Introverted play.

When I design a videogame, it’s not with the idea of providing a specific experience to the player. Instead I design a spectrum of opportunities. As a result our games can’t tell you what to do in order to have fun. You’re mostly on your own. And you have to figure out for yourself how to amuse yourself with our work.

But we don’t design open worlds either. Our environments are very much authored with certain emotional effects in mind. We just don’t set up much structure to help you achieve them.

I’m not sure if this is a smart approach, but it seems to be what we are drawn to. Also as players. Nothing gives us more joy in a videogame than doing something out of our own initiative. It makes the game feel like a actually existing reality. Even if what we did clashes with the fiction of the game.

Bientôt l’été takes this approach one step further, in line with the atmosphere we want to create inspired by Marguerite Duras. It plays with emptiness and indifference as themes. The largest area in the game is a practically empty huge white room. Your avatar is dressed in white as well. They look away from you, avoid eye contact, remain isolated, introverted.

It’s not unpleasant, though. Much like it is not unpleasant in real life to sometimes be on your own, alone with yourself. To feel so connected to your environment that the wind seems to blow straight through your body. As if you simultaneously do not exist and are everything.

Then you take this introverted creature inside, to meet another, equally introverted. You try to talk. The contact is pleasant. It’s nice to hear a voice. But what can you say? What can one possibly say that will make this other person become part of us? Like the sea and the wind?

Maybe, instead, you will discover joy in the existence of something, some body, outside of yourself. Another being, whom you cannot possibly comprehend, let alone fuse with. But who is there, across the table, as aware of your existence as you are of his.

Maybe there’s other sources of joy than indifference.