Are there people who never truly experience beauty? People who live and die without ever knowing deep aesthetic delight? I think so. There may even be many.

We have entire treasure troves of beauty in our museums, our theaters, our libraries and our concert halls. The past millennium has produced more than enough exquisiteness to saturate any human life time. But to enjoy these works of art requires a certain attitude, and some education, that simply do not fit very well in our modern age. And contemporary artistic concerns have lead away from the primacy of beauty.

As a result the only beauty that is readily available is the vulgar glossy kind in magazines and stores. And it, while often pretty, never produces the deeply moving effects of artistic beauty. Glistening commodities provoke surrogate feelings that may lull our innate aesthetic desires to sleep. So much so that I fear many a person today lives and dies without ever experiencing this form of bliss, this form of wonder, this form of knowledge.

No surprise then that the world is filled with cynicism and cruelty!

This is where the creation of beauty becomes a political act. The experience of beauty touches the depths of our humanity, and it shows us a glimpse of the greatness that we are capable of. After having experienced beauty, we will no longer accept the primitive life style designed for us by capitalist consumerism. We will no longer accept the crushing of life for the purpose of profit. We will refuse to play a part in the cynical machine of neoliberal military-industrialism.

Experiencing beauty shows us how beautiful we are, as a species, as a world. Or how we can be beautiful. And that is politics.

Forcing English speakers, or Dutch speakers like myself, to say the French title of this game puts them, us, in a position of weakness, of inadequacy. Duras often explores inadequacy. And my own indulgence in making this personal game puts me in a vulnerable position.

So maybe that’s what Bientôt l’été is about? Against the grain of always being the best we can be, seeing the most spectacular, experiencing the most awesome, maybe this is an exploration of imperfection, of inadequacy, of hesitation, of insecurity.

Not to wallow in misery and self pity, but to discover the melancholic beauty of insufficiency, the enchanting nobility of fragility. The comfort we find when realizing that the other feels as awkward as we do, and the laughs we can share about it. After which we fall silent again, looking away, a tiny tear in the eye, we softly swallow, and smile. The sun is rising.

Certain places recur in in several novels of Duras. They seem to be derived from personal memories but have a strong symbolic function. When these places appear, they always have a similar history. The exterior of the café where you meet another player in Bientôt l’été will take the form of several of these buildings throughout the game. The door will always be the same, but the building around it will change.

Of course there will be a regular café. One of those typical low brow French pubs that are usually part of a long row of cafés, stores, restaurants, and residencies. Except in Bientôt l’été it will stand on its own. The sides of the building will be blank, much like the sides of many of the early villas at the seaside. The café plays a central role in Moderato Cantabile, the novel at the basis of Bientôt l’été. It is the place where the crime passionel happened that gives the two characters an excuse to meet and talk.

The villa also plays a role in Moderato Cantabile. It is where the female lead character lives. It is the home of the family that owns the factory. A place where the local bourgeoisie can indulge in their decadence. But also a place where the lonely mistress of the house slowly loses her wit. At night she wistfully stares outside her window while she hears a couple making love in the cold moonlight shadows.

The hotel is a meeting place for extramarital couples. Again, the window plays an important role as it offers an outsider, hidden in a wheat field, the opportunity to see what her lover is doing with her best friend. Or was it the other way around? Is it the lover who is curious whether she is watching?
In Bientôt l’été, the design is based on the former hotel “Roches Noires”, famously depicted by Claude Monet and inhabited by Marguerite Duras herself as well as Marcel Proust at some point.

The municipal casino serves one specific function in Duras’ œuvre: it is the place where a young woman loses her lover after he has been dancing all night with a strange woman. This event causes the young woman to lose her mind. A state that she will not recover from in years. But there is always this desire to go back to the ball room of the casino. The casino is always closed but a friendly employee is willing to show the visitor in. And then nothing happens. No memories come flooding back. No tears are shed. The episode is over.

And finally there is the colonial mansion. Referring to Duras’ childhood in French Indochina, the building appears empty, abandoned, perhaps bombed. Possibly a memory of the war (Duras was a member of the Parisian resistance during World War II and her husband was a concentration camp victim).

In keeping with the minimalist aesthetic chosen for the game, all these buildings will be rendered white, but otherwise quite realistic. Perhaps they seem to be made up of parts of each other, as if they were made from the same module kit.

Since the earliest concept of this project, there’s been a reference to chess in the design. When we decided on the turn-based conversation in the multiplayer part of Bientôt l’été it was chess more than any other game that we were thinking of. Taking turns to choose carefully what we were going to say and do —what we were going to contribute to the conversation— felt a bit like chess.

Also, as of the first prototypes, there’s been a chess board pattern on the café table. For this I originally used a texture that was made for a prototype for another game. We had this idea of creating a larger version of Vanitas, for iPad: a large box with objects that you could collect or that would appear by themselves (kicked in through a little door at the bottom of the box —very amusing). Some of these objects were chess pieces and there was a chess grid at the bottom of the box. We were hoping that people would play chess with the pieces that they found, possibly by replacing some missing pieces with one of the other objects in the box, a little bell, a bird’s skull, etc.

This idea, in turn, was based on a desire to make a virtual chess board and chess pieces for iPad. Just that: a virtual simulation of board and pieces with realistic physics but without any enforcing of game rules or A.I. or networking. The purpose was to offer a virtual chess set that two people could play with together on the same tablet.

This entire idea, somehow, found its way to Bientôt l’été. You will be able to collect chess pieces on the beach. And if you and your online partner succeed in collecting enough, you can simply play chess with each other.

For this reason, the maximum amount of objects you can collect is 16, which is the number of pieces one player needs to play chess. These will be arranged in the inventory in 2 rows of 8, mimicking the chess board layout.

I’m not sure why I’m attracted to chess. Maybe it’s just because it’s “the default game”. I don’t know. Or maybe it’s because Auriea and I enjoy playing chess together, even though neither of us is any good at it, and we don’t even do it very often. For us it’s a way to be together intimately. And chasing down each other’s pieces on the board has a gentle erotic connotation. If only because of the prominence of the archetypal male and the archetypal female in the game: King and Queen: the passive and slow King who nevertheless performs the key role versus the agile and all powerful Queen, who leaves a trail of destruction in her wake and without whom playing gets very lonely.

Bientôt l’été is both the most personal and formally extreme game I have worked on. So much so that I feel that after this one, I can just relax. I will have said all that I wanted to say as an artist. And I can just play for the rest of my life. Make fun games with stupid stories.

I admit I’m a bit tired. Tired of fighting against what has always seemed inevitable. Also, somehow I don’t really believe that humankind will continue for much longer. So even if my work could have any effect in the long run, it won’t, because the species will be extinct.

Sometimes it feels like I am producing archeological finds for the future. Millenia from now, alien scientists will land on this planet. Minor scientists since the serious ones had avoided Earth for centuries because the layer of junk culture produced by the last humanoid inhabitants discouraged any real interest. And it is these minor scientists from outer space who will find Bientôt l’été and use it to convince the others to get more resources for further excavations.

And this will enable the aliens to discover the Earthian beauty of romantic painting, baroque music, renaissance sculpture, gothic architecture, et cetera. And the universe will have become a better place. The End.

I’m just working all day, trying to make something beautiful and nice and fun. Little step by little step. It’s a lot of work. But we’re making progress. We know what we want to make and we’re getting there. Bit by bit.

And then I look up and see what my colleagues are releasing. Dragons! Ninjas! Shotguns! Chainsaws! Pits to jump over, ropes to swing from, fast cars, big guns. Impossible platform structures, game level architecture, mechanics based on physics. And players having so much fun.

And I look back at my work and ask myself What am I doing? What kind of medium is this? Who are these people who enjoy these games? Is that the joy they find in life?

And so I shake my head. I don’t know, man. Bientôt l’été is not that. I’m not sure what the point is. Even the supposedly enlightened journalists won’t know what to do with this one. I guess they’ll just think it’s freaky and weird. Or “artsy”. God, what am I doing?

But it needs to exist. The amount by which Bientôt l’été is different from other video games makes it seem like something heavy and monumental. But it’s not like that at all. It’s really quite simple, seen from this side of the universe. Obvious, even. Straightforward. Clear. Modest.

Why do I have to feel like a freak? I’m not the one dressing my characters in metal bikinis, having them slay dragons and commit serial murder for hours on end, or leading my players through absurd dungeons, bashing on every crate looking for loot, saving the world over and over from alien invasion, finding amusement in blood splattering all over the place or in growing fake potatoes on a fake patch of fake farm land with fake friends.

It’s amusing, of course, to some extent. And I look forward to seeing people’s reactions. But I wish things were a bit more normal sometimes.

Today we have recorded the female voice for the multiplayer part of Bientôt l’été. In this part of the game, you sit down with another player at a café table. The objects you collected on the beach can be put on the table and the phrases you collected can be spoken. Each player puts or says something in turn. Like a game of chess.

Over 200 phrases were selected from multiple novels by Marguerite Duras. Some are very poetic, but many are plain. For the tone we follow Duras’ own style of reading from her work, as she did in many of her films: very dry and neutral. This fits perfectly with her writing style. On the surface the words may seem banal, and sometimes indifferent or cruel, but that only heightens the sense of extreme passion that the characters are going through. At least that’s the effect this has on me.

There’s two characters in the game, a man and a woman. Both have the same phrases at their disposal. For the female voice, we were as fortunate as to find an even bigger Duras fan that I in Mademoiselle Fabienne Mésenge, a multi-talented actress/director herself.

She clearly enjoyed performing Duras’ words, surrounded by the organ pipes in the studio of Bientôt l’été composer Walter Hus in Brussels. The recording went much more smoothly than anticipated. But the second session, after un verre de vin was clearly the better one!

It was very moving to me to hear the text. I can’t wait to record the male voice and put it all in the game and then play!

Even though I think of my work as design, I don’t have the well defined goals that commodity creators do. I design systems of which I don’t know the outcome. I design them because I am curious to see how people will respond. What will happen to them when they play my game? I hope they enjoy it, but I have no expectations of how they do.

I do not design with a specific goal in mind, like wanting the players to feel a particular emotion, or establish some kind of rapport or understanding. It’s more the other way around. Through my work I ask a question. And I am sincerely curious for the answer.

In part because I want to know who shares my interest in the themes I am exploring. I often have a feeling that I am attracted to things that not many people care about. So the games we release are like messages in a bottle thrown into the ocean, in the hopes of finding a kindred spirit.

This is probably why many people have trouble appreciating our work. I imagine them poking at the game, trying to extract some meaning from it. Or maybe they sit there waiting for the game to hit them emotionally. But the game was designed to extract meaning from them instead and as a sort of “lab test” to find out how they would respond emotionally.

What we create is open ended, not designed to provoke a specific reaction. But when other designers notice that certain aspects do provoke certain responses, our work can inspire them to design for this specifically. Personally however, I prefer making -and playing!- games that were not designed with a specific goal in mind. I find it much more empowering to come up with my own ideas and have personal reactions, than to nicely experience the emotions the designer intended me to experience.

You really need to pick up the bottle, pull out the cork and read the note. And then I want to see your response. Do you burn the note? Eat it? Throw it away and fill the bottle with sand? That’s when things get interesting. And interactive.

In principle Bientôt l’été is endless. It consists of two areas (single player and multiplayer, beach and café) that can alternate indefinitely. Since a lot is left to chance (especially in the multiplayer part), I want people to play more than once, to get different versions as it were.

Since I am counting on repeat play, I’m using the outside-inside cycle to introduce new elements. Every time you leave the café, something will have changed on the beach. I’m thinking of having these elements appear in a certain order, linearly, back and forth (like the tides of the sea). There’s only a small amount of elements, though, so after 4 or 5 cycles you may have seen everything (except for the randomly distributed phrases and objects that can be collected of which there are many).

That doesn’t mean you could no longer enjoy the game. Bientôt l’été is not an exploration game. A lot of variation is introduced through the multiplayer aspect. But it also offers a certain mood, that you might simply want to return too.

Given that the cycle is endless, it’s perfectly possible for people to continue playing forever. And I worry that they may continue playing until they get bored. And when they got bored, they might look back at the entire experience as a waste of time, even though they were enjoying it before they got bored.

So maybe I should add a way to encourage people to stop playing, to stop playing before they get bored, i.e. when the game is still fun for them. Perhaps I could add a notification that tells them that they have seen everything there is to see. And then they can still continue playing, but as a warned man.

Since the beginning of this project I have wanted to include time of day and ocean tide cycles in the beach scene. Sometimes it would be day time, otherwise night time, or something in between. And sometimes the sea would be far away and sometimes it would be very close. I wasn’t quite sure how fast these cycles would happen. Usually videogames speed up time so that players can experience different moments. I figured I would do the same.

At some point I thought that it would be interesting if these day to night transitions happened in spurts, rather than gradually. Probably inspired by the way such things are suddenly described in a book. Even though the reader may assume that the transition was happening all along, the fact that the writer suddenly mentions how dark it has become or that the sun is rising, is significant. I want to create moments like that.

But rather than programming a little engine that automatically transitions from stage to stage according to some fixed schedule, I now want to have these transitions influenced by the player’s activity. Perhaps for every 5 items that the player collects from the beach, the time of day will progress to the next stage. This can happen abruptly, without any transition, while their eyes are closed. And perhaps every time the player leaves the café, the tide will be different. Apart from these variations, time will remain the same. It will always be almost summer, and the moon will always be almost full.