Sometimes when I see a bad contemporary art piece, I feel embarrassed about being a contemporary artist. Some contemporary art can seem so absurd, so grotesque, completely incomprehensible, lame and alienating. And I feel embarrassed. Because I know there are people who experience the work that I have helped create in this way. Their responses to my work are exactly the same as my responses to another contemporary art piece that I didn’t get.

I don’t want to be in that position any more. I don’t want to be that artist. I don’t want to make work that confuses people. It seems so unnecessary. And lazy in a way. I need to work harder.

Because I do want make the world a better, more beautiful place.

I have tried to do that by investigating my own preferences and trying to present the most pure version of what I find moving, what I find beautiful. I think that is what drove many decisions in Bientôt l’été.

But the “extreme” work of art that comes out of such a process is bound to alienate most people. To most people Bientôt l’été will be empty and it will not move them. Perhaps it can inspire peers who may include a milder version of some aspects of it in their own work. And this work, unlike my own, can inspire people.

In the future, I want to be like those peers. I want to at least try to make something that is refined, well balanced, accessible, understandable. Rather than presupposing that I’m always going to be too weird to ever get through to anyone outside of a small elite.

I hope that not every artist makes this choice, though. Because I do think extreme works of art can ultimately be beneficial to people, if only to keep the mainstream from becoming all too dull and dulling. Even if I cannot enjoy that extreme contemporary art myself. Some people do, and some of then will be inspired to make something that I do appreciate.

I have spent the first half of my life rejecting pop culture. Maybe I can spend the second half embracing it. That way I get the best of both worlds in a single life time.

I definitely feel a lot less hostile towards pop culture now that I have developed an interest in using some of its features in my work. But there’s still plenty wrong with modern life. And in a way this newfound enthusiasm is just another, hopefully more efficient way to achieve the same goals.

I used to be a big Nietzsche fan. But now that the whole Western world had become a Nietzschean paradise of self-indulgence and anti-morality, I’m deeply disgusted. Like the writing of De Sade, it was titillating fun as long as it was fictional. But when that stuff turns real, it’s horrible.

I do realize that a big part of this problem is caused by the current state of capitalism and cannot be fixed through aesthetics alone. But I believe the power of capitalism is waning, so this part of the problem will dissolve.

In the mean time, through my work, I want to reacquaint people with the truly beautiful, perhaps even the spiritual, with the concepts of harmony and kindness and respect. With wonder for the unknown, reverence for what is greater than us, and empathy, maybe even love, for everything else.

Put in these terms, it is clear that the corniness of popular art is highly suitable for my purpose!

It must be possible to make sincere work with elements that are usually reserved for superficial popular amusement. I guess we have done this to some extent with The Path: starting from a folk tale and designing the characters with a goth girl aesthetic in mind. These two factors probably greatly contributed to the game’s success. And they didn’t prevent us from exploring deeply artistically.

So it’s probably a good idea to embrace popular clichés. And then work with them to add more character, more depth. Nobody ever complained about an excess of depth in their entertainment. The only thing that people complain about is the gateway to this depth, which is often difficult and sometimes boring. High art sometimes take a lot of effort to enjoy. I can understand that many people don’t want to do this effort.

And I don’t think it’s necessary. I think the interactive medium offers us a way to get to a rich and deep emotional experience, without great effort. Because we have so much control over the experience. Our art can respond to the viewer and we can make them complicit. The effort, if any, can be shared by player and game.

As an artist, I have a reflex to stay far away from ubiquitous elements in popular entertainment. Zombies, vampires, superheroes, aliens, fairies, kittens, etc tend to only provoke eye rolling in me. But maybe I should not reject such elements, given their obvious appeal to large groups of people. Maybe I can embrace them and use them for my own agenda. These elements are certainly rich enough. There is no explicit requirement to make superficial entertainment with them. And perhaps using them can help avoid the problem of alienation that often occurs when art is too original, too different from the mainstream.

There has always been an implicit reductionism —minimalism, perhaps, even— in our approach to making videogames. In the sense that we always wanted to make videogames that are not games. And being a game, in the strict formal sense, was —and probably still is, for many— the core of what makes a videogame. In such a context it always felt like we were removing things, stripping things away that many might have expected.

But what we were really doing, was trying to figure out how to design videogames for a different purpose. Since we had no interest in competition or victory as subject matter, it was only logical that we weren’t going to use game-like structures. We needed to figure out other types of structures and interactions, to serve our own goals, to support and express the subject matter we did want to deal with.

Not that we had a clear message. In fact, the capacity for ambiguity is one of the main features that attracts us to the interactive medium. Interactive works of art are more about exploring possibilities than making statements for us.

We developed a design process that encouraged us to maximize the number of meanings and interpretations a work could generate. We deeply enjoy the confusing flood of ambiguities and uncertainties that comes out of such games. For us, this is a much more honest representation of reality than any sort of wisdom brought down from the mountain. We didn’t mind contradictions and dead ends. It was all part of the joy.

But now I realize that this is difficult for many people. Even enthusiastic players of our games, while knowing better than to suggest a definitive interpretation, often still tend towards making sense of it all. And that is not always a satisfying activity in works that are not designed to make sense.

Bientôt l’été is a lot more specific than our previous games but it still contains an element of open-endedness, of throwing its hands in the air exclaiming “I don’t know! You figure it out!” even if there is nothing to figure out. For all extents and purposes, Bientôt l’été is meaningless.

In my future work, I want to reject this sort of all-embracing maximalism. This inclination towards allowing the game to be anything. Because I think this results in the game being nothing for many players. And it really shouldn’t be.

So rather than adding whichever interactions that contribute to the wealth of possible meanings that the game can generate, I want to think more carefully about the player’s emotional experience. I don’t even want to make assumptions that any interactions are necessary. I want to create a pleasant, satisfying experience. With as little means as possible. Even without interaction, if that makes the experience clearer, the joy deeper.

One of the nice things about making art is that size doesn’t matter. You can make a tiny work of art for just a few people and it’s perfectly satisfying.

But is this still true when working in a popular medium and embracing it as such? I imagine it would be utterly unsatisfying to make easily accessible work and then have only a small number of people play it. When creating work with the potential of appealing to many people, you sort of have the obligation to try and reach all those people too.

That can be an expensive project. A small art project can be a bit broken. But when working in a less elitist sphere, the piece just has to function properly, technically and artistically. It just has to work. So people are not confused. So they get the work, on a first try, without effort or preparation.

This is entirely possible but it takes considerable effort and the accompanying cost. I’m attracted to the challenge. But I’m also still drawn to small projects that you make one day and publish the next. My love of early websites may never go away.

That I don’t want to make art anymore should not be construed as a recommendation for others. Even if I want to do something else, my admiration for those who do make art knows no bounds. It’s bigger than it ever was.

One of the less glorious reasons why I don’t want to make art any more, is that I don’t think I’m very good at it. And, for a change, I would like to try something that perhaps I can be good at, or of which it doesn’t matter so much whether one is good at it.

Contrary to my younger self, I do not wish the extinction of contemporary art. I wish for artists to keep trying, to keep pushing. I’ll just be one of those people who stands on the sidelines now, cheering them on, expressing my admiration without really being involved.

One of the reasons why my work of the past years has leaned towards art, is an implicit fear of corniness. There’s a lot of things that humans find beautiful or pleasant that have been featured and exploited in popular entertainment. This omni-presence has rendered such depictions or topics virtually taboo for art.

Even today, and even far outside the art world, creative people often find it difficult to include pictures of rainbows in their work, or sunsets, or kittens, or unicorns or mermaids, without a sense of irony. I personally dislike irony because it’s cheap. But I behaved in a no less cowardly fashion by simply avoiding such features altogether.

I think the inclusion of the science fiction elements in Bientôt l’été has helped me get over my fear. Even though Bientôt l’été itself is beyond a doubt intended to be a Work of Art, it contains this virtually kitschy element that may be the key to freeing myself from the timidity that has been my artistic practice.

I am no longer afraid to make videogames about things that are simply pleasant to observe. I still want to avoid the exploitation that often goes along with the use of such elements in mass media. But I think I can do this by being utterly sincere. Mass media are embarrassing because the images they produce are not good enough, not sincere enough. Because their only goal is money. But I have far more important goals.

In the first years that I created in the interactive medium (web sites from 1995 to 2002), I did so with the explicit notion that what I was making was not art. I was already very arrogant though. In the utopian spirit of early cyberspace, I considered what we were doing to be better than art.

This attitude was born out of disgust with contemporary art and its context, the art world. Going online felt like we were abandoning that sinking ship. From one day to the next, I dropped all of my analog creation and turned my back on museums and galleries.

At the same time, the distance between my graphic design work and my art suddenly vanished. Probably because working with an interactive medium implied working for people, and that implied design. And because in the early days of the web, one could get away with a lot more daring designs than one can now. In those days, it was only when we failed to achieve our creative goals that we called our work art.

But when working with videogames as a medium (as of 2002), I felt gradually pushed back into the idea of art. In part because our approach to game making deviated so much from conventions that it could only be explained as art. But also because videogames embraced a very old fashioned idea of art (beauty, emotion, etc) that I found a lot more palatable than what is considered artistic in contemporary fine art circles.

After ten years, however, I feel ready to go back. I have learned a lot. Playing the artist is a very enriching experience. I highly recommend it.

The videogames context has changed as well. Creating a game that is just meant to be beautiful or meaningful has now become acceptable. Gamers have become a lot more appreciative of videogames that are not about challenges and rewards. The medium -dare I say it?- seems to have matured a bit.

So now I can go back to that thing I wanted to make in the first place. That thing that is better than art. That thing that can only be done in the interactive medium, where you can think with your fingers and where your brain is always connected to the hive mind of the cosmos. Where suffering ceases to exist and all is joy.

I think Bientôt l’été wil be the last art game I will make. I’m kind of sick of being an artist. And Bientôt l’été has offered me sufficient opportunity for narcissism. I think I can do without for a while now. Maybe for the rest of my life.

I feel that with Bientôt l’été I will have said all I have to say as an artist. I’m very happy to have this opportunity. But after this I will be empty.

I will not stop creating. I have many plans. But I want to make things for other people now, not for myself or for how I think people should be. In a way this is far scarier than making art. If people don’t like your art, you can always think that they don’t get it or that it’s not to their taste or that it’s simply art for a small elite. As an artist you can afford to be mean spirited and contrary.

But if you make things for people, with the express purpose that they would enjoy them, if you try to give people beauty and then they reject your work. Ouch! That must hurt. I hope it doesn’t happen to me.

The visual logic of Bientôt l’été is starting to be messy. Several system have been redesigned multiple times and fragments of old logic are still present here and there, in case I change my mind. Systems are also entangled with each other more than they probably should be in an attempt to control what should be running at which time.

All of this is a result of designing the game while programming it. And I should probably remake the whole thing. But there’s no time.

In the future, I’ll schedule two production phases: one in which I figure out the design and that ends with alpha-testing and tweaking. And a second one in which the entire game is built again from scratch, according to the specifications defined in the previous phase. I imagine this second phase could be quite fast. It’s generally easy to program something if you know what the end result should be.

Prototyping is not sufficient as a first phase for the types of videogames that we want to make. Because our games are not just about interactions but rely on all facets of the software (visuals, sounds, processes, interactions, etc) for full impact. And it is especially important for testing the game on potential players that this impact can be achieved. I imagine for other games, testing if the players are having fun is sufficient. And I imagine this can be done through interaction testing alone. But we have other expectations.

Prototyping is also horrible if you are hoping to achieve a relatively specific mood. Playing around with placeholder graphics opens up a whole range of possibilities, most of which are simply not suitable or not feasible in the project at hand. This leads to frustration. Also, focusing purely on interaction tends to happen in a sort of cultural vacuum. You start creating things that feel nice, that have a certain basic emotional effect, that appeal to our animal instincts. But, apart from the fact that I find this very difficult to do, technically and design-wise, this is just not where I see our work. I’d much rather have broken mechanics in a virtual world that resonates with the player’s life experiences, than build an absurd world around some mechanics that happen to feel nice.