Deeper with the popular.

It must be possible to make sincere work with elements that are usually reserved for superficial popular amusement. I guess we have done this to some extent with The Path: starting from a folk tale and designing the characters with a goth girl aesthetic in mind. These two factors probably greatly contributed to the game’s success. And they didn’t prevent us from exploring deeply artistically.

So it’s probably a good idea to embrace popular clichés. And then work with them to add more character, more depth. Nobody ever complained about an excess of depth in their entertainment. The only thing that people complain about is the gateway to this depth, which is often difficult and sometimes boring. High art sometimes take a lot of effort to enjoy. I can understand that many people don’t want to do this effort.

And I don’t think it’s necessary. I think the interactive medium offers us a way to get to a rich and deep emotional experience, without great effort. Because we have so much control over the experience. Our art can respond to the viewer and we can make them complicit. The effort, if any, can be shared by player and game.

As an artist, I have a reflex to stay far away from ubiquitous elements in popular entertainment. Zombies, vampires, superheroes, aliens, fairies, kittens, etc tend to only provoke eye rolling in me. But maybe I should not reject such elements, given their obvious appeal to large groups of people. Maybe I can embrace them and use them for my own agenda. These elements are certainly rich enough. There is no explicit requirement to make superficial entertainment with them. And perhaps using them can help avoid the problem of alienation that often occurs when art is too original, too different from the mainstream.