Bientôt l’été will probably end up being one of the “purest” videogames I made. Pure in the sense of trying hard to approach what I feel is right, fine-tuning the expression so it matches what I have in mind as closely as possible. And what I have in mind is intensely personal. So personal that I don’t expect many people to enjoy it like I do.

That is where purism leads: away from an audience. I’m essentially making a game for myself. And after Bientôt l’été, I think I’ll be ready for something else.

Because the deeper I go, the more acutely I become aware that in the deepest depths, there is nothing. That is also where purism leads. You keep chiseling away the unnecessary parts, there’s always something that seems wrong, and in the end, nothing is left.

This purism may be the way to arrive at the best possible art. And in my mind this means that it can only be enjoyed deeply by a small group of people. I don’t think this sort of elitism is a problem in and of itself. It’s just not something I want to be involved in all the time.

I will continue the production of Bientôt l’été along its current course. But I don’t think the next project I’ll be working on will be quite as purist. It’s interesting to dig this hole and enjoy the quiet and the concentration. But after this, I’ll be happy to crawl out and engage with simpler pleasures that are more easily shared.

A young man was showing us a videogame he was working on the other day. He was explaining how his game was different because it didn’t have any puzzles or combat or scores. We were expected to develop an opinion about his work, and I couldn’t help but think that this was not special at all, not anymore.

At first I was surprised, because it’s the kind of thing I have been saying and defending myself for a long time. But then I realized that this means that we have moved on, that something has happened. Something has changed.

Sure, the commercial mainstream rages on with its mediocre conservative spectacles. But there are alternatives now. We may even be approaching a situation similar to that in other media, where the popular mainstream is just banal titillation but where there is also a strong stream of other, more sincere, more artistic work.

Perhaps today the phrase “this videogame doesn’t have conventional rules or goals” has become as little revolutionary or special as “this music doesn’t have drums” or “there’s no explosions in this movie” or “this book is not structured like a hero’s journey”. Drums, explosions and heroes may still be super-popular, but everybody knows that other things exist as well, and that those things are valuable, even if, perhaps, sometimes they require a bit more attention to appreciate.

And the greatest thing about this is that suddenly the creation of artistic videogames has become a lot more challenging. It is no longer good enough to make a game without guns or platforms. We’re in the next phase now: we need to work harder. Finally!

One of the great aspects of the videogame medium is that it can liberate us from the terror of storytelling. After a century of dominant linear media, humans have become storivores to an unprecedented extent. The relentless manipulation by movies, advertising, scientific discourse and propaganda has made us virtually blind for any sort of reality that cannot be framed in a neat, satisfying narrative with beginning, middle and end and a clear and simple distinction between causes and effects.

We’re addicted to linearity. Not even just to happy endings, but to endings as such. Combined with our aesthetic taste for destruction, it’s no surprise that our media are filled with apocalyptic visions. We love linearity so much that we are willing to accept predestination. Clinging to religion or darwinism, we are willing to accept complete disaster, simply because it’s a logical consequence of “the nature of man”.

Thankfully the techno-commercial complex is now offering us a way to escape the tyranny of story.

Videogames allow us to portray realities in non-linear ways. Certainly time forces the experience of the game by the player to be sequential, but it doesn’t need to be built like that. In my experience, videogames are built like little creatures. You poke them one way and they respond in some way, you poke them another way and they respond in some other way. You don’t poke them at all, and they simply do whatever they like.

And all the while the player takes as much or as little time as they want with the game. Unlike with a book or a movie, even when the player pauses, the game goes on, and the player continues to experience its emotional effects.

It strikes me that such a non-linear presentation offers a much fairer depiction of reality, of existence on this planet. The ticking clock may sometimes give us the illusion that our lives are chains of events. But when you sit down calmly, and listen to the world, and watch it happening, you realize that existence is both far more complex and much simpler.

Things happen and they happen again. Some things have happened millions of times. And we’re here to watch a few of them. Our own bodies have existed before and will exist after. With slight variations, all utterly meaningless. But beautiful nonetheless.

Things don’t have to make sense to be beautiful. Our reason is not the only connection we have to existence. And there’s many ways of thinking. Our intellect is a toy that we can play with, not a cage to reduce reality to.

My skin is covered with antennae, reaching out to take it all in. I want to see with my eyes closed, feel the sound of the ocean, touch the untouchable landscapes continuously forming in my imagination. There is no separation between me and the world. The notion of cause and effect trivializes our relationship. There’s no story here. There’s so much more. So much more.

Making art about life experiences is like saying goodbye to existence. It was nice. Thank you. Bye.

You only need a tiny bit of real life experience, to have stuff to make art about for an entire life time. Which is a good thing. Since making art is a lot of work, and while you’re doing it, you’re not experiencing life.

Existence is so immensely rich. There’s always new ways to look at even the smallest aspects of it. New ways of loving it and celebrating it and being grateful for having known it.

So much so that simply going through life without art, almost feels like not living at all, like walking blindly from cradle to grave without noticing anything. It is through art, both creation and appreciation, that we can really start seeing reality. It’s an amusing contradiction, given how art, per definition, is not real itself.

Art gives us emotional glasses that allow us to feel things that would otherwise pass us by unnoticed. It is the artifice of art that shows us the depth of the real.

I have been nagging quite a bit here about my inner conflicts between popular success and original quality. I apologize if it has bothered you. It bothers me too. I vastly prefer good art over popular art. I admit I’m even a bit of a snob here. But I have Walter Benjamin on my side. Popular works have simply lost their aura.

For art to be good, it needs to be very specific and very nuanced. It’s only logical that this limits the audience. For a wide appeal, the work needs to be broad and general.

But when it comes to judging my own work, I find it difficult to distinguish between good and popular. I create art for other people. I know there is a tendency among some creative people that says you should create for yourself. I simply don’t understand that. I don’t see the point.

I want other people to see my work. I want them to enjoy my work. And if and when they do, I tend to consider the work good. I’m that shallow. I believe people. So, naturally, any game of ours that reaches the biggest audience is the best game.

But this conflicts with what I say above, that good art, per definition, cannot be popular.

Extreme popularity is more or less a guarantee for low quality. But extreme obscurity is by no means a guarantee for high quality. Humans are not that different from each other. If a work is good, there generally tends to be a group of people who agree that it is.

But how large can this group become before the consensus on high quality turns into plain popularity, and thus low quality?

And is it really just a question of numbers?

I was brought up in the notion that being different is good, that being weird in some ways implies being superior. This is probably a sort of defensive rhetoric that people use to console themselves. But it gave me an acute sense of respect for originality, for deviating from norms, and also a feeling that I too should be respected for my own deviations.

In the real world however, deviation is not respected but by a few stuffy intellectuals here and there -probably also more out of self defense than anything else. What gets respect, what is admired is always things that fit well within the norms, that even in relative originality still contain a large conventional part, or are an expression of an already generally felt sentiment.

One can really only be either weird or popular. And I would probably be a much happier person if I would just accept that and stop having any kind of expectations of recognition, let alone success. Success is not for the weird. And I just don’t have it in me to be normal. Miss-educated, I’m sure. Or born in the wrong age, whatever.

This doesn’t mean that I don’t see how my work and words relate to their context, how they perhaps influenced things, or at least were ahead of their time. I should just not expect anybody else to recognize this, let alone find any value in it.

Because there isn’t much, I think. My parents greatly exaggerated the superiority of originality or being different, and overestimated its importance. It’s much more important, and even influential, to live within one’s own time, to expand on ideas that are shared by many. Anything else is just yelling in the desert. Pointless.

I can’t stop yelling. But I can stop expecting people to actually hear me. After all, I don’t really need them, do I?

I wish they would stop the dominant rhetoric of originality being desirable, the encouragement to “think different”, to have ideas “out of the box”. It’s all a lie. People cannot comprehend the extraordinary. Per definition. Only the ordinary is comprehensible.

New ideas are exciting. Having an idea for a new game or a new feature in an existing project generates a lot of enthusiasm in me. If only those ideas were easy to execute! If only the path from idea to released game wasn’t so gruesome and slow!

Ironically, but probably not coincidentally, it is in the midst of such difficult and slow productions, that new ideas pop up and come to tease us, make us impatient to get the current one over with and start the new one. Or to change the current one so that the new idea can find a place in it. Or, if it’s an idea for a new feature in an existing project, to drop all the tedious but essential work in favour of trying this new and exciting idea.

Of course, every exciting new idea turns into a gruesome slow production at some point. Making new new ideas pop up and distract us. I feel like one of those abused women you see in television shows and movies: their man is no good, he beats her and she knows she should leave him. But she loves him and always comes back. In fact she begs him to stay even when she knows that it will only end in another beating.

I used to think that inspiration was a curse. It gives one new ideas but life is too short to execute all. And ideas distract from work. And only work can lead to finished results.

I have so much doubts about Bientôt l’été that it’s funny. It’s so bad that I just want to finish it, publish it, walk away from it and start working on a new project.

That’s the problem with these long productions. You have so much time to think about many things. And the world doesn’t stop either. The world in which we invented Bientôt l’été does not exist any more. It’s already an anachronism.

Earlier I was plagued by doubt about the strangeness of this project. And I was kicking myself asking why I couldn’t make something nice and normal for a change. Now I’m leaning towards the other side. Maybe Bientôt l’été still contains too many conventions, maybe it tries too hard to be liked, maybe I didn’t take things far enough.

The concept of notgames has definitely added clarity to my thinking about design. But it’s not easy! It’s not easy to ditch a decades old tradition -that was itself based on a centuries old tradition- in favor of something new, a new use that fits this new medium better. I guess it’s only normal that this is a slow process that involves a lot of failure. And I’m so happy that we’re not doing this alone.

Because of this, the new doubt expressed above is ultimately a positive doubt. Finally a context is beginning to appear in which we actually have some competition. Several developers are doing things along similar notgames lines. And it’s actually refreshing to have to wonder if our work will hold up next to theirs. Will it be good enough?

We need to find a way to sustain cultural production without the requirement of massive commercial success. The internet has given us a means to create small niches of kindred spirits. This offered the potential of small self-sustaining subcultures. But so far, as soon as finances are involved, economic principles of the old, large, mainstream, broadcast model are applied.

There is an obvious logic to the issue, nonetheless. But it hasn’t been applied successfully as far as I know. It’s simple: products that appeal to large groups of people can be sold for a low price to make their money back. Price multiplied by number of sales should equal or exceed production budget. By the same logic, products that appeal to only a small group of people should be sold for a higher price. But that is not happening.

On the contrary, even: independent games are often sold for a lower price than AAA games, even if they target a much more specialized and infinitely smaller group. I believe we should find a way to sustain smaller subcultures. We owe it to society. Without diversity, culture withers and dies, and civilization with it. I can see the symptoms of this everywhere.

Without glorifying the past (because I do feel the present offers opportunities that are potentially preferable), before we all fell prey to market logic, a certain cultural hierarchy protected smaller subcultures. Some kinds of art were considered more valuable than others, even if they did not have the same wide appeal. Classical music, opera, theater, art film and fine art have all survived thanks to this. But the pressure on these subcultures to become mass entertainment or die is very high today.

A problem with this custom, is that it only really protects traditional forms of culture. A well know illustration of this is the inability of media art to find a place at the same cultural table, for instance, despite of its widespread recognition among art circles and some undesirable compromises by artists to make their technology-based work more compatible with conventional exhibition or performance practices.

Scarcity has been one of the aspects of art that has been used successfully to justify a higher price. But the most relevant thing to do for an artist today is to use technologies that allow digital distribution. This annihilates the very notion of scarcity. And thus drops these works into an economic system where they don’t belong, and where society cannot sustain them.

The results are disastrous. Sincere talented artists are avoiding technological media (thus reducing the artistic quality of even popular entertainment), and the ones who use them are encouraged to give up on their artistic vision -so valuable for our civilization- and produce work that appeals to the masses (simply in order to sustain themselves). That work may not necessarily be bad. But it’s far from an ideal situation.

We need to find a way to support and encourage small scale contemporary cultural production. With Tale of Tales we have managed to do this more or less by combining arts funding with income generated by sales. But we know we have been very lucky. We were at the right time in the right place with the right sort of background. Yet the budgets we have access to are extremely limited. And arts funding cannot really be used for in-depth continued research and expanding on ideas (since it leans towards a degree of novelty).

Ultimately, I’d prefer a sustainable situation for many creators without needing to rely on regional governments. The idea that working with an international medium requires such localized support is rather strange. Especially given the potential reach we all have through the internet. Can we not figure out a way to solve this problem among ourselves?

I quite like the idea that very few people read these pages. It feels like we’re a secret society figuring out a lot of stuff before anybody else does.

The great advantage of the internet is also its greatest problem: the fact that everyone can participate in any discussion at any time. While this often provides for interesting new perspectives on a topic, most of the time, interventions “from outside” defuse the focus and derail the reasoning.

When somebody interferes in a trivial discussion with an original remark, it can liven things up. But when a complex train of thought is being developed on the edge of what is currently thinkable, an intrusion can only result in pulling everything back towards the center, towards the well known, the obvious, the banal.

I don’t think I would enjoy this relative obscurity quite as much if nobody would have the opportunity to know. I would probably still do this -I have in the past- but the joy would be less. But quite a number of people are keeping an eye on Tale of Tales these days. So when we do something small and silent, maybe it gets the delicious flavor of elitism, rather than the potentially pitiful taste of obscurity.

I don’t believe in crowds. I know how powerful they can be. But I do not believe that crowds lead to the best possible outcomes. Not even for themselves. I dislike that our contemporary culture values mob rule so highly. I hope the trend changes soon -I fear for mankind if it doesn’t.

In part, this is why I enjoy this relative solitude: it gives me an opportunity to explore and hopefully illustrate the superiority of dedication and focus over diffusion and consensus.