In my efforts to come up with a description of Bientôt l’été for potential players, I had forgotten about something. Auriea reminded me of it when I told her about the presentation of a new project to the Notgames Critique participants last Wednesday in Köln. I explained the concept of this new game to nothing but blank stares and blinking eyes. But after I showed the early prototypes, a lot of encouraging reactions bubbled up.

We get that all the time. Our games are based on weird ideas. But we do try to make them into pleasant experiences. On the surface, the ideas don’t work, or are too flimsy. But when realized as interactive environments, they can bring deep joy to many players.

This is not really a coincidence. We feel challenged by unlikely proposals. Making something that sounds plausible does not get our creative juices flowing. So we end up making multiplayer games in which you can’t speak, games about old ladies, games in which you win by losing and games in which nothing happens. We find such ideas exciting. Because they are so unlikely, because it’s hard to imagine what such a game would be like. But I should understand that other people probably don’t share our enthusiasm.

So trying to describe the concepts or even the stories of our games as an introduction to potential players is probably a bad idea. That doesn’t mean that all we can do is hope that they play the games and make up their own mind. What we should do is not describe the concept but the execution, the end result. We should talk about the atmosphere we create, the thoughts and feelings the game might provoke, the aesthetics, etc. I’ll try that next.

My desires for what I ultimately want Bientôt l’été to be are being torn between two extremes. On the one hand there is my love and admiration for Marguerite Duras, whose life, writing and films the immense beauty of which I cannot but want to pay tribute to. On the other hand there’s the medium that I work in and what I know of its audience.

This is not a choice between high art and low art. It is a choice been different kinds of pleasures.

I deeply enjoy the confusing, cerebral, ambiguous but also charmingly naive and seductively romantic work of Duras. And part if this joy comes from knowing that not many people share it. Not that Duras doesn’t have a big readership -she is one of the most famous French contemporary writers. But the pleasure feels so personal that it cannot really be shared.

Videogames offer another type of pleasure. Far less cerebral, but certainly not less emotional. I have always thought of interactive media as a way to connect to people much more directly. On an almost subconscious level, beyond the limitations of language, and even culture to some extent. Perhaps videogames are the medium must closely related to music. They certainly share some of its properties.

But how can I bring these two tastes together? Can they even co-exist? And should I even bother with Duras, given that my love for her work is so personal and that there is hardly any overlap with games culture. I guess in the end, I have no other guide than my inadequate heart. And I am cursed to make a(nother?) torn piece.

Even more so than the previous description, this is how I might explain Bientôt l’été in person, to a stranger or a friend, casually.

Bientôt l’été is a videogame in which you walk on the beach. There’s not much else to do, or to see. It’s mostly about experiencing a certain mood. There’s not even much of a story.

As you walk on the beach, you can see phrases of text appear, short quotes from novels by French writer Marguerite Duras. Many of these refer to love and relationships.

In the second part of the game, which takes place indoors, the phrases that you saw can be used to communicate with another player. You sit on opposite sides of a small café table. To say something, you move chess pieces across the chess board pattern on the table top. All spoken text is in French. But there’s subtitles in English and some other languages. You can also drink and smoke and listen to old French songs.

The whole thing takes place on a holodeck of a remote space station. The person you talk to is a transparent hologram and talks with a machine-like voice. Also, when you close your eyes in the game, you can see very digital looking grids of pink and blue neon lines.

Once in a while you find something on the beach. When you do, you get another chess piece. You could collect all chess pieces and play online chess. But that’s not really the point, of course. It’s just a pleasant, atmospheric experience that may perhaps inspire some interesting thoughts about your life, about love, about loneliness maybe. Not in a dark and brooding way, but rather relaxing and meditative.

Perhaps it’s not necessary to explain the entire game. Maybe I should think about the highlights and only mention those. Either briefly, or expand on some details.

Bientôt l’été is a videogame in which you take walks on an empty beach. The game plays in third person and you choose whether you want to play a man or a woman. On the beach, you see phrases appear, often related to love. All you do is walk.

There is one building on the dike. When you enter it, you sit down at a small café table decorated with a chess board pattern. Soon another character comes and sits across from you. This other character is in fact another player who, like you, is playing Bientôt l’été, somewhere on the internet. If you chose to play the man, the other player shows up as a woman, disregarding their own choice.

The phrases you saw on the beach are now available for you to use in a conversation with the other player. By moving a chess piece over the table top, you select what you want to say. All you do is talk.

The other player looks transparent, and so do their chess pieces. And their voice sounds like it comes from a loudspeaker. When you leave the café, you find a strange object, a different one every time. It looks a bit glitchy and when you approach it, it disappears. And if you walk very far along the beach, the sky becomes transparent and turns into a giant window through which you can see stars and planets, even during the day time.

As it turns out, the entire world your avatar lives in is artificial. The other player is real. But they are playing on another artificial world, far away from yours. When you close your eyes in the game, you get an impression of the computer systems that are running this simulation.

In a way, Bientôt l’été is a metaphor for playing videogames. And for the contact we have with other people through the internet, very far and yet close. I met my wife through the internet. She co-directed the game and designed the characters. So, in a way, Bientôt l’été is about us. Welcome to our world. Hope you feel comfortable.

Bientôt l’été is a videogame for two players. Two players who pretend to be lovers. They pretend to be lovers separated from each other by lightyears of deep space. They have lonely walks along the shore of a simulated ocean, thinking wistful thoughts of each other. Thoughts from ancient Earth literature by Marguerite Duras.

The empty beach, the strong wind, the gentle music and a small colony of electric seagulls are their only companions. Yet their heart is full and their mind confused. Walk along the shore, until they meet the emptiness.

When it all becomes too much, they run towards each other. Enabled by intergalactic networks, they touch each other’s holographic bodies in cyberspace. A surreal game of chess becomes the apparatus through which they, man and woman, can talk. The words they have were given to them, as they have always been to lovers everywhere.

The sea remains, tugging at their hearts when not at their hairs and clothes, as it itself is tugged by the virtual moon. And as great as the desire for the other may be, they cannot stay away from the wind and the waves and the sand. Every time they find a new treasure. An abandoned tennis field. An heap of coal. A dead dog. Ordinary. Absurd. Meaningless. Yet comforting.

Enter a café, exit a villa, enter a casino, exit the ruin of an ancient colonial mansion. We know this is not real. So it doesn’t surprise us. Nothing surprises us. It doesn’t matter when you feel the pain of love. Of being in love, of falling in love, of leaving in love. There is no such thing as time. There is only love. And it never stops. No matter how much it hurts.

You are on a space station far away from earth. You are all alone. To while away the time and forget about your loneliness, you entertain yourself on the station’s holodeck. Your favorite program is a simulation of a French North-Atlantic beach.

You sometimes play a woman, sometimes a man. With this avatar you stroll along the seaside. Waves roll in and bring thoughts of desire, togetherness, complications in relationships, love. You remember these thoughts when you enter the only building on the dike.

In the café your avatar meets the avatar of another player, another lonely soul in the vastness of space fleeing their desperate realities in the arms of a digital Morpheus. The phrases from the beach come back to you. You speak them. So does your partner. A sort of conversation unfolds, a sort of contact, a connection. You drink, you smoke, you listen together to old Earth music.

And then it is time to go. You have nothing more to say. The virtual contact begins to frustrate. You want more but you cannot have it. So you run away to the calm of the ocean, the comfort of the wind and the hysteric shrieking of seagulls.

Should I add to this that Bientôt l’été is a videogame? I don’t think it is mentioned on the back of a novel, or a DVD. “This is a book about” or “To experience this film, you sit down and watch.” Of course, videogames have vastly different ways of experiencing them. But maybe that’s something that players can find out while playing.

Should I warn people that Bientôt l’été is not a conventional game? Should I allude somewhere to its artistic ambitions?

Do they need to be told explicitly and beforehand that it’s a two-player game? And how do I describe that it is only partially two-player? And not necessarily so, since there is a “simulation” mode?

What I like about this description is that it firmly states the space station and holodeck context as very concrete aspects of the game, even if during the actual playing, this may still feel a bit vague. But perhaps describing the game as such will direct players towards an interesting interpretation, an engaging experience.

Oddly, Marguerite Duras is not mentioned at all. Is this a problem? Given that I don’t expect many people in the potential audience for Bientôt l’été to be familiar with her work, does it matter at all? Maybe some people might find it interesting that part of the inspiration came from modern literature, even if they don’t know Marguerite Duras specifically.

The description neither mentions the minimalistic aesthetics of Bientôt l’été. Maybe people imagine a realistic looking beach when reading the text, or explicit depictions of sci-fi space craft. This may not be a problem if I manage to refine the aesthetics so much that it is a welcome surprise that they don’t look as expected.

There’s no mention of the music either, which is an important contributor to the atmosphere.
And there’s no mention of chess. It’s an obvious link to games, but frankly not so important to experience.

Maybe the missing aspects can go in a features list.

• experimental videogame
• work of art
• two-player mode
• quotes by contemporary French author Marguerite Duras
• unique stylized aesthetics
• atmospheric music by Walter Hus
• chess-like interface to romantic conversation

Only a little bit silly.
I should probably try to not think of Bientôt l’été as so insanely different from other videogames. Maybe it’s smarter to pretend that it’s not so different at all. Maybe it isn’t.

I’m in trouble now. When I try to describe Bientôt l’été to somebody who hasn’t played it, I don’t know what to say. I don’t know how to present it so they understand what I find interesting about this game.

In our previous games there’s always some kind of hook that we can hang up a story from. “It’s based on a fairy tale”, or “life and death in a graveyard”, or even “the legend of Salomé”. But mentioning a game inspired by the work of Marguerite Duras, I can expect mostly blank stares: Who? Or if they happen to know Marguerite Duras, they’ll probably go How? and/or Why?

I remember feeling like this about our other games too, though. That all anyone could do was play the game and make up their own mind. That it was impossible to describe. This is followed by a period of discomfort, describing the game in terms that are easy to communicate, even if they don’t cover the game exactly. And after that comes comfort with the “lies” that we are spreading about our own work. As it happens, those imperfect descriptions still tend to sound more interesting than the usual “it’s a platform game with a twist” or “it’s a puzzle game and it’s really difficult.”

So I’m hoping something similar will happen with Bientôt l’été. Right now, I cannot see any approach towards this game that would make it feel comprehensible. We can’t even say that it subverts this or that feature of conventional games, because it doesn’t. Maybe I need to add such a feature to enable description.

I guess I should practice. Attack unsuspecting game fans and just start describing Bientôt l’été to them and see how they respond. If I start babbling to you at the GDC, you know what’s going on. You have been warned!
(then again, if you’re reading this, you won’t need my elevator pitch, you will already be familiar with this project -so stop me in that case!)

With Bientôt l’été I have shifted towards a different design practice. Instead of including as much as possible in every design, I am moving towards a method of scarcity. Now I try to reduce the amount of elements to the smallest number possible. It’s a shift from glorifying the ambiguity that the interactive medium enables to seeking a sort of purity.

Ironically, this purity may help achieve a much greater emotional effect. In the past we were happy to let our players figure out for themselves how they want to play our games or how to feel about them. But as a result many people could not get anything out of them at all. Too much was open, too much mental activity was required. In a medium that excels in the visceral.

I abhor the vacuum of modernism. So I will be the last to embrace a motto like “less is more.” If only because our goal remains “more”. The goal is not to simplify things as such, but to increase their impact. And the fewer things there are, the more attention both creator and player can give them.

This attitude potentially conflicts with our “make the game first, then design it” method were it not for that other discovery: that it is ok for computer simulations to be imperfect, for computer characters to behave differently than real humans.

This may be the ultimate key to making this medium work, artistically. Theoretically it may be possible to achieve absolute realism with videogames technology. But to what end? We will never really believe that the synthetic character on the screen is an actual human (just like we don’t believe that a novel narrates things that actually happened or that an actor really feels pain when he is bitten by a monster on the screen). We have, however, another opportunity with computers, one that is lacking in all other media. Our characters can respond to the viewer!

What matters is not so much the way in which a creature can convince us that it is something else, as the power of this creature to demonstrate to us that it is, in fact, alive, really alive. When confronted with another living creature, it matters little if that creature looks and behaves like us or not. What matters is our relationship with that creature.

Videogames need not be a pictorial medium. Videogames do not need to reflect life. They can become part of it. Videogames are things that we do. Not just things that we see. Likewise, the characters in them are creatures that we meet, not just depictions of fictional characters that we can ponder. If we dare to sit there and ponder them, they should respond in protest and tell us Don’t you dare to ponder us! Talk to us instead! Play with us instead! We may not be human. But we are here, with you!

I have been posting to this blog daily for almost half a year now. All posts in some way related to Bientôt l’été, some more remotely, and some even more to what I want to do after this project. Forcing myself to post daily is not the ideal method for producing quality writing. But it has been an interesting experiment.

I started with the idea of sharing the development of the design of the game. I wanted to document the changes a design goes through, so that readers -including myself- would understand better how that works. But the blog has become a lot more. It has become a record of my doubts and uncertainty, my fear of obscurity, as much as an attempt at expressing the emotional process from inspiration to programming. And I have ventured into speculations and theories about videogames as a medium.

Sitting down every day to write something about this project has made me realize a lot of things. Not so much about this particular game perhaps, which still remains something of a mystery to me, but about what I want as a designer, as an artist. Forcing oneself to express feelings and ideas in words really helps clear one’s head. I’m not entirely convinced that this clarity will lead to the best creative results. But I like this new feeling of confidence, especially since it came out of a process of intuition and self-doubt.

We have released a new alpha version of Bientôt l’été today. People who preorder the game can play it.

In this new version Apparitions and building changes have been enabled. Thanks to the modelling efforts of Theresa Schlag and Daniel Hellweg, you can now find strange things on the beach and different buildings on the dike, often referring to Marguerite Duras’ life and work.

But the changes that I am eager to hear feedback to concern the interaction design.

In the beach scene, the waves along the sea shore bring quotes from various Marguerite Duras novels to the screen. You collect these phrases to use them in your conversation with another player in the café.

In the first alpha version, the appearance of the phrases was tied to the movement of the avatar. Standing still for a while would collect the phrase. This turned out to be unintuitive. In the current version, phrases are tied to the waves and all the phrases you see are collected without requiring any action. I removed the limit of 16 so now you can collect all 270 of them.

The biggest change pertains the two-player part in the café. In the first alpha you could put objects on the table (there was only one, but there were meant to be more) and you could select phrases from a list to speak them. That felt very rigid. Now there’s no visible phrases anymore and putting an object down on the table speaks a phrase. You select which phrase by hovering over the fields of the chess board pattern on the table top. So it looks like you’re playing a game of chess without following the rules.

Another change pertains the look and feel of the interior scene. Many alpha 1 testers mentioned a desire for more realistic detail. They wanted to see more of their partner and their surroundings, and be able to do more. But I didn’t feel comfortable with adding all that.

Instead, I redesigned the mood to feel more lonely and pensive, which I hope will reduce the desire to see more detail. The background noise is very quiet and sporadic, and you hear the sea in the distance. The random music was replaced by a sort of jukebox that plays fragments of French love songs when a player selects them. The voice of your partner now sounds as if it comes through a loudspeaker, to complement their representation as transparent hologram.

The multiplayer interface has been simplified to a single button. The choice for simulation is now a simple button in the café scene. And private sessions have been disabled. Also, when you’re in the single player part on the beach and somebody starts a two-player game in the café, a window will be opened in the building with curtains blowing in the wind. So you know somebody is there who wants to play with you.