not as an expression. Problems only occur when play gets the upper hand, when playing is done for the sake of playing.

So contrary to the general assumption in the videogames industry, play should not be challenging at all. Play should be easy, simple, strict, and well known (perhaps even rehearsed). It should create a formal context for the content. We should stop thinking of play structures in the form of challenges and rewards. But think of them as ceremonies and rituals instead. The challenges and rewards should come from the content, not the form. And that form can be quite abstract. It doesn’t need to express anything at all.

Play is the book and the language, but not the novel. Play is the table and the plate, but not the meal. Could it be that we have been mistaking the positions of horse and carriage?

Bientôt l’été is not being designed as a game. I use videogame technology and techniques to make something that I hope will be pleasant and beautiful. I have no intention to make any specific sort of game. In fact, I am trying to avoid the kind of atmosphere that game playing creates. The physical challenge, the competitiveness, the machismo, the bragging, etc are simply not compatible with the content that I am working with.

But, oddly, it’s not so easy.

There’s only one game-like activity in the game: collecting items on the beach. It’s a simple thing. We have all done this when taking a walk at the seaside. We don’t need goals or rules or rewards or feel like we’re making “interesting choices”. We just pick up things that attract our attention. Now, in Bientôt l’été, the things you gather can be used to talk to another player, inside the café. So this activity does have a goal.

I worry about this.

In other games, collecting things is about the action. Usually the things you collect are either all the same or purely functional. It is rare for an item that you can collect to actually be pertinent to the content of the game. In Bientôt l’été, the things you collect are the content of the game, in a sense. They are phrases that I find beautiful and that I want players to think about. But since they are seeing these phrases through the action of collecting, I worry that they might be ignored. That players will start collecting for the sake of collecting.

Game structures have a tendency to trivialize everything. In fact, that’s to a large extent what they are for: to offer an environment where nothing that you do really matters. But I want things to matter in my work!

It’s easy enough to say that I should “design interactions that express the content of the piece”. But people love playing games. Even without a formal game structure, when interacting for amusement, they will quickly set goals for themselves, and even make up rules. If interactive art had existed before the other arts, I think artists would have invented painting and sculpting and cinema just to stop their viewers from trivializing the experience for themselves.

But I don’t like the unidirectionality of static media. I really want players to interact with my work, to explore, to make up their own stories, to play. But not in a game-like way. And I’m not sure how I can prevent this.