Bientôt l’été is a videogame for two players. Two players who pretend to be lovers. They pretend to be lovers separated from each other by lightyears of deep space. They have lonely walks along the shore of a simulated ocean, thinking wistful thoughts of each other. Thoughts from ancient Earth literature by Marguerite Duras.

The empty beach, the strong wind, the gentle music and a small colony of electric seagulls are their only companions. Yet their heart is full and their mind confused. Walk along the shore, until they meet the emptiness.

When it all becomes too much, they run towards each other. Enabled by intergalactic networks, they touch each other’s holographic bodies in cyberspace. A surreal game of chess becomes the apparatus through which they, man and woman, can talk. The words they have were given to them, as they have always been to lovers everywhere.

The sea remains, tugging at their hearts when not at their hairs and clothes, as it itself is tugged by the virtual moon. And as great as the desire for the other may be, they cannot stay away from the wind and the waves and the sand. Every time they find a new treasure. An abandoned tennis field. An heap of coal. A dead dog. Ordinary. Absurd. Meaningless. Yet comforting.

Enter a café, exit a villa, enter a casino, exit the ruin of an ancient colonial mansion. We know this is not real. So it doesn’t surprise us. Nothing surprises us. It doesn’t matter when you feel the pain of love. Of being in love, of falling in love, of leaving in love. There is no such thing as time. There is only love. And it never stops. No matter how much it hurts.

You are on a space station far away from earth. You are all alone. To while away the time and forget about your loneliness, you entertain yourself on the station’s holodeck. Your favorite program is a simulation of a French North-Atlantic beach.

You sometimes play a woman, sometimes a man. With this avatar you stroll along the seaside. Waves roll in and bring thoughts of desire, togetherness, complications in relationships, love. You remember these thoughts when you enter the only building on the dike.

In the café your avatar meets the avatar of another player, another lonely soul in the vastness of space fleeing their desperate realities in the arms of a digital Morpheus. The phrases from the beach come back to you. You speak them. So does your partner. A sort of conversation unfolds, a sort of contact, a connection. You drink, you smoke, you listen together to old Earth music.

And then it is time to go. You have nothing more to say. The virtual contact begins to frustrate. You want more but you cannot have it. So you run away to the calm of the ocean, the comfort of the wind and the hysteric shrieking of seagulls.

Should I add to this that Bientôt l’été is a videogame? I don’t think it is mentioned on the back of a novel, or a DVD. “This is a book about” or “To experience this film, you sit down and watch.” Of course, videogames have vastly different ways of experiencing them. But maybe that’s something that players can find out while playing.

Should I warn people that Bientôt l’été is not a conventional game? Should I allude somewhere to its artistic ambitions?

Do they need to be told explicitly and beforehand that it’s a two-player game? And how do I describe that it is only partially two-player? And not necessarily so, since there is a “simulation” mode?

What I like about this description is that it firmly states the space station and holodeck context as very concrete aspects of the game, even if during the actual playing, this may still feel a bit vague. But perhaps describing the game as such will direct players towards an interesting interpretation, an engaging experience.

Oddly, Marguerite Duras is not mentioned at all. Is this a problem? Given that I don’t expect many people in the potential audience for Bientôt l’été to be familiar with her work, does it matter at all? Maybe some people might find it interesting that part of the inspiration came from modern literature, even if they don’t know Marguerite Duras specifically.

The description neither mentions the minimalistic aesthetics of Bientôt l’été. Maybe people imagine a realistic looking beach when reading the text, or explicit depictions of sci-fi space craft. This may not be a problem if I manage to refine the aesthetics so much that it is a welcome surprise that they don’t look as expected.

There’s no mention of the music either, which is an important contributor to the atmosphere.
And there’s no mention of chess. It’s an obvious link to games, but frankly not so important to experience.

Maybe the missing aspects can go in a features list.

• experimental videogame
• work of art
• two-player mode
• quotes by contemporary French author Marguerite Duras
• unique stylized aesthetics
• atmospheric music by Walter Hus
• chess-like interface to romantic conversation

Only a little bit silly.
I should probably try to not think of Bientôt l’été as so insanely different from other videogames. Maybe it’s smarter to pretend that it’s not so different at all. Maybe it isn’t.

I’m in trouble now. When I try to describe Bientôt l’été to somebody who hasn’t played it, I don’t know what to say. I don’t know how to present it so they understand what I find interesting about this game.

In our previous games there’s always some kind of hook that we can hang up a story from. “It’s based on a fairy tale”, or “life and death in a graveyard”, or even “the legend of Salomé”. But mentioning a game inspired by the work of Marguerite Duras, I can expect mostly blank stares: Who? Or if they happen to know Marguerite Duras, they’ll probably go How? and/or Why?

I remember feeling like this about our other games too, though. That all anyone could do was play the game and make up their own mind. That it was impossible to describe. This is followed by a period of discomfort, describing the game in terms that are easy to communicate, even if they don’t cover the game exactly. And after that comes comfort with the “lies” that we are spreading about our own work. As it happens, those imperfect descriptions still tend to sound more interesting than the usual “it’s a platform game with a twist” or “it’s a puzzle game and it’s really difficult.”

So I’m hoping something similar will happen with Bientôt l’été. Right now, I cannot see any approach towards this game that would make it feel comprehensible. We can’t even say that it subverts this or that feature of conventional games, because it doesn’t. Maybe I need to add such a feature to enable description.

I guess I should practice. Attack unsuspecting game fans and just start describing Bientôt l’été to them and see how they respond. If I start babbling to you at the GDC, you know what’s going on. You have been warned!
(then again, if you’re reading this, you won’t need my elevator pitch, you will already be familiar with this project -so stop me in that case!)

With Bientôt l’été I have shifted towards a different design practice. Instead of including as much as possible in every design, I am moving towards a method of scarcity. Now I try to reduce the amount of elements to the smallest number possible. It’s a shift from glorifying the ambiguity that the interactive medium enables to seeking a sort of purity.

Ironically, this purity may help achieve a much greater emotional effect. In the past we were happy to let our players figure out for themselves how they want to play our games or how to feel about them. But as a result many people could not get anything out of them at all. Too much was open, too much mental activity was required. In a medium that excels in the visceral.

I abhor the vacuum of modernism. So I will be the last to embrace a motto like “less is more.” If only because our goal remains “more”. The goal is not to simplify things as such, but to increase their impact. And the fewer things there are, the more attention both creator and player can give them.

This attitude potentially conflicts with our “make the game first, then design it” method were it not for that other discovery: that it is ok for computer simulations to be imperfect, for computer characters to behave differently than real humans.

This may be the ultimate key to making this medium work, artistically. Theoretically it may be possible to achieve absolute realism with videogames technology. But to what end? We will never really believe that the synthetic character on the screen is an actual human (just like we don’t believe that a novel narrates things that actually happened or that an actor really feels pain when he is bitten by a monster on the screen). We have, however, another opportunity with computers, one that is lacking in all other media. Our characters can respond to the viewer!

What matters is not so much the way in which a creature can convince us that it is something else, as the power of this creature to demonstrate to us that it is, in fact, alive, really alive. When confronted with another living creature, it matters little if that creature looks and behaves like us or not. What matters is our relationship with that creature.

Videogames need not be a pictorial medium. Videogames do not need to reflect life. They can become part of it. Videogames are things that we do. Not just things that we see. Likewise, the characters in them are creatures that we meet, not just depictions of fictional characters that we can ponder. If we dare to sit there and ponder them, they should respond in protest and tell us Don’t you dare to ponder us! Talk to us instead! Play with us instead! We may not be human. But we are here, with you!

I have been posting to this blog daily for almost half a year now. All posts in some way related to Bientôt l’été, some more remotely, and some even more to what I want to do after this project. Forcing myself to post daily is not the ideal method for producing quality writing. But it has been an interesting experiment.

I started with the idea of sharing the development of the design of the game. I wanted to document the changes a design goes through, so that readers -including myself- would understand better how that works. But the blog has become a lot more. It has become a record of my doubts and uncertainty, my fear of obscurity, as much as an attempt at expressing the emotional process from inspiration to programming. And I have ventured into speculations and theories about videogames as a medium.

Sitting down every day to write something about this project has made me realize a lot of things. Not so much about this particular game perhaps, which still remains something of a mystery to me, but about what I want as a designer, as an artist. Forcing oneself to express feelings and ideas in words really helps clear one’s head. I’m not entirely convinced that this clarity will lead to the best creative results. But I like this new feeling of confidence, especially since it came out of a process of intuition and self-doubt.

We have released a new alpha version of Bientôt l’été today. People who preorder the game can play it.

In this new version Apparitions and building changes have been enabled. Thanks to the modelling efforts of Theresa Schlag and Daniel Hellweg, you can now find strange things on the beach and different buildings on the dike, often referring to Marguerite Duras’ life and work.

But the changes that I am eager to hear feedback to concern the interaction design.

In the beach scene, the waves along the sea shore bring quotes from various Marguerite Duras novels to the screen. You collect these phrases to use them in your conversation with another player in the café.

In the first alpha version, the appearance of the phrases was tied to the movement of the avatar. Standing still for a while would collect the phrase. This turned out to be unintuitive. In the current version, phrases are tied to the waves and all the phrases you see are collected without requiring any action. I removed the limit of 16 so now you can collect all 270 of them.

The biggest change pertains the two-player part in the café. In the first alpha you could put objects on the table (there was only one, but there were meant to be more) and you could select phrases from a list to speak them. That felt very rigid. Now there’s no visible phrases anymore and putting an object down on the table speaks a phrase. You select which phrase by hovering over the fields of the chess board pattern on the table top. So it looks like you’re playing a game of chess without following the rules.

Another change pertains the look and feel of the interior scene. Many alpha 1 testers mentioned a desire for more realistic detail. They wanted to see more of their partner and their surroundings, and be able to do more. But I didn’t feel comfortable with adding all that.

Instead, I redesigned the mood to feel more lonely and pensive, which I hope will reduce the desire to see more detail. The background noise is very quiet and sporadic, and you hear the sea in the distance. The random music was replaced by a sort of jukebox that plays fragments of French love songs when a player selects them. The voice of your partner now sounds as if it comes through a loudspeaker, to complement their representation as transparent hologram.

The multiplayer interface has been simplified to a single button. The choice for simulation is now a simple button in the café scene. And private sessions have been disabled. Also, when you’re in the single player part on the beach and somebody starts a two-player game in the café, a window will be opened in the building with curtains blowing in the wind. So you know somebody is there who wants to play with you.

I have redone the in-game hints and instructions to match with the interaction redesign and the new focus on mouse controls rather than keyboard. They almost seem redundant now that the interactions have become so simple.

But I don’t want players to not know how to play. Exploration is fun but exploration of controls is not very interesting. It is also completely meaningless.

I dislike telling people how to play, though. And it’s quite hard to build a robust context-sensitive real-time hint system. I’m beginning to see the advantage of using conventional controls. Maybe I should see if I can’t use those in a future game.

Unless learning the controls can somehow become a sort of playing. Extending the honest expression of the fakeness of the game in Bientôt l’été through the holodeck device, one could make learning how to control the avatar part of the story.

Maybe we could even let the player design the controls in game. For each action that the avatar can do, the game asks the player how they want to execute that action. Or better, the avatar asks the player.

I want to move away from the avatar as simulated human anyway. Avatars are simple creatures with rigid logic. Maybe we can admit that to the player. Their stupidity could perhaps be charming and might stimulate a desire in the player to help them. Or at least to play along better.

That way it wouldn’t be the game that teaches the player how to interact. Instead, the player would figure out together with the avatar how to play.

A brief Twitter discussion about authors admitting to the fictional nature of their work, made me realize that I do not think of our games as fictions. We create them to be part of reality.

We don’t tell stories. Our characters are not real people. But they are also not stand-ins for real people. They are themselves. At best they refer to archetypes, fictional characters, without becoming one themselves. I see our characters as actual creatures, with a certain form of life. Creatures with whom you can have a relationship.

Not all depictions are fictional. A photo of a landscape is not fictional because the landscape it depicts really exists. How about a painting of a landscape? And what about the painting as an object? An object of beauty that gives us real pleasure. The painting itself is not fictional. It really exists. In our world.

That’s how I think of our games. They really exist. They are digital, yes. And that allows them to exist in many copies. But it is still existence. Not representation.

I think this sets videogames apart from movies. In movies, the characters are necessarily fictional because they are played by an actor who is not the character. But videogames do not have this ambiguity. There is no actor. The character is wholly itself. It is not being played by somebody else. It exists as this creature who is part of this world.

Initially the concept of a game may be a fiction, imagined by humans. But as soon as the world is built and the characters are created, they become real. They are no longer fictional. The characters may seem to live in this strange world that is not ours. But they also live in our world, just as the game world exists in our world. The gameworld is as much a part of our world as the bowl of fruit on the table.

It makes me very happy to hear people say that they enjoy our videogames. I’m glad that they can look past the faults in our work and find the thing that we intended the games to be.

There’s something inherently frustrating about creating with videogames technology. Everything is always a lot of work. And the only way to get even close to excellence is to throw buckets of cash at problems. Sadly those buckets tend to come with conditions and expectations that usually end up neutralizing the effect of the excellence (i.e. a pretty skin on a dead carcass).

Like the players who find ways to enjoy our work despite their lack of such excellence, we as developers need to find ways of approaching our vision without actually being able to execute it.

It’s almost like making a simulation of a simulation. Maybe in our next game you will play a gamer who plays a videogame. And then you simply imagine how great the fictional videogame is that your gamer-avatar is playing.

Perhaps this explains the emptiness in Bientôt l’été. We can’t really make the beautiful game that should exist, but we can allude to it, we can hint at it, we can evoke an emotional impression of it. Maybe that’s enough. It should be enough. It better be enough.

I wish I could switch to fine tuning already. I yearn for that feeling of control. To polish the game until it is perfect. But from the looks of my to do list, there will not really be time for that before the planned released date of October. There’s a lot of small functional things and minor features I need to deal with. I may need to postpone release to have enough time for polish.

We have never done this before. We have always released on time. This is the first time in our existence as a company that we could actually afford to give ourselves more time. And I have scheduled for a buffer period before we start the next project. So maybe I should take my time with Bientôt l’été.