I was disappointed not to find Bientôt l’été among the Indiecade finalists. But I guess this is a healthy reminder of the fact that I’m not working on a popular game. Despite my new found desire to engage in such a project in the future, Bientôt l’été is not it.

Good thing too. In a way it’s easier to make art than it is to make entertainment. When you make art, all you need to do is be sincere. Your primary goal is not communication but honesty and precision. Art is closer to science than to entertainment in this way. Art will also chose truth over a simple story. Even if that truth is difficult to understand or appreciate. If the result ends up being unpopular, you can safely blame the audience, the context, the times, etc.

When making entertainment, however, you aim to please. And whether your work pleases or not is directly expressed by the audience’s response. If they don’t like it, you have failed. There’s nothing else to blame but yourself.

Not that I think Bientôt l’été is some sort of untouchable magical artistic masterpiece. I can definitely see its weaknesses. And I can understand that for some people these weaknesses might be deal breakers. Not for me, though. I’m in love with this piece. And I love everyone who loves it.

I am happy to adapt my artistic approach to the response of the audience. And I often prefer works of art myself that were tweaked to appeal more to a larger audience. But is this ultimately a good thing?

There’s a lot to say in favor of an artist being pushed to please his audience. The most obvious is that there is no point in the creation of something that brings joy to people if it, well, if it doesn’t. If one tries to make something beautiful and nobody likes it, one should probably try something else. The other important advantage, in my opinion, is that it offers an escape from the modernist cult of the personal, of extreme individualism, the artists as hero, etc. This trend has produced such astounding ugliness paired with unbelievable arrogance, that sacrificing the few exceptions feels completely justified.

There is still a strong tendency in popular opinion that argues in favor of originality: “One should just make what one really wants to make, what one is personally driven to make.” This theory is not supported by practice, however. When it is time for the proletarian preachers to put their money where their mouths are, they often opt out and choose to invest in the easier, less experimental, less original. Perhaps those pieces were still created in all honesty. People with a popular personality will create work that is popular. People with a less popular personality are still encouraged to make personal work. They just should not expect anyone to actually appreciate it. In a way, this could be interpreted as an aversion towards craft: only do what you are already good at.

Before the internet, it was a lot easier to travel one’s own path. One didn’t know if people liked or disliked one’s work. One could always blame one’s lack of success on many external factors. But the internet gave artists direct access to the opinions of their audience. And humans being what they are, negative opinions often have greater impact than positive ones.

I do believe that this is not necessarily a completely bad situation. I believe many artists’ work even improves when it is made with its audience in mind. I believe I might be one of those artists. But I can’t help but feel that there should be more support for the Einzelgängers, for people who stubbornly do what they believe in, without much support from the audience. We may be losing a lot of good ideas if, as a society, we cannot find a way to support and encourage unpopular creativity. Not everything should be decided by the market.

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.

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.

It makes me very happy to hear people say that they enjoy our videogames. I’m glad that they can look past the faults in our work and find the thing that we intended the games to be.

There’s something inherently frustrating about creating with videogames technology. Everything is always a lot of work. And the only way to get even close to excellence is to throw buckets of cash at problems. Sadly those buckets tend to come with conditions and expectations that usually end up neutralizing the effect of the excellence (i.e. a pretty skin on a dead carcass).

Like the players who find ways to enjoy our work despite their lack of such excellence, we as developers need to find ways of approaching our vision without actually being able to execute it.

It’s almost like making a simulation of a simulation. Maybe in our next game you will play a gamer who plays a videogame. And then you simply imagine how great the fictional videogame is that your gamer-avatar is playing.

Perhaps this explains the emptiness in Bientôt l’été. We can’t really make the beautiful game that should exist, but we can allude to it, we can hint at it, we can evoke an emotional impression of it. Maybe that’s enough. It should be enough. It better be enough.

Maybe Bientôt l’été will be the first entirely sincere game that we have made. And perhaps this is why, despite of being highly artistic, personal and experimental, it inspires a new direction towards a more accessible style.

All of our games have had a humorous, ironic aspect. Even The Graveyard with its solemn theme pokes fun at gamers’ expectations and parodies the try-before-you-buy system. But adding such contrary, ironic things ends up confusing many players. And even if it amuses some, it does so on a meta level, outside of the fiction and the simulation.

So what is the point? It’s insincere. To create something and then to mock it. Players can do this on their own if they like.

Mixing humor and sincerity is confusing. I personally enjoy such ambiguity. But it always disappoints me when other people don’t. When they take things seriously that we added in jest. Or when they simply don’t think our jokes are funny. They are beside the point anyway. So I should just leave them out.

I don’t think Bientôt l’été is ambiguous. It was made from a much more confident position than any of our previous work. The notgames community has in no small way contributed to a certain feeling of comfort I now have with the medium of videogames. I no longer feel I should acknowledge the videogame context in some way by adding ironic references to conventional game design. I just use the medium for what I want to make. And I only care about things made previously in this medium that I appreciate.

As a wise man once said: “Irony is for cowards.”

If we could figure out what it is that makes pop culture so popular, perhaps we could use its techniques to maximize the emotional effect of sincere works of art. Pop culture seems to always go hand in hand with business. It’s the desire for profit that drives it more than anything.

But despite of that, the public can still be touched by popular movies, books or music. Touched more even, than by works of art that were made solely out of kindness and a desire to bring beauty into this world.

We could look down on those simple souls who cry during a romantic comedy but feel nothing when reading Duras, hearing Wagner or seeing a Bernini bust. But could the themes and techniques that move the masses not be exploited for more elevated purposes? If we could make high art with the same impact as popular art, we would unite people with good taste and people with bad taste. And bring joy and beauty and sense and meaning to everyone.

A popular art that is produced in sincerity, and not for commercial gain, does not seem to exist today. But does that mean it is not possible?

There is often an element of deliberate contrariness in our initial ideas for games. We have resolved the conflict of this with our more classicist aspirations as a desire for balance: if we see too much of one thing in the world we will add a little bit of the other.

Even The Endless Forest, undoubtedly our most joyous piece so far, started as an “anti-game”: an mmo in which you play a deer and you can’t talk.

Perhaps it’s not necessarily contrariness that motivates us as curiosity. There’s often a “what if” question at the origin of an idea. What if you play an old woman and you cannot do much but walk and sit down? What if Little Red Ridinghood is actually looking for the wolf, knowing full well it will be her end? What if John the Baptist was given an opportunity to consider Salome outside of his professional duties as a prophet?

Sometimes a perfectly valid artistic choice is not the wisest decision in terms of accessibility. The French language in Bientôt l’été and the inspiration from Marguerite Duras is a recipe for disaster in an Anglo-Saxon dominated context like videogames. I admit there’s a certain f* you sentiment involved in our preference to shoot ourselves in the foot rather than be sensible.

Despite such contrary beginnings, we then always try to make the experience as nice as possible. We take pains to set a mood, to give the player sensations of being somewhere else, feeling something else. When actually making the game, we don’t want to challenge expectations any more. We just want playing to feel good.

So why don’t we just drop our jerky modernist reflex of being contrary? Wouldn’t our life be a lot easier if our games started with an idea that is already nice in concept? And then we simply build further on that. To make something that is simply nice. Maybe that is my new ambition.

Total immersion in a virtual reality is not the ideal state for appreciating interactive art, like videogames. When the game world starts feeling natural and real, it begins to disappear. And nothing in it stands out any more. Or the simulation overwhelms. With the same result.

We are dealing with synthetic images here. And with multimedia. We don’t need to simulate reality. And we can immerse players in sound too.

We need to create sufficient space around the important elements, so that the player can recognize them and pay attention to them. These elements in turn will respond to the player. And a relationship between the two will grow.

This cannot happen when everything in the game demands equal amounts of attention. The important elements need to be isolated sufficiently so that they can charm the player. And become his partner, or a comfortably recognizable feature, in the exploration of the synthetic environment.