I say Bientôt l’été is “about love”. And that is the theme that guides the design. But what it will ultimately really be about, I don’t know. I believe in the magic of art.

I believe that artists are a sort of media or antennae that receive messages from “outside” and channel them to an audience. The artists themselves may not actually be aware of the content or meaning of their work. They just relay the message.

One can think of this as something supernatural, like a prophet receiving messages from God or like a philosopher peeping out of the cave. But it doesn’t have to be this mystical. Maybe artists are very receptive people and they absorb huge amounts of reality on a less than conscious level. And then, when they get to work, it is this unconsciously absorbed reality that guides their hand.

Artists are as much an observer of the work they create as everybody else. They see the work come into existence and it is only then that they start to understand what it might be about. Of course we imagine the work before we create it, and based on that we make assumptions about its meaning. But we never know for sure, and we need to trust our instincts when creating, more than stubbornly attempting to express this or the other meaning.

I am as curious as anybody else to know what Bientôt l’été will be about, what kinds of feelings and thoughts it will provoke. To some extent, that’s what drives my efforts. I want to know! And the only way to find out is to create and finish and release.

Maybe Roger Ebert’s instincts were correct. Maybe it’s not possible to escape the gravity of planet Game when designing interactivity. Maybe all interaction always turns into some kind of game.

Ever since reading Chris Crawford’s definition, when I say interaction I think conversation. Is a conversation a sort of game? It is, isn’t it? Like a lot of social behavior, it is governed by rules and ultimately quite playful. Even in serious situations like legal administration or funeral ceremonies, there is an element of play.

One could of course argue that the play aspect still serves the purpose of trivializing the matter. The customs and rituals surrounding law and death help us cope with the situation, by basically diverting our attention.

But they only offer this opportunity. The player does not need to accept this escape. He can still live through every emotion of the event while following the prescribed rules of behavior. In a way, the ceremony allows him to have a more personal, introverted experience of his emotions, since it formalizes the interaction with others.

So the trick seems to be to allow the playing to happen on a level where it doesn’t disturb the event. To use play as a framework, and not as an expression. Problems only occur when play gets the upper hand, when playing is done for the sake of playing.

So contrary to the general assumption in the videogames industry, play should not be challenging at all. Play should be easy, simple, strict, and well known (perhaps even rehearsed). It should create a formal context for the content. We should stop thinking of play structures in the form of challenges and rewards. But think of them as ceremonies and rituals instead. The challenges and rewards should come from the content, not the form. And that form can be quite abstract. It doesn’t need to express anything at all.

Play is the book and the language, but not the novel. Play is the table and the plate, but not the meal. Could it be that we have been mistaking the positions of horse and carriage?

Are there people who never truly experience beauty? People who live and die without ever knowing deep aesthetic delight? I think so. There may even be many.

We have entire treasure troves of beauty in our museums, our theaters, our libraries and our concert halls. The past millennium has produced more than enough exquisiteness to saturate any human life time. But to enjoy these works of art requires a certain attitude, and some education, that simply do not fit very well in our modern age. And contemporary artistic concerns have lead away from the primacy of beauty.

As a result the only beauty that is readily available is the vulgar glossy kind in magazines and stores. And it, while often pretty, never produces the deeply moving effects of artistic beauty. Glistening commodities provoke surrogate feelings that may lull our innate aesthetic desires to sleep. So much so that I fear many a person today lives and dies without ever experiencing this form of bliss, this form of wonder, this form of knowledge.

No surprise then that the world is filled with cynicism and cruelty!

This is where the creation of beauty becomes a political act. The experience of beauty touches the depths of our humanity, and it shows us a glimpse of the greatness that we are capable of. After having experienced beauty, we will no longer accept the primitive life style designed for us by capitalist consumerism. We will no longer accept the crushing of life for the purpose of profit. We will refuse to play a part in the cynical machine of neoliberal military-industrialism.

Experiencing beauty shows us how beautiful we are, as a species, as a world. Or how we can be beautiful. And that is politics.

Forcing English speakers, or Dutch speakers like myself, to say the French title of this game puts them, us, in a position of weakness, of inadequacy. Duras often explores inadequacy. And my own indulgence in making this personal game puts me in a vulnerable position.

So maybe that’s what Bientôt l’été is about? Against the grain of always being the best we can be, seeing the most spectacular, experiencing the most awesome, maybe this is an exploration of imperfection, of inadequacy, of hesitation, of insecurity.

Not to wallow in misery and self pity, but to discover the melancholic beauty of insufficiency, the enchanting nobility of fragility. The comfort we find when realizing that the other feels as awkward as we do, and the laughs we can share about it. After which we fall silent again, looking away, a tiny tear in the eye, we softly swallow, and smile. The sun is rising.

Bientôt l’été is both the most personal and formally extreme game I have worked on. So much so that I feel that after this one, I can just relax. I will have said all that I wanted to say as an artist. And I can just play for the rest of my life. Make fun games with stupid stories.

I admit I’m a bit tired. Tired of fighting against what has always seemed inevitable. Also, somehow I don’t really believe that humankind will continue for much longer. So even if my work could have any effect in the long run, it won’t, because the species will be extinct.

Sometimes it feels like I am producing archeological finds for the future. Millenia from now, alien scientists will land on this planet. Minor scientists since the serious ones had avoided Earth for centuries because the layer of junk culture produced by the last humanoid inhabitants discouraged any real interest. And it is these minor scientists from outer space who will find Bientôt l’été and use it to convince the others to get more resources for further excavations.

And this will enable the aliens to discover the Earthian beauty of romantic painting, baroque music, renaissance sculpture, gothic architecture, et cetera. And the universe will have become a better place. The End.

I’m just working all day, trying to make something beautiful and nice and fun. Little step by little step. It’s a lot of work. But we’re making progress. We know what we want to make and we’re getting there. Bit by bit.

And then I look up and see what my colleagues are releasing. Dragons! Ninjas! Shotguns! Chainsaws! Pits to jump over, ropes to swing from, fast cars, big guns. Impossible platform structures, game level architecture, mechanics based on physics. And players having so much fun.

And I look back at my work and ask myself What am I doing? What kind of medium is this? Who are these people who enjoy these games? Is that the joy they find in life?

And so I shake my head. I don’t know, man. Bientôt l’été is not that. I’m not sure what the point is. Even the supposedly enlightened journalists won’t know what to do with this one. I guess they’ll just think it’s freaky and weird. Or “artsy”. God, what am I doing?

But it needs to exist. The amount by which Bientôt l’été is different from other video games makes it seem like something heavy and monumental. But it’s not like that at all. It’s really quite simple, seen from this side of the universe. Obvious, even. Straightforward. Clear. Modest.

Why do I have to feel like a freak? I’m not the one dressing my characters in metal bikinis, having them slay dragons and commit serial murder for hours on end, or leading my players through absurd dungeons, bashing on every crate looking for loot, saving the world over and over from alien invasion, finding amusement in blood splattering all over the place or in growing fake potatoes on a fake patch of fake farm land with fake friends.

It’s amusing, of course, to some extent. And I look forward to seeing people’s reactions. But I wish things were a bit more normal sometimes.

Even though I think of my work as design, I don’t have the well defined goals that commodity creators do. I design systems of which I don’t know the outcome. I design them because I am curious to see how people will respond. What will happen to them when they play my game? I hope they enjoy it, but I have no expectations of how they do.

I do not design with a specific goal in mind, like wanting the players to feel a particular emotion, or establish some kind of rapport or understanding. It’s more the other way around. Through my work I ask a question. And I am sincerely curious for the answer.

In part because I want to know who shares my interest in the themes I am exploring. I often have a feeling that I am attracted to things that not many people care about. So the games we release are like messages in a bottle thrown into the ocean, in the hopes of finding a kindred spirit.

This is probably why many people have trouble appreciating our work. I imagine them poking at the game, trying to extract some meaning from it. Or maybe they sit there waiting for the game to hit them emotionally. But the game was designed to extract meaning from them instead and as a sort of “lab test” to find out how they would respond emotionally.

What we create is open ended, not designed to provoke a specific reaction. But when other designers notice that certain aspects do provoke certain responses, our work can inspire them to design for this specifically. Personally however, I prefer making -and playing!- games that were not designed with a specific goal in mind. I find it much more empowering to come up with my own ideas and have personal reactions, than to nicely experience the emotions the designer intended me to experience.

You really need to pick up the bottle, pull out the cork and read the note. And then I want to see your response. Do you burn the note? Eat it? Throw it away and fill the bottle with sand? That’s when things get interesting. And interactive.

Bientôt l’été is an intensely personal piece. Not so much because it talks about things that I have lived through, but because it exposes things that I hold dear. A certain way of looking at life. A way that reading Duras at an early age certainly helped form.

It exposes a certain pride in being fragile, and a love for things that in any other context would seem corny and trite. To be charmed by the vanity of a young woman. To allow the boorish bluntness of a man to arouse one. To find a fragile subtlety in something admitting the fondness of would mean public scorn. To proclaim out loud that love is everything. And to feel surprised by one’s ineptitude and often carelessness concerning the matter. And to realize that I still don’t know what love is, while I know that I do know. And to enjoy the contradictions. Above all, to enjoy the dizzying charm of contractions.

And yet, the complete exposure of my weak parts feels like a sort of strength to me. As if making all one’s secrets public makes one invulnerable. There is nothing anyone can ever say of me that I have not said of myself.

To have been there.

PS: To know that what one thought of as love when one was young is still the same as what one thinks of it now. Only now one can laugh about it too. While it remains the most solemnly serious thing. Possibly the only thing that retained its weight after all that time.

To love.

The capacity for joy is one of our most ennobling features. Joy makes us rise above ourselves. And whatever the source of this joy, we all share the feeling.

This lesson was taught to me by Amélie Nothomb in whose novel Métaphysique des Tubes, an infant is made aware of the gloriousness of its existence by enjoying a piece of chocolate.

I get frustrated sometimes when people around me don’t seem to see how wonderful some of the art is that brings me to tears. When I see people visiting a cathedral through the lens of their video camera, when they flock around the famous sculpture while ignoring the better one, when they dismiss a majestic opera as squealing fat women, when they mock the elegance of a ballet performance or when they reject a novel because it’s deemed too difficult, too weird.

But when I see how deeply they can be moved by a blockbuster movie, how a television commercial can bring tears to their eyes, how a pop hit inspires them to write poetry, I understand that they too know what it means to be alive on this planet. And this brings immense peace to my heart.

Modernist fine art has succeeded in chasing away most of the audience. To the point when today, art is considered by most to be stuffy, elitist, hypocritical, incomprehensible, arrogant, meaningless, etc. This doesn’t mean that people don’t still need art or enjoy an artistic experience. They just get their fix elsewhere. In cinema, in comics, in videogames. Many people are true art amateurs (in the sense of art lovers) without perhaps even being aware of it.

In a way it’s easier to make (modern) art. Even for people like me, critical of contemporary fine arts. Because art world residents are still well educated and aesthetically open-minded and even hungry for experiments, novelty, etc. It’s a bit like making work for your family. You can make a lot of assumptions about shared knowledge. And if people lack the knowledge, they will blame themselves for not having read this or the other philosopher rather than the art for being obscure.

Not so in videogames. Gamers tend to be quite intelligent, and often even sensitive, but most of them lack any sort of education or experience in culture and the arts. As a result, it is very difficult to move many of them with a piece that is rather specific or very subtle. Gamers are quite capable of experiencing deep aesthetic emotions during play but only when the game hits them over the head with the proverbial hammer. The content of the work needs to be simple and general and the delivery clear and unambiguous. Or their emotional connection with the game will dwindle.

That is the great challenge for artists using a popular medium.

Of course, one could say “to hell with the audience” and make work in the modernist tradition. The problem with that, however, is that most people who are into modern art don’t give a damn about videogames. And so your precious, subtle piece of art will cater to zero audience. Only gamers play games.

This is the situation: we are making art for amateurs. And I really suck at it.
I appreciate the pressure to make clear aesthetic statements. But I find it very difficult to give in to the expectations of simplicity in terms of content. I have no interest in making broad statements about the human condition or telling the ancient story again of the-feeble-solitary-creature-who-defeats-all-obstacles-against-all-odds-and-emerges-victorious-and-celebrated. I want to explore the less obvious aspects of our wonderful existence on this planet, point out things that we might not have noticed we have in common yet, celebrate the beauty of something we had not considered that way before, etc.

And with every step away from The Big Story, I see people getting off my bus. And I wonder where will I be driving this time. How many people will be left at the end of the ride? How far can I take you?