Marguerite Duras, the French novelist and film maker whose work inspired Bientôt l’été, has nothing to do with science fiction or space travel whatsoever. Her work is about real modern day people in either France or colonial Asia. It’s about love, desire, loss, class, gender, madness.

Framing the story of Bientôt l’été in a holodeck on a remote space station is entirely our own invention. I’m sure it will be considered in bad taste by many Duras lovers, Duras work being well respected high literature and science fiction a staple of pulp.

Yet it feels right to me. There’s something about Duras’ writing that invokes a certain distance towards the characters. Despite of the clearly autobiographical aspects of her work, we always look at these characters, as other people, strangers, outside of us. The emotional effect of this, at least on me, is a heightened sense of empathy. It is precisely because these characters are not you, and not known to you, that you can love them so blindly.

Walking on the holodeck in Bientôt l’été with the avatar who doesn’t look at you, and when suddenly seeing through the illusion the enormity of outer space, it is no longer you looking at this story but the cosmos looking at you. And the cosmos looks at you with the benevolence one can only feel for strangers, for creatures other than yourself, or your friends or your family.

So while you might be playing a Duras story, outer space starts to represent the reader of that story. You are being watched, by your creator, by the writer of your story. And since he has written you, there is nothing you can do to disappoint him. All your quirks and doubts and fears and desires are fine by him. There is only love here.

Duras loved her characters. She lived with them. And since they were fictional and thus, in some way, perfect, her love for them was unconditional and infinite.

I’m becoming weary of this choice we have in videogames between first person perspective and third person perspective. I just want to be in the game world sometimes without having to be somebody.

In film this is perfectly normal. As a viewer you are not any of the characters. And you are not looking through an invisible character’s eyes (none of the characters in a film ever pays any attention to you).

Board games ditto. I’m not a character on the chess board. I may be moving a pawn around. But this pawn does not represent me in some way. Neither am I, the player, an entity in the fictional system that is the game. I look at it and I interact with it. Without having to be part of it.

I love virtual worlds. Realtime 3D environments that are alive, in which things happen. Is our designation of the player as one of the entities in this world a clumsy attempt to prove that indeed this world is happening in real time, and is not prerecorded, that it is alive. Is it so important that we prove this? And doesn’t the player of videogames know this by now already?

Sometimes I just want to have a world that simply exists, with characters that I can observe. Without those characters representing me or even acknowledging my existence. I want to figure out how to do this in realtime 3D.

I have been nagging quite a bit here about my inner conflicts between popular success and original quality. I apologize if it has bothered you. It bothers me too. I vastly prefer good art over popular art. I admit I’m even a bit of a snob here. But I have Walter Benjamin on my side. Popular works have simply lost their aura.

For art to be good, it needs to be very specific and very nuanced. It’s only logical that this limits the audience. For a wide appeal, the work needs to be broad and general.

But when it comes to judging my own work, I find it difficult to distinguish between good and popular. I create art for other people. I know there is a tendency among some creative people that says you should create for yourself. I simply don’t understand that. I don’t see the point.

I want other people to see my work. I want them to enjoy my work. And if and when they do, I tend to consider the work good. I’m that shallow. I believe people. So, naturally, any game of ours that reaches the biggest audience is the best game.

But this conflicts with what I say above, that good art, per definition, cannot be popular.

Extreme popularity is more or less a guarantee for low quality. But extreme obscurity is by no means a guarantee for high quality. Humans are not that different from each other. If a work is good, there generally tends to be a group of people who agree that it is.

But how large can this group become before the consensus on high quality turns into plain popularity, and thus low quality?

And is it really just a question of numbers?

I was brought up in the notion that being different is good, that being weird in some ways implies being superior. This is probably a sort of defensive rhetoric that people use to console themselves. But it gave me an acute sense of respect for originality, for deviating from norms, and also a feeling that I too should be respected for my own deviations.

In the real world however, deviation is not respected but by a few stuffy intellectuals here and there -probably also more out of self defense than anything else. What gets respect, what is admired is always things that fit well within the norms, that even in relative originality still contain a large conventional part, or are an expression of an already generally felt sentiment.

One can really only be either weird or popular. And I would probably be a much happier person if I would just accept that and stop having any kind of expectations of recognition, let alone success. Success is not for the weird. And I just don’t have it in me to be normal. Miss-educated, I’m sure. Or born in the wrong age, whatever.

This doesn’t mean that I don’t see how my work and words relate to their context, how they perhaps influenced things, or at least were ahead of their time. I should just not expect anybody else to recognize this, let alone find any value in it.

Because there isn’t much, I think. My parents greatly exaggerated the superiority of originality or being different, and overestimated its importance. It’s much more important, and even influential, to live within one’s own time, to expand on ideas that are shared by many. Anything else is just yelling in the desert. Pointless.

I can’t stop yelling. But I can stop expecting people to actually hear me. After all, I don’t really need them, do I?

I wish they would stop the dominant rhetoric of originality being desirable, the encouragement to “think different”, to have ideas “out of the box”. It’s all a lie. People cannot comprehend the extraordinary. Per definition. Only the ordinary is comprehensible.

There seems to be a correlation between motion and text. I personally dislike reading text in a game. I’m just too eager for (inter)action to just stand still and read. Even listening to a character speak gets on my nerves if it requires me to stay in one spot.

But if the text coincides with motion, I find it pleasant. The linearity of moving from one point to another meshes with the linearity of a text in a way that is aesthetically pleasing.

I have just implemented “Passing Thoughts” in Bientôt l’été and it feels strangely satisfying to see the text scroll by in overlay as I move the character through space. It even helps me to read the text and to concentrate on its emotional effect, as opposed to my earlier assumption that standing still and doing nothing was the optimal condition for focus.

We need a faster way to create games. Or I need to become smarter to reduce the scope of the ideas I have.

It’s important to take one’s time to explore an idea thoroughly. But after a while I think myself in knots that I can’t get out of.

Long production cycles give one plenty of time to doubt everything. I’m sure this has advantages. But I wish it was an option. I wish, if only once in a while, I could make something quickly. Just act upon an idea and get it out there, and then judge whether it was any good. And move on from there.

Big productions not only tend to reduce my focus, the longer they go on the more important it becomes that they do not fail. Otherwise all the time was wasted. But that’s a stupid attitude for a creative process.

The following is a stream of consciousness written down on my tablet as I am trying to solve a design problem I was having with Bientôt l’été. I do this regularly throughout the production process. Sometimes for concrete programming issues, sometimes for aesthetic questions, and sometimes for design problems. After the problem is solved, I erase these streams -they are usually written down in a wiki, often as part of my to do list.

I’m not sure if this will make a lot of sense to anyone who hasn’t played the game in its current form. So here’s a short description of the relevant activity.

Currently, in the game, the sea waves drop items on the beach. Most of these are quotes from Duras novels (called “Thoughts” in the game) and some are small objects (called “Things” in the game, some come straight from Vanitas, others are chess pieces, and there’s a flower, and I had plans for shells, pebbles, etc). You can collect each of these items by standing close to it and closing your eyes for a few seconds, during which time the item is shown large on screen and becomes clearer (considered to be “focusing”). Then the items are stored in an inventory that you can see any time you close your eyes: Things on the left, Thoughts on the right. You can collect 16 of each (the number of pieces needed by one player for chess) When you enter the café, the Things fall into a drawer on the left side of the table and the Thoughts appear as buttons. You can click a Thought button to speak the phrase and you can drag the Things onto the table.
Every time you exit the café an “Apparition” can be found somewhere outside. This is an object or environment feature that just stands there, in complete isolation. When you walk up to it, you can collect an item from it that you cannot find anywhere else. After you do, the Apparition disappears. There is only ever a single apparition per exterior play session.

Bientôt design issue

Good:
Interior
Beach
Characters
Waves
Sea drops items on beach
Gulls
Cyberspace
Closing eyes
Thoughts
Things

Neither here nor there:
Control of the avatar

Bad:
Collecting
Inventory

Collecting becomes about the activity, not about the item that is being collected. This item is the content of the game. The most important thing. What the game is about. The words of Duras. Love. Difficult love. Loneliness.

We need those words and objects in the café.
But players should not just fill their pockets. They should consider carefully which they want to bring.

Is sixteen too many?

The current interface invites to close the eyes to really see an object. As they are hard too see in the world. But when you do this, you are already collecting.

Do we require an extra action to effectively collect the focused item? Almost like a “like” button.

We could instead focus the closest item automatically when standing still. And then you simply blink to collect it. Bit like eating. But that’s ok. Visually translucent overlays might work great with the texts. But showing the objects in the middle of the screen, over the avatar will look weird. Unless maybe very faint?

Are Things and Thoughts collected differently?

Careful choosing only applies to the texts. The objects are fairly random and don’t even require focus.

Can we allow the character to go pick up an object independently when the player “lets go”? Though less directed as in The Path. More as part of idle behavior.
(though many players may want to do this on purpose)

Focused text would be shown larger.
Can we increase the size of the in-game object, surreal-wise?
You might be standing too close to it to see, though.

Unless we change the camera.
More independent from the character.
The camera could fly up and look down. Would make the text readable. But the object is too small.

Or we remove the Things and have only Thoughts.
But playing with Things in interior is fun.
Is that enough though? Given that the game would become clearer, more extreme and easier with only text.
Things allow for chess to happen. As if anyone will do that. Maybe that could be a separate game. Or an extra multiplayer mode. Chess pieces could already be set up.
Can’t we do this in optional DLC?

Think of Jeff Noon’s fog catchers: carefully plucking vague texts from the winds.

I have to remove the collecting activity. It is too easy to interpret it as a typical play activity, which will ruin the mood for people with gamer reflex.
Maybe it’s more like an accumulation of impressions. And it happens automatically. The words fill your head. Maybe they’re not even arranged neatly. Just a jumble of texts that are only sorted out at the café table.
As for the objects, maybe there is only ever one per session. Maybe only the Apparition objects. And there’s 16 Apparitions. These could be collected through “let go”. And you never lose them. Maybe they are chess pieces.
And you still need to go walk at the sea shore to let the wind fill your head with thoughts. Maybe these thoughts literally stick on the screen and even obscure your vision. Or at least the borders of the screen.
Get rid of the inventory. You only see your collection in the café.

I’m beginning to disagree with something we wrote in the Realtime Art Manifesto in 2006. Namely to “Make the activity that the user spends most time doing the most interesting one in the game”.

Well, I don’t actually disagree with the sentiment, but more with the phrasing, or with my interpretation of it. That phrase was written mostly in response to the mind-numbing repetitive actions many games force you to do, and to the requirement in other games, to walk long distances from one event to another, without anything interesting happening on the way.

The mistake I made was to believe that what you do in a videogame is the most important thing. Possibly influenced by Chris Crawford who seems to believe that the more verbs there are in a game, the better the game is. And despite of the small amount of actions that the player can do in most games (typically to run, to jump, to shoot, and that’s it), the games industry mostly agrees with Crawford on this point: it’s all about what you do, about the action, about inter-activity. They just see no harm in repetition.

We’ve always contrasted “being” with “seeing” in favor of being in a videogame. This in relation to an aesthetic approach that favors a multi-sensory feeling of realism over photo-realistic graphics. But I’m starting to think we should also contrast “being” with “doing”.

I’ll admit slightly embarrassed that this realization really hit me when trying to understand why Journey, Dear Esther and Proteus are more widely critically recognized than our own work, despite of sharing many philosophical points and even being influenced by our work (at least in the case of Journey). When Dan Pinchbeck complained about picking flowers in The Path, my initial response was simply “Well, you’re doing it wrong. You’re one of those typical gamers who ruins the experience for himself.” but then I started thinking “Is there any way I can help such players to do it right?”

And the key can be found in Dan’s own piece “Dear Esther“, but also in “Journey” and “Proteus“. There is practically nothing to do in neither of the three (as somebody pointed out recently). Once in a while something happens in the game world but most of the time, you’re just moving around. This activity is so low in intensity that it allows and encourages the player to enjoy the environment. And this is actually how you’re supposed to play our games too. And how I play them. And how I’m sure many people do. But for some stupid reason, we have always put these things to do in our games, even if we don’t particularly care about doing them. I think we were just afraid to leave the player to their own devices.

It started with our very first project “8“. We cared mostly about the world and the characters and the atmosphere. When we realized that the sort of puzzles we came up with were rather trite, we just outsourced the game design and hired Chris Bateman to help us. He came up with a wonderful concept that we would have implemented had we found the funding for the production. But in hindsight, I guess I’m glad we didn’t. The new version of 8 that Auriea is now working on, is actually much better. There’s no puzzles in it at all. And indeed, most of the time, you’re just going places.

Both Journey and Dear Esther have a single goal. Very literally a point that you are walking towards. The path towards this goal is so long, however, that the player stops obsessing over it (which is always the thing that ruins the experience). Once in a while seeing the light in the distance reminds you of some vague reason why you are in this world, and then you stop thinking about it (there’s not much to think about: it’s a mystery). Even the puzzles in Journey, while they do feel a bit out of place, are quickly forgotten through the visual splendor and the narrative progression that they unlock. The emotions brought on by the aesthetic experience wipe away any game-specific emotions the player might have had.

I guess The Graveyard is the only game of ours with a similar structure. In The Path there’s flowers to pick, memories to collect through interactions with objects, and a sort of boss rounds even when encountering wolves. In Fatale, you have to extinguish all these lights. It’s symbolic sure, but it’s also a lot of work for the player.

We have this fascination with objects. We like stuff. We are interested in how people relate to objects, in how dear some objects are to people, in how people attribute meaning to objects. In our most object-centric game, Vanitas, I clearly remember thinking of all sorts of interactions we could do with these objects. Luckily there was no time to implement these, so we just made a box with stuff in it.

In Bientôt l’été, there’s also a bunch of objects. And you collect them. And now I’m thinking that this is wrong. I can feel how it is really demanding for the player to focus on the object itself, or the text, when doing the “collect” activity. Somehow, the action dominates everything else. So you end up collecting, collecting anything, just picking stuff up, without paying much attention to what the objects are, or reading the text, or taking in the atmosphere of the environment. You’re too busy doing. There’s no time for being.

It seems appropriate to collect things along the shore of the sea, much like it seems appropriate for a dead man to extinguish candles on his way to heaven, or a young girl to pick flowers in the woods. But maybe it’s wrong. Maybe such an activity, or activity as such, distracts from really dealing with the situation you’re in, from really taking it all in, and letting your emotional responses bloom. In real life, grown ups don’t collect shells, in favor of enjoying the experience of wind and noise and light and landscape. Even in The Path, I know I should ignore the flowers in order to get the nice experience of feeling lost in the woods.

But for many others, this is not so easy. If it’s a game, we are eager to do things, we want to inter-act. So if as a designer you don’t want players to do these things, don’t include them in your design. We applied this idea in The Endless Forest: if you don’t want people to fight in your mmo, don’t put in combat, if you don’t want verbal abuse, don’t put in chat (or even readable names), if you don’t want competition, don’t put in puzzles. But somewhere along the line we must have felt that certain activities are perhaps ok. That perhaps it was necessary for people to do things. Or they would be bored.

But doing things can be as boring is not doing anything. It all depends on the context. It’s the nouns and the adjectives that make the difference, not the verbs. It’s not about doing, it’s about being. So now I need to find it in my heart to remove the collecting feature from Bienôt l’été. I’ve felt that it was wrong for some time now. And I have been tweaking it to make it feel better. But now I realize that it is the very fact that you’re doing something, or at least doing so much of something, that is wrong. I need to create more time for doing nothing. And not be afraid that players might be bored.

The notgames method is not only a challenge to designers. In many cases it’s also a necessity for creating videogames that are about mood or meaning.

In theory it is simple: avoid typical game activities and structures, and see where this takes you as a designer. In practice, it is harder to do than it sounds. At least for me.

There’s a bunch of typical game activities that I actually like. Collecting for instance. Or clearing a map. If a game offers a pleasant mood next to this, it’s not a problem for me to enjoy it too. If the game’s design permits it, I often take plenty of time not engaged in the game activities.

For other players, however, this is not so easy, as I have witnessed in playtests. They have what I would call gamer reflex. As soon as they discover a game-like activity, they will obsess over it. It will dominate their entire brain and ruin the mood completely and probably prevent them from getting any meaning out of the piece. In many cases, it even destroys their enjoyment.

Sadly, many gamers suffer from this condition, so it’s not something a game designer can ignore. One solution is to design these activities so well that the gamer still enjoys the game (albeit in another way). The other is to remove them completely (the notgames method).

Neither solution comes easy to me. Designing typical play activities is not something I have a talent for. And since I actually enjoy some such activities myself, it’s very hard to avoid having design ideas that involve them. Sometimes I realize far too late that I designed an activity that could be intepreted as a typical play activity by people who suffer from gamer reflex. And so these people go and ruin their own enjoyment and then they tell me that my game sucks.

They are right of course. I need to take their condition into account as a designer. And do what needs to be done, however much it pains me: remove any and all activity that could trigger the gamer reflex.

New ideas are exciting. Having an idea for a new game or a new feature in an existing project generates a lot of enthusiasm in me. If only those ideas were easy to execute! If only the path from idea to released game wasn’t so gruesome and slow!

Ironically, but probably not coincidentally, it is in the midst of such difficult and slow productions, that new ideas pop up and come to tease us, make us impatient to get the current one over with and start the new one. Or to change the current one so that the new idea can find a place in it. Or, if it’s an idea for a new feature in an existing project, to drop all the tedious but essential work in favour of trying this new and exciting idea.

Of course, every exciting new idea turns into a gruesome slow production at some point. Making new new ideas pop up and distract us. I feel like one of those abused women you see in television shows and movies: their man is no good, he beats her and she knows she should leave him. But she loves him and always comes back. In fact she begs him to stay even when she knows that it will only end in another beating.

I used to think that inspiration was a curse. It gives one new ideas but life is too short to execute all. And ideas distract from work. And only work can lead to finished results.