Never finished.

Contrary to my ambiguous feelings concerning the multiple deadlines I’m setting myself during this late phase in the production of Bientôt l’été, I actually really like the idea of a videogame that’s never finished.

I think this harks back to my earlier love of the website as an artistic medium. A website is a living thing. It’s always up but changes all the time. As such it’s never finished. To finish a website is to kill it. A website is not built with finishing in mind. It keeps changing, sometimes from the top, by adding new content, sometimes from the bottom, in response to user interaction.

I wish videogames could be the same. Publishing early alpha versions feels a little bit like that. This process could go on forever. I would keep making changes and see how people react. Not, as now, with the purpose of refining the design towards some ideal state, but just for the sake of change itself.

Working like this could take the project in many unexpected directions. At some point I could introduce a storm. And then that would be the state of the game. And at some other time, perhaps a taxi arrives in front of the café, and we would go travel somewhere else. Or a giant wave hits the shore and throws us in the air where we develop wings.

To some extent, perhaps, the Apparitions in the game are crystallized suggestions of such possibilities. What if questions. What if this black rock would become a main feature of the game? How would the experience change? What if somebody would actually come and play tennis? Could we meet them? Join them? Have drinks with them after the match, in the café? What if the dead dog was actually a dog I had seen before, alive, and I would have petted it, or been afraid of it, or ignored it?

Possible worlds.

Maybe it’s for the best that practical reasons prevent this sort of endless production. But it’s a nice fantasy.