Contrary or nice?

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.