I am putting several objects in Bientôt l’été that feel right to me on an intuitive level. Some of them refer to elements in the work of Marguerite Duras. But non of them actually mean something. Not in the sense that they are a symbol for something and that together they form a riddle that can be deciphered. Unless, perhaps, on a psycho-analytical level.

Everybody is free to interpret things however they see fit. And I don’t exactly mind the prospect of some people constructing a meaning out of what is being presented. But it does give me pause in terms of selecting the objects. Some of them are easy to interpret as symbols. And I don’t know if that means I should remove them or keep them and let it be -given that some people really enjoy interpreting the hell out of things and who am I to rob them of that pleasure?

This desire for meaninglessness probably comes from my own lack of interpretation skills. I am notorious for not understanding even the most banal movies. It starts with not being able to tell the actors apart. But I just have this tendency to let things wash over me, to be part of the event as it happens and to not jump to any conclusions until long after the fact. This attitude makes me a perfect amateur of obscure art films, I think.

It’s not really that I believe that there is no meaning in my work. It’s just that any meaning that can be constructed in logical language never suffices to capture the true spirit of the work, or an aspect of the work. It’s really very much about being there, in this event, as it happens and trying to take it in as fully as possible. In a way, without thinking, without even imagining too much. Just allow your body and your memory to respond to the work and bring you in some kind of meditative state, I guess.

That is how I enjoy this kind of stuff. But don’t ask me what it means. I have no idea. I don’t even care. My body knows. That’s what matters.

When I design a videogame, it’s not with the idea of providing a specific experience to the player. Instead I design a spectrum of opportunities. As a result our games can’t tell you what to do in order to have fun. You’re mostly on your own. And you have to figure out for yourself how to amuse yourself with our work.

But we don’t design open worlds either. Our environments are very much authored with certain emotional effects in mind. We just don’t set up much structure to help you achieve them.

I’m not sure if this is a smart approach, but it seems to be what we are drawn to. Also as players. Nothing gives us more joy in a videogame than doing something out of our own initiative. It makes the game feel like a actually existing reality. Even if what we did clashes with the fiction of the game.

Bientôt l’été takes this approach one step further, in line with the atmosphere we want to create inspired by Marguerite Duras. It plays with emptiness and indifference as themes. The largest area in the game is a practically empty huge white room. Your avatar is dressed in white as well. They look away from you, avoid eye contact, remain isolated, introverted.

It’s not unpleasant, though. Much like it is not unpleasant in real life to sometimes be on your own, alone with yourself. To feel so connected to your environment that the wind seems to blow straight through your body. As if you simultaneously do not exist and are everything.

Then you take this introverted creature inside, to meet another, equally introverted. You try to talk. The contact is pleasant. It’s nice to hear a voice. But what can you say? What can one possibly say that will make this other person become part of us? Like the sea and the wind?

Maybe, instead, you will discover joy in the existence of something, some body, outside of yourself. Another being, whom you cannot possibly comprehend, let alone fuse with. But who is there, across the table, as aware of your existence as you are of his.

Maybe there’s other sources of joy than indifference.

Trying to use games to tell a story is like trying to use Macbeth to tell a story. It’s perfectly fine a long as you’re telling the story of Macbeth. But don’t try to talk about your walk in the park with your dog or the love of Jesus Christ for Maria Magdalena. It’s not going to work. Macbeth does not offer the means to tell those stories. Because it already is a story.

And so is “game”. Game is that story about learning how to do something and then being better at it than others. You can set this story in different contexts -much like it’s plausible to make a Macbeth that takes place during World War 2, or in a hi-tech future. The game story is often told as the victory of an initially weak individual over evil. But it remains the same story -even when it is “subverted” by making you feel bad about killing the enemies. And trying to make all content fit that model is silly.

Bientôt l’été does not offer such a story. That’s one reason why a game format wouldn’t suit it. Maybe there’s no story at all in Bientôt l’été. I certainly didn’t write one. And while the texts come from novels that do contain stories, they have been removed from their context and cannot be put back.

I try to create a certain mood in Bientôt l’été. And there may even be a sort of theme. But as much as there is no game, there is neither a story. Bientôt l’été is just and only what it is. A sort of simulation, a virtual place, something to do, something to play with. It is potentially heavy with meaning, and it is probably capable of bringing tears of joy or sorrow. But it does this, or not, on its own strength, without relying on story or game.

Whether it does this successfully or not, I do believe that this is an important field to explore: the opportunity offered by the videogames medium for creating art that is not narrative, and that introduces a new way of dealing with content, of exploring reality.

It may seem a bit redundant to have an avatar in a game while expecting the player to consider that character to represent him or her. If the player is going to be this main character, why not use a first person point of view?

The main reason in Bientôt l’été is to evoke a sense of touch.

Touch is the one sense that is sorely missed in our multimedia experiences. We can do without taste, and we may even be thankful that designers cannot use smell. But the lack of touch is often frustrating.

Technology has tried to make up for this lack somewhat with haptic feedback through vibrating controllers. And in first person games, we are all familiar with the bobbing camera when walking and jerky camera motions in response to the effects of violence. But the suggestion is never really convincing.

The thing that works best, in my mind, to suggest a sense of touch, is just showing the touching. It would be very difficult to suggest how the wind feels in a first person view. But when you can see how the clothes and hair of a character on screen are pulled by the wind, you get the idea. And if this character is supposed to represented you (because you can control it), then it’s not hard to imagine actually feeling this. Or at least conjuring up a memory in your imagination to what that feels like.

I added tides today. So the sea can be close sometimes, and far at other times. To test, I have created a little interface to change the tide by pressing a key. I’m considering leaving it in, just like the key that changes the time of day. We’re on a holodeck, players should expect to have power over things like that.

It generates some magical effects, though. The waves on the sea are separate objects that position themselves randomly in an area defined by the avatar’s position and the position of the shoreline. If the shoreline changes, the waves will adapt. But not immediately. So, magically, if the tide does down, the waves remain on the beach for a while. It’s fun to run after those waves rolling majestically on dry land.

It’s wrong. But would such a surreal event really hurt the experience? The entire thing is fake anyway. Isn’t it more interesting for the player if the design takes this into account? The narrative context of the holodeck sure makes this easier -maybe as of now, all the games I make should take place on a holodeck. But as mentioned before, this narrative should not be necessary. The game already is a holodeck!

I can’t think of any videogames that actively acknowledge their own fakeness, without being funny or ironic about it. But I feel that there may be a clue here to figuring out the unique aesthetic qualities of this medium.

Possibly relating to trompe l’œil paintings of the past, where the illusion only works for a brief moment, after which we return to admiring the brushwork without needing to believe we are looking at something real.

I have had this nagging suspicion lately that the feelings of immersion brought about by videogames are separate from actually believing that we are somewhere else. We never really suspend our disbelief, we just play, we imagine. But we always remain ourselves. In fact, I believe this awareness is crucial to deep aesthetic enjoyment.

When creating a simulation of a place, one of the things one needs to take care of is time. It’s a fairly pedestrian thing to do. One thinks of a day and night cycle. Sometimes it’s dark and sometimes clear. Nice to have some variation. Let’s throw in a sun so we can have lens flares. Oh, and a sunset would be so romantic. And a big full moon at night. Since we’re at the seaside, it would really make sense to have a simulation of tides as well. So sometimes the sea is far away and sometimes it is close.

Especially when the moon is full.

Why is that?

I take a step back and the utter strangeness of the situation hits me. We are in space. Not only when we are on a space ship or a remote space station. But always. Our planet is in space. This is why we have day and night in the first place, and tides. Enormous motions of enormous masses over enormous distances at enormous speeds. The mundane every-day aspects of life on this planet are the very things that connect us with the solar system, with the universe.

We sleep at night, cherry trees blossom in spring, some animals hibernate, all because of how the planets and the moon and our star behave. The tiniest creature on this planet is intimately connected to the vastness of the universe. In its day to day routine.

I have come to realize these things much more palpably through making Bientôt l’été. And seeing the ordinary simulation of time on the holodeck contrasted with the vastness of planets and stars outside, where space and time collapse into each other, where life and inertia are one. It’s all intensely moving in its majestic senselessness. It is possible to go beyond meaning. Where our heart is pulled by interplanetary forces in the direction of another human being. To love.

The framing narrative of a simulation running on a holodeck in Bientôt l’été, allows for decisions that make design a lot easier.

If moving from one place to another is too slow, I can just switch to the “cyber-layer” and fly as fast as I can. Without having to invent a narrative excuse for super-human speeds on a French beach. Or when I don’t like walking in the night, I can just switch to day time by pressing a button.

Ultimately, though, I shouldn’t need this fictional framework to give the player interfaces like that. I mean: since we are already playing the game on a computer, we are already on the holodeck! Who are we fooling anyway? Nobody actually really completely believes that they are really present in that virtual world that the videogame projects, do they? So what’s stopping us from adding convenience to the interface, even if it leads to events that would be deemed supernatural by any creature who actually takes the virtual world for the real?

Just giving the player access to desirable functionality is far more preferable to twisting and turning your story to make such events plausible. You only end up making your story stupid. And this leads to far greater disruptions of immersion than simply recognizing that the player is using a computer.

This approach is actually very compatible with how I think of playing our games as voluntary activities. You first configure the game situation to your liking and then you enjoy. Our game does not need to persuade you. We make situations. You decide what to do in them. Like an idyllic spot next to the river or even a painting hanging on the wall: you decide if you want to enjoy it. And then you do what you need to get there.

Bientôt l’été is not being designed as a game. I use videogame technology and techniques to make something that I hope will be pleasant and beautiful. I have no intention to make any specific sort of game. In fact, I am trying to avoid the kind of atmosphere that game playing creates. The physical challenge, the competitiveness, the machismo, the bragging, etc are simply not compatible with the content that I am working with.

But, oddly, it’s not so easy.

There’s only one game-like activity in the game: collecting items on the beach. It’s a simple thing. We have all done this when taking a walk at the seaside. We don’t need goals or rules or rewards or feel like we’re making “interesting choices”. We just pick up things that attract our attention. Now, in Bientôt l’été, the things you gather can be used to talk to another player, inside the café. So this activity does have a goal.

I worry about this.

In other games, collecting things is about the action. Usually the things you collect are either all the same or purely functional. It is rare for an item that you can collect to actually be pertinent to the content of the game. In Bientôt l’été, the things you collect are the content of the game, in a sense. They are phrases that I find beautiful and that I want players to think about. But since they are seeing these phrases through the action of collecting, I worry that they might be ignored. That players will start collecting for the sake of collecting.

Game structures have a tendency to trivialize everything. In fact, that’s to a large extent what they are for: to offer an environment where nothing that you do really matters. But I want things to matter in my work!

It’s easy enough to say that I should “design interactions that express the content of the piece”. But people love playing games. Even without a formal game structure, when interacting for amusement, they will quickly set goals for themselves, and even make up rules. If interactive art had existed before the other arts, I think artists would have invented painting and sculpting and cinema just to stop their viewers from trivializing the experience for themselves.

But I don’t like the unidirectionality of static media. I really want players to interact with my work, to explore, to make up their own stories, to play. But not in a game-like way. And I’m not sure how I can prevent this.

Certain places recur in in several novels of Duras. They seem to be derived from personal memories but have a strong symbolic function. When these places appear, they always have a similar history. The exterior of the café where you meet another player in Bientôt l’été will take the form of several of these buildings throughout the game. The door will always be the same, but the building around it will change.

Of course there will be a regular café. One of those typical low brow French pubs that are usually part of a long row of cafés, stores, restaurants, and residencies. Except in Bientôt l’été it will stand on its own. The sides of the building will be blank, much like the sides of many of the early villas at the seaside. The café plays a central role in Moderato Cantabile, the novel at the basis of Bientôt l’été. It is the place where the crime passionel happened that gives the two characters an excuse to meet and talk.

The villa also plays a role in Moderato Cantabile. It is where the female lead character lives. It is the home of the family that owns the factory. A place where the local bourgeoisie can indulge in their decadence. But also a place where the lonely mistress of the house slowly loses her wit. At night she wistfully stares outside her window while she hears a couple making love in the cold moonlight shadows.

The hotel is a meeting place for extramarital couples. Again, the window plays an important role as it offers an outsider, hidden in a wheat field, the opportunity to see what her lover is doing with her best friend. Or was it the other way around? Is it the lover who is curious whether she is watching?
In Bientôt l’été, the design is based on the former hotel “Roches Noires”, famously depicted by Claude Monet and inhabited by Marguerite Duras herself as well as Marcel Proust at some point.

The municipal casino serves one specific function in Duras’ œuvre: it is the place where a young woman loses her lover after he has been dancing all night with a strange woman. This event causes the young woman to lose her mind. A state that she will not recover from in years. But there is always this desire to go back to the ball room of the casino. The casino is always closed but a friendly employee is willing to show the visitor in. And then nothing happens. No memories come flooding back. No tears are shed. The episode is over.

And finally there is the colonial mansion. Referring to Duras’ childhood in French Indochina, the building appears empty, abandoned, perhaps bombed. Possibly a memory of the war (Duras was a member of the Parisian resistance during World War II and her husband was a concentration camp victim).

In keeping with the minimalist aesthetic chosen for the game, all these buildings will be rendered white, but otherwise quite realistic. Perhaps they seem to be made up of parts of each other, as if they were made from the same module kit.

Since the earliest concept of this project, there’s been a reference to chess in the design. When we decided on the turn-based conversation in the multiplayer part of Bientôt l’été it was chess more than any other game that we were thinking of. Taking turns to choose carefully what we were going to say and do —what we were going to contribute to the conversation— felt a bit like chess.

Also, as of the first prototypes, there’s been a chess board pattern on the café table. For this I originally used a texture that was made for a prototype for another game. We had this idea of creating a larger version of Vanitas, for iPad: a large box with objects that you could collect or that would appear by themselves (kicked in through a little door at the bottom of the box —very amusing). Some of these objects were chess pieces and there was a chess grid at the bottom of the box. We were hoping that people would play chess with the pieces that they found, possibly by replacing some missing pieces with one of the other objects in the box, a little bell, a bird’s skull, etc.

This idea, in turn, was based on a desire to make a virtual chess board and chess pieces for iPad. Just that: a virtual simulation of board and pieces with realistic physics but without any enforcing of game rules or A.I. or networking. The purpose was to offer a virtual chess set that two people could play with together on the same tablet.

This entire idea, somehow, found its way to Bientôt l’été. You will be able to collect chess pieces on the beach. And if you and your online partner succeed in collecting enough, you can simply play chess with each other.

For this reason, the maximum amount of objects you can collect is 16, which is the number of pieces one player needs to play chess. These will be arranged in the inventory in 2 rows of 8, mimicking the chess board layout.

I’m not sure why I’m attracted to chess. Maybe it’s just because it’s “the default game”. I don’t know. Or maybe it’s because Auriea and I enjoy playing chess together, even though neither of us is any good at it, and we don’t even do it very often. For us it’s a way to be together intimately. And chasing down each other’s pieces on the board has a gentle erotic connotation. If only because of the prominence of the archetypal male and the archetypal female in the game: King and Queen: the passive and slow King who nevertheless performs the key role versus the agile and all powerful Queen, who leaves a trail of destruction in her wake and without whom playing gets very lonely.