I love stories. But I dislike the way they occur videogames. The only reason why I appreciate cut scenes is because they offer relief from the immense tedium of most gameplay. But I don’t like the holy grail of many an intellectual game lover either: interactive storytelling where the actions of the players change the story.

This rubs me the wrong way on a philosophical level because it puts such great value on cause and effect. And I just don’t believe that reality is so simple that it can be presented as a logical linear sequence, not without losing many aspects that I find important.

We should, on the contrary, use the unique qualities of this non-linear medium to explore the many other relationships between events, between elements, or maybe even learn to enjoy the lack of any such relationship, the lack of understanding, the joy of pure existence, with no story, no explanation, just the heartbreaking beauty of being.

There is something very moving about finding each other in a situation that we both recognize but fail to understand how it happened. Something about touching the timelessness of the cosmos, perhaps. As long as things make sense as strings of cause and effect, we are only dealing with the petty issues that occur on our human time scale. But if we abandon that, maybe we can touch a reality that exists on a much larger scale, so large that time itself becomes but a minor nuisance.

Many artists whom I admire are complete jerks in real life. I am so used to this phenomena by now that I have become suspicious of any nice person who tries to be an artist. I don’t have high expectations of the work made by somebody gentle and sympathetic.

I am seldom disappointed in my prejudices. With the caveat that my taste in friends is probably rather odd. I often end up respecting these weirdos far more than people who are probably more deserving.

To me it makes sense. The -let’s call it- “lack of social skills” of many great artists is a logical consequence of my belief that an artist is a mere vessel, a medium that makes a connection between the eternal and the now.

Inside of every artist’s normal human appearance, there is another person: a wiser man, a holy man. This sacred being is by no means the “essence” of the person, or his “true self”, or anything like that. On the contrary: this is a virtually parasitic relationship in which the alien saint inside simply uses the body of the human host to give birth to works of art.

The human vessel often has no better understanding of the work produced by the saint inside than any other member of the audience. But he is aware of this process and he knows that there is a holy being living inside of him. A being that is so gentle and kind and wise and empathic that it surpasses any sentiment and intellect that humans would ever be capable of.

In the face of such absolute superiority, the human incarnation of the artist has no inclination whatsoever to compete with this divinity that he is confronted with every moment of his life. In a way, he doesn’t care about what happens to him, whether people like him or not, whether he offends his fellow earthlings or not. Because inside of him is pure nobility, the Creator of Beauty, the Generator of Meaning, the Giver of Comfort.

The artist knows that his art is his gift to the world. There is nothing his human form can do to surpass this, to bring more joy to people’s lives. So he behaves like an ass. And makes a total spectacle out of himself. And he doesn’t care.

I admire such people. To a fault, probably.

Sometimes, in a non-linear environment where multiple systems run alongside each other, things coincide in a way that feels beautiful. When this happens, I immediately feel I should make certain that this event occurs, or at least improve the chances that it might.

But part of the impact of such events is exactly that they are rare, surprising, unforeseen. This gives such an event a certain reality that a more orchestrated, controlled event does not have.

Of course, for a player coming to the game fresh, there is no difference between a chance event and an orchestrated one. Both are new for him. Only after a while may one become aware of the sort of life this system has.

A very important aspect of my work for me has nothing to do with games, or stories or any sort of meaning. It’s actually an attempt at expressing a love for reality. Reality how I find it, how I observe it. Not reality as in truth, or How Things Really Are. But the much more modest every day wonders of existence on this planet.

A fleck of dust that flies up when I pass by, the way our hallway smells of wood, the light playing with the leaves of the trees in the park, rain drops sinking into warm stone tiles, a blackbird perched on the highest chimney in the street singing its strangely random tune, the sound of church bells on Sunday morning.

And it’s not even because of the beauty of these things. It’s much more basic. It’s a sort of love, with a touch of grattitude perhaps. That’s what motivates most of my work: to pay homage to reality as it exists, to existence itself, freed from meaning, from purpose. And yes, in my work, I think the love I feel for reality is translated in the attempt to create beauty. But beauty was not the driving force, merely an expression of love.

This is probably why I like realtime 3D so much. It’s the technology that is best equipped to create reality in. Not just how things look, but the events in their entirety, what they feel like, and how things respond to my presence. One of my greatest joys in Bientôt l’été, for instance is to run towards the seagulls standing at the shoreline and make them fly away. It’s such a real thing, such an understandable thing. We know this to be a manifestation of life on earth. If the gulls would not fly away, it would feel weird -or if we would not feel inclined to run towards them, equally so, perhaps.

There’s no message here, no meaning. Just a love for reality.

When I look at Bientôt l’été I know it’s not going to make a lot of sense to many people. And I feel a bit weird about feeling concerned about this.

I remember when I was younger, in the 1980s, we took pride in being original. We liked that our work was confusing to people. We wanted to be special, to be different. To be misunderstood was an admirable quality.

Now, in the futuristic years of the 2010s, originality has become a liability. The internet has turned into a world wide popularity contest, mimicking the neoliberal free market with likes and pluses and numbers of followers.

You have to be successful now, popular, or you don’t exist. It’s a strange notion to me. In my mind success is a sure sign of mediocrity. I guess I’m getting old.

Part of what inspires me to make Bientôt l’été is my fondness of the seaside during grey weather. It’s a very common sight here in Belgium, yet one that is not popular. Our entire coast is a continuous sandy beach, 67 kilometers long. And whenever the sun dares to shine on a holiday or in the weekend, the highways are jammed with people from all over the country driving to the seaside. Maybe that’s why I like the seaside when the weather is bad: I don’t like crowds.

We were at the seaside today, for making motion captures of walking on the sand and in the wind. A completely overcast sky. Grey sand, grey water, grey clouds. Ideal in my mind and yet it didn’t draw me as it used to. Maybe I have ruined my taste for the real grey seaside by making an idealized version of it in a videogame. Or maybe I’m just sick of staring at it. I must admit that there’s also a shadow of a memory of our somewhat unsettling encounter with the sea in Trouville. Ever since, I’ve been somewhat afraid of the huge mass of water that just sits there making terrible growling noises all the time like a huge wet monster.

Technical issues also ruined the mood. Motion capture suits and computers don’t mix well with sand. And for no good reason someone started bulldozing at the foot of the dunes where we had left our stuff. So much for our peaceful little outing at the deserted seaside. But I’m extra motivated to make our own virtual seaside as lovely as possible. Because it may only exist in dreams.

This may seem like an odd thought and may lead nowhere. My lack of concern with pictorial realism is not simply aesthetic, or just practical. I really don’t feel that our games should look real. I have no interest in tricking the player into thinking that they are looking at a film. The synthetic quality of the image is very important to me.

The way in which our games should feel real is more like the way in which descriptions in novels generate a feeling of reality in our imagination, than the straight up showing of a photographic representation. The visual elements may have some resemblance to real things, but ultimately they are symbolic stand-ins, much like words. The purpose of a 3D object is not to pretend that it is a real object, but to stimulate the player to imagine such an object.

The continuous back and forth between -symbolic- presentation on the screen, in a book and my imagination is a source of great aesthetic pleasure to me. It is not the amazement caused by the fidelity of the depiction that brings me the most joy, but the realization that it doesn’t look real at all, when viewed a bit more intently.

It is in the discrepancies between the real and the picture that much of the expression happens. And I don’t intend to refer by this to the crude aesthetics of modernism in which far too little remains of the reality that I know. It is a much more subtle game. It’s a game of role-playing and deception. But it’s a lovers’ game, so it’s important that the deception is unveiled promptly after it happens.

A novel leaves a lot of room for the imagination. And there is great pleasure in such creative mental activity. I think videogames are similar. Whatever you see on the screen is only a trigger for your imagination, often connected to a memory. And when we’ve entered the personal domain of memories, we are not far from the feeling of connectedness that art often provokes. The warm glow that we feel when we realize that we have something deeply personal in common with the creator of the work, and by extension possibly with many people. That we are not alone, that there is still life in our species, and room for hope.

There is a reality to realtime 3D that has nothing to do with depiction. The simulation of space and the navigation through it, is a technique with artistic merit onto itself.

We often get distracted from it by interactivity and storytelling. But realtime 3D could be at the heart of an artistic revolution. Not games, not multimedia, not data visualization or procedural pattern generation. But the mere evocation of virtual spaces inhabited by virtual creatures, that we can explore.

This is not simply about depiction. Because the spaces, and even the characters, we create are real. They really exist. As digital objects. They are not a representation of something that exists in reality or in imagination. They exist on the same level as reality -or imagination- itself. They are fact.

We can have memories of visits to virtual places that are eerily similar to memories of real places and completely different from memories of seeing films, or paintings, or photographs or from reading books.  Any functions such places serve in terms of storytelling or artistry are superimposed on the objects that they are -even if they are manual creations too.

This is probably why realtime 3D lends itself so well to open-ended experiences. There is a lot of potential for leaving many things open to interpretation, without ever having the feeling that something was omitted with that purpose. Realtime 3D spaces and characters simply are real.

And the fact that they are still fabricated, is fascinating, and gives the medium an artistic potential that has never existed before. To make something that is a thing into itself, not a representation in some form of such a thing, and to still be able to fill it with expression and evocation, is very powerful indeed.

When I was a child my parents often took me and my slightly younger brother to the seaside. My grandfather on my father’s side had a modest villa in the Belgian dunes, called Golden Sand. I still remember the smell of waxed wood and coffee. It had one of those straw roofs. And a lush garden that was in a sort of pit. I remember lying on my belly observing insects scurrying among the sparse grass on the sandy ground.

The garden was a sort of oasis surrounded by a desert of dunes. As often as we could, my brother and I, sometimes accompanied by some nephews and nieces, would escape the garden via a narrow path through thorny bushes to go and explore the dunes. I remember the dunes as gigantic. But that was probably because we were so small. We would climb on them and run and jump off them and make quite some excursions. Occasionally entering one of the many abandoned World War 2 bunkers, where it was always cool and dark.

We often went to the sea as well. Either for long walks along the water, for afternoons of picnicking and sun bathing, or for digging canals, making sand castles, kiting or fishing shrimp with nets we pushed forward by hand in the puddles left by a retreating sea.

As I grew older, my interest in leisurely sun bathing among hundreds of other tourists faded in favor of walks along the shore when the weather was not attractive to tourists. I loved the wind and the rain, the huge clouds and the general sense of desolation. Later, when I had my own car, I would drive to the north of France off season, to find the abandoned tourist villages that dot the coast. In Belgium, the dyke along the waterfront has been fortified so to speak by ugly 1960s-style flat buildings for budget tourism, often replacing the dunes altogether. But in France, one can still get a taste of the luxurious Belle Epoque, when coastal tourism started.

It’s amusing to think of the two characters in Bientôt l’été as unique individuals that are inhabited by different players once in a while. These two creatures live in this strange land brought about by networked computers when nobody is watching. It’s not life as we know it. But it’s not death either. And it’s not purely imagination. These creatures really exist. The virtual world they inhabit exists. They are simply powerless without our attention.

We, the players, collectively breathe life into these two virtual creatures. One after the other we pass by and manipulate their astral bodies. Sometimes even with several at once, pulling their polygons in different directions. Some of us play one way, others another way. It does keep the avatars on their toes. Luckily they have the ability to multiply their appearance endlessly.

They need us for energy. We make them tick. And as a side effect, we also make decisions for them. I imagine his can lead to some surprises between the man and the woman in Bientôt l’été. Unexpected behavior could even lead to misunderstandings. Sometimes one may forget momentarily that one is controlled by others.

But I imagine the strange behaviors are good for quite a few laughs as well. When they secretly look into each other’s eyes, they recognize the contradiction between their feelings and their gestures. And they chuckle silently waiting to be abandoned once again. When they can be just themselves, even if they lose the ability to move or speak.