Not a game at all.

I’m very sympathetic to the attempts of people like Chris Bateman to make use of the term game in a broad inclusive way. Much more sympathetic than I am to the nitpickers who have contracted the meaning of the word to only the kinds of activities that they enjoy (usually rigid formal games with specific rules, goals, challenges, conflict, competition and victory conditions). But when I play Bientôt l’été, I find it difficult to think of it as a game.

Walking my avatar on the beach doesn’t feel like playing a game. Even if the controls are very similar as in other videogames. Bientôt l’été is about doing something. Imagining being somewhere.

This has nothing to do with games at all. Unless maybe games of make belief. But even then. We don’t really believe we are there. It’s a game of imagination, of what if. It has nothing to do with formal games. In fact, it is so different that I can add chess without causing any confusion (just as one could mention chess in a novel or draw it in a painting).

Playing Bientôt l’été is about how it makes you feel to imagine being in such a situation. On a beach, in a café, in love, or not. On a space station, in a simulation, with a virtual creature. It’s not about the fiction, or its meaning. It’s about the emotions and memories triggered in you while you’re playing. These emotions are real not fictional. It’s not about empathy. It’s about you. Not how you feel about somebody else.

I guess the closest equivalent to pretending to walk on a beach in Bientôt l’été is actually walking on a real beach. Not a game. Not a fiction. Just something you do. Something that affects you emotionally and makes you think.