Designing interactions in a game is fun until you realize that your players don’t find them or can’t figure out how to do them. Despite of the instructions. This can seriously handicap the experience. And even if it doesn’t, they’re missing something that you worked hard to implement.

One way to deal with this is to make all interactions optional and implement so many of them that it doesn’t matter if they miss a few. Then randomly trying all sorts of things can be part of the game. But in a serious and minimal game like Bientôt l’été that isn’t really an option.

I can only see two solutions.

Either the interface needs to be conventional. But that excludes everyone who doesn’t play games. Which I know is not a lot of people. But I still want to be nice to them. Also, I personally dislike many conventional game interfaces as they often don’t express the feeling I’m going for.

Or the interaction is simply removed. Which is probably ideal. Interacting with a virtual world should be fluent. Interruptions, such as instructions, are undesirable because they move the attention of the player from the fiction level to the system level. Especially since such instructions need to be in the player’s face, otherwise it’s too easy to miss them.

This is only logical, really. Some interactions are fun to do. But the joy happens on the mechanical level. Even attempts to map the controls to the fiction (as famously done in Heavy Rain) , often end up drawing more attention to the system layer. Videogames that focus on content are best served by transparent controls. Convention can serve transparency. As can absence.

I have redone the in-game hints and instructions to match with the interaction redesign and the new focus on mouse controls rather than keyboard. They almost seem redundant now that the interactions have become so simple.

But I don’t want players to not know how to play. Exploration is fun but exploration of controls is not very interesting. It is also completely meaningless.

I dislike telling people how to play, though. And it’s quite hard to build a robust context-sensitive real-time hint system. I’m beginning to see the advantage of using conventional controls. Maybe I should see if I can’t use those in a future game.

Unless learning the controls can somehow become a sort of playing. Extending the honest expression of the fakeness of the game in Bientôt l’été through the holodeck device, one could make learning how to control the avatar part of the story.

Maybe we could even let the player design the controls in game. For each action that the avatar can do, the game asks the player how they want to execute that action. Or better, the avatar asks the player.

I want to move away from the avatar as simulated human anyway. Avatars are simple creatures with rigid logic. Maybe we can admit that to the player. Their stupidity could perhaps be charming and might stimulate a desire in the player to help them. Or at least to play along better.

That way it wouldn’t be the game that teaches the player how to interact. Instead, the player would figure out together with the avatar how to play.

A brief Twitter discussion about authors admitting to the fictional nature of their work, made me realize that I do not think of our games as fictions. We create them to be part of reality.

We don’t tell stories. Our characters are not real people. But they are also not stand-ins for real people. They are themselves. At best they refer to archetypes, fictional characters, without becoming one themselves. I see our characters as actual creatures, with a certain form of life. Creatures with whom you can have a relationship.

Not all depictions are fictional. A photo of a landscape is not fictional because the landscape it depicts really exists. How about a painting of a landscape? And what about the painting as an object? An object of beauty that gives us real pleasure. The painting itself is not fictional. It really exists. In our world.

That’s how I think of our games. They really exist. They are digital, yes. And that allows them to exist in many copies. But it is still existence. Not representation.

I think this sets videogames apart from movies. In movies, the characters are necessarily fictional because they are played by an actor who is not the character. But videogames do not have this ambiguity. There is no actor. The character is wholly itself. It is not being played by somebody else. It exists as this creature who is part of this world.

Initially the concept of a game may be a fiction, imagined by humans. But as soon as the world is built and the characters are created, they become real. They are no longer fictional. The characters may seem to live in this strange world that is not ours. But they also live in our world, just as the game world exists in our world. The gameworld is as much a part of our world as the bowl of fruit on the table.

I am happy with the opportunity that the new point-and-click navigation on Bientôt l’été‘s beach offers to just watch the game and think, dream, empathize. We’re often so obsessed with interactivity when making videogames that we underestimate the power of doing nothing, the luxury of just being able to watch something and allow all our energy to flow to our thought processes.

I click a distant point on the beach and my avatar starts walking towards it. I release the mouse, lean my head on my hands and watch. The waves float in, texts appear, a solitary gull in the sky. The world is alive. There is nothing movie-like about this experience, despite a superficial similarity.

I watch my avatar from the back. Nothing in her body language betrays any response. But I know how this sight makes her feel, how the words touch her. How she wants to see more, feel more, even if it hurts. There is a strange sort of self-indulgent pleasure in emotional pain. It almost feels addictive.

I’m very pleased with this game. By reducing the activity, I think I have managed to capture the wonder of the very core of many videogames. We often forget how truly remarkable it is that we have these synthetic characters traversing virtual environments. This fascinates me so much more than any sort of gameplay.

I’m afraid I might not care about interaction anymore. The thought came to me as I was tweaking Bientôt l’été in response to alpha-test feedback.

For some reason I cannot recall -or maybe there was none- you collect things in one part of this game which you then use in another. What was I thinking? What’s the point?

I’ve designed several ways both for collecting and using these items. It apparently doesn’t matter to me exactly how you collect or use them. I only care about the effect.

I wanted to create a conversation constructed with more or less random French phrases. That’s the entire reason why Bientôt l’été exists.

Not that only having this conversation would have satisfied me. I care deeply about the environment we have created, the mood, the sound, the visual appearance.

I’m happy enough with the walking activity on the beach. Though I couldn’t care less about how exactly you control the avatar. I wish players could just design and use their own preferred way of navigating.

Maybe we need another type of platform for this kind of work. A 3D world exploration platform that gives the author complete control over how the world and its inhabitants (including the avatar) look and behave. But that allows the user to do whatever they wish in it (within the limitations of their avatar).

Currently, to play with somebody else in Bientôt l’été, you enter the café on the dyke and go sit at a table. When you do that, the game checks if somebody is already sitting at a table somewhere, waiting, and if so you connect to them. If not, you wait.

I just realized that there’s a problem with this design. If the availability of connecting to another player depends their patience to wait, the window for finding somebody else will be extremely small. And given that Bientôt l’été is not the kind of game that will attract enormous crowds —so that there’s always somebody to play with— I need to increase that window somehow.

There is literally nothing to do while you wait either. I guess I could let you to have a virtual drink and smoke on your own, Dinner Date-style, but how long will that remain amusing without adding a lot more to the game.

We already have “a lot more”, though. We have an entire beach. So perhaps your “waiting” starts already while you’re alone on the beach. And then when somebody enters the café, you are notified of this and you can decide to join them. This notification should not be too personal, though (like your character’s cell phone ringing). That would conflict with the pleasant solitude of the beach situation.

Maybe the appearance of the café on the beach changes for all players when somebody has entered and is available to play together. So you would regularly look at the café and if, say, the light is on, you can enter yourself. If multiple players responded simultaneously, they can all be matched up in couples by the game.

Since you know that this light will go on in other players’ games when you enter the café, you would normally not have to wait too long until somebody connects to you —at least if somebody else is playing the game at that moment (which is a lot more likely if “playing the game” includes the beach scene, and is not limited to “waiting at the table”). So that makes it acceptable to enter the café even is nobody is there yet.

I understand the joy of power fantasies. But I find fragility often far more interesting and beautiful.

The normal structure of videogames allows us to continuously feel like a winner. When we drop out of the flow channel and are confronted with situations that are not challenges that can be overcome, we may be confused and uncertain. But that is when we become sensitive to many other forms of beauty and joy.

Lack of power is not necessarily sad. Power feels good because it makes us feel superior to others. But lack of power feels good because it makes us feel connected to others. Per definition, there can only be one winner of any competition. Per that same definition, most of us are losers.

But only if we choose to see our existence as competition. There is absolutely no need for that. When we stop thinking in such terms, suddenly the world becomes much richer and more varied and nuanced. Suddenly feelings of confusion and doubt become pleasurable. If only because we know they are shared feelings.

Lack of power is liberating. When we refuse to run the race any further, we suddenly feel the sensation of the gravel underneath our feet, hear the wind in the trees, notice the myriad colors in the sunset.

Even our unfulfilled desires, our frustrations and wishes become beautiful. We are at our most noble when we long, when we desire, when there is something outside of us that is out of our reach.

Bientôt l’été is not a love story. It’s not about two people who meet and fall in love and then break up. Instead it’s a story about that story. We, the players, all know what love is. And in the videogame, we can explore these emotions, we can play with the things that we, humans, say and think about love. It’s not real. It’s a game.

Through this playing, hopefully, we will discover some of the beautiful shades that emotions can have outside of the narrow range of power, victory and success. We can be fragile, with each other. We can be mystified, feel dumb, feel ugly and inadequate, and laugh about it. Laugh, yes, because existence on this planet is wonderful. Even our capacity for suffering and sadness is beautiful, is wondrous.

When I saw the final characters that Auriea created for Bientôt l’été I couldn’t help but chuckle. Just because they arrive at a moment when sexism is a hot topic in the games industry in the wake of E3. Here I was looking at two characters designed by a woman: a male character and a female character. The roles were reversed.

Completely according to the specifications inspired by the main characters in Marguerite Duras’ Moderato Cantabile, which serves as the basis for Bientôt l’été, the female character is strong, exudes authority and power and knows exactly why she’s here. She’s inspired by Anne Desbaresdes, the spouse of the business man who owns the factory and who lives in a gated mansion at the end of the Boulevard de la Mer. The male character is inspired by Chauvin, the rough factory worker who may have been stalking her, but is well aware of his social inferiority to the woman.

In Bientôt l’été, the male character looks handsome, mysterious, and highly desirable. Dressed in flimsy fabrics that you can easily imagine running your hand over while feeling every inch of the shape of his legs and shoulders and chest. He is obviously put on this planet to please womankind, and in particular the woman whom he will meet in the café at the seaside, after a lonely stroll on the beach.

Not to trivialize the serious nature of this project, but this kind of characterization fits well with Marguerite Duras. She didn’t seem to think very highly of men. But this expressed itself more in a sort of amused sympathy, not onlike how one feels towards a friendly pet. She certainly has deeply loved men. But I don’t think she ever considered them equals.

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.