Fear of games.

Bientôt l’été is not being designed as a game. I use videogame technology and techniques to make something that I hope will be pleasant and beautiful. I have no intention to make any specific sort of game. In fact, I am trying to avoid the kind of atmosphere that game playing creates. The physical challenge, the competitiveness, the machismo, the bragging, etc are simply not compatible with the content that I am working with.

But, oddly, it’s not so easy.

There’s only one game-like activity in the game: collecting items on the beach. It’s a simple thing. We have all done this when taking a walk at the seaside. We don’t need goals or rules or rewards or feel like we’re making “interesting choices”. We just pick up things that attract our attention. Now, in Bientôt l’été, the things you gather can be used to talk to another player, inside the café. So this activity does have a goal.

I worry about this.

In other games, collecting things is about the action. Usually the things you collect are either all the same or purely functional. It is rare for an item that you can collect to actually be pertinent to the content of the game. In Bientôt l’été, the things you collect are the content of the game, in a sense. They are phrases that I find beautiful and that I want players to think about. But since they are seeing these phrases through the action of collecting, I worry that they might be ignored. That players will start collecting for the sake of collecting.

Game structures have a tendency to trivialize everything. In fact, that’s to a large extent what they are for: to offer an environment where nothing that you do really matters. But I want things to matter in my work!

It’s easy enough to say that I should “design interactions that express the content of the piece”. But people love playing games. Even without a formal game structure, when interacting for amusement, they will quickly set goals for themselves, and even make up rules. If interactive art had existed before the other arts, I think artists would have invented painting and sculpting and cinema just to stop their viewers from trivializing the experience for themselves.

But I don’t like the unidirectionality of static media. I really want players to interact with my work, to explore, to make up their own stories, to play. But not in a game-like way. And I’m not sure how I can prevent this.