I like that Proteus and Kairo offer an alpha build of the game well before release. I am now considering this for Bientôt l’été.

There’s two reasons why I want to do this. And one why I may not: if people don’t like the unfinished game they may never give the finished one a chance when it’s done.

However, we are talking about only a very small group of people that is interested in playing unfinished versions of games. So not much harm done if they don’t like it. Some people in this small subset may, however, like the game, and if they do, they might be very keen on spreading the word about it. And that is the best publicity an independent developer can get.

I also want to hear reactions to the game, before we confront “the masses” with it. I worry about Bientôt l’été. I have no idea how people will respond. The little experience I’ve had so far with collaborators playing the game, has been tremendously helpful already to help improve the game so many more future players will enjoy it. I want more such feedback.

I’m thinking of releasing a build of the game that doesn’t include some of the features that still need a lot of work. So this build would feel fairly polished and would be fairly stable. It would just be missing some parts. Which would help to keep people interested and curious. And it would also help optimize the simple core of the game. If that part is good, not much can go wrong by adding the missing features.

So, would you buy an alpha build of Bientôt l’été? And if so, would you share your feelings about it with us? Would you share them with your friends?

Ne dites pas tout à la fois, faites durer les choses.

When I saw the final characters that Auriea created for Bientôt l’été I couldn’t help but chuckle. Just because they arrive at a moment when sexism is a hot topic in the games industry in the wake of E3. Here I was looking at two characters designed by a woman: a male character and a female character. The roles were reversed.

Completely according to the specifications inspired by the main characters in Marguerite Duras’ Moderato Cantabile, which serves as the basis for Bientôt l’été, the female character is strong, exudes authority and power and knows exactly why she’s here. She’s inspired by Anne Desbaresdes, the spouse of the business man who owns the factory and who lives in a gated mansion at the end of the Boulevard de la Mer. The male character is inspired by Chauvin, the rough factory worker who may have been stalking her, but is well aware of his social inferiority to the woman.

In Bientôt l’été, the male character looks handsome, mysterious, and highly desirable. Dressed in flimsy fabrics that you can easily imagine running your hand over while feeling every inch of the shape of his legs and shoulders and chest. He is obviously put on this planet to please womankind, and in particular the woman whom he will meet in the café at the seaside, after a lonely stroll on the beach.

Not to trivialize the serious nature of this project, but this kind of characterization fits well with Marguerite Duras. She didn’t seem to think very highly of men. But this expressed itself more in a sort of amused sympathy, not onlike how one feels towards a friendly pet. She certainly has deeply loved men. But I don’t think she ever considered them equals.

One of the great aspects of the videogame medium is that it can liberate us from the terror of storytelling. After a century of dominant linear media, humans have become storivores to an unprecedented extent. The relentless manipulation by movies, advertising, scientific discourse and propaganda has made us virtually blind for any sort of reality that cannot be framed in a neat, satisfying narrative with beginning, middle and end and a clear and simple distinction between causes and effects.

We’re addicted to linearity. Not even just to happy endings, but to endings as such. Combined with our aesthetic taste for destruction, it’s no surprise that our media are filled with apocalyptic visions. We love linearity so much that we are willing to accept predestination. Clinging to religion or darwinism, we are willing to accept complete disaster, simply because it’s a logical consequence of “the nature of man”.

Thankfully the techno-commercial complex is now offering us a way to escape the tyranny of story.

Videogames allow us to portray realities in non-linear ways. Certainly time forces the experience of the game by the player to be sequential, but it doesn’t need to be built like that. In my experience, videogames are built like little creatures. You poke them one way and they respond in some way, you poke them another way and they respond in some other way. You don’t poke them at all, and they simply do whatever they like.

And all the while the player takes as much or as little time as they want with the game. Unlike with a book or a movie, even when the player pauses, the game goes on, and the player continues to experience its emotional effects.

It strikes me that such a non-linear presentation offers a much fairer depiction of reality, of existence on this planet. The ticking clock may sometimes give us the illusion that our lives are chains of events. But when you sit down calmly, and listen to the world, and watch it happening, you realize that existence is both far more complex and much simpler.

Things happen and they happen again. Some things have happened millions of times. And we’re here to watch a few of them. Our own bodies have existed before and will exist after. With slight variations, all utterly meaningless. But beautiful nonetheless.

Things don’t have to make sense to be beautiful. Our reason is not the only connection we have to existence. And there’s many ways of thinking. Our intellect is a toy that we can play with, not a cage to reduce reality to.

My skin is covered with antennae, reaching out to take it all in. I want to see with my eyes closed, feel the sound of the ocean, touch the untouchable landscapes continuously forming in my imagination. There is no separation between me and the world. The notion of cause and effect trivializes our relationship. There’s no story here. There’s so much more. So much more.

Making art about life experiences is like saying goodbye to existence. It was nice. Thank you. Bye.

You only need a tiny bit of real life experience, to have stuff to make art about for an entire life time. Which is a good thing. Since making art is a lot of work, and while you’re doing it, you’re not experiencing life.

Existence is so immensely rich. There’s always new ways to look at even the smallest aspects of it. New ways of loving it and celebrating it and being grateful for having known it.

So much so that simply going through life without art, almost feels like not living at all, like walking blindly from cradle to grave without noticing anything. It is through art, both creation and appreciation, that we can really start seeing reality. It’s an amusing contradiction, given how art, per definition, is not real itself.

Art gives us emotional glasses that allow us to feel things that would otherwise pass us by unnoticed. It is the artifice of art that shows us the depth of the real.

Marguerite Duras, the French novelist and film maker whose work inspired Bientôt l’été, has nothing to do with science fiction or space travel whatsoever. Her work is about real modern day people in either France or colonial Asia. It’s about love, desire, loss, class, gender, madness.

Framing the story of Bientôt l’été in a holodeck on a remote space station is entirely our own invention. I’m sure it will be considered in bad taste by many Duras lovers, Duras work being well respected high literature and science fiction a staple of pulp.

Yet it feels right to me. There’s something about Duras’ writing that invokes a certain distance towards the characters. Despite of the clearly autobiographical aspects of her work, we always look at these characters, as other people, strangers, outside of us. The emotional effect of this, at least on me, is a heightened sense of empathy. It is precisely because these characters are not you, and not known to you, that you can love them so blindly.

Walking on the holodeck in Bientôt l’été with the avatar who doesn’t look at you, and when suddenly seeing through the illusion the enormity of outer space, it is no longer you looking at this story but the cosmos looking at you. And the cosmos looks at you with the benevolence one can only feel for strangers, for creatures other than yourself, or your friends or your family.

So while you might be playing a Duras story, outer space starts to represent the reader of that story. You are being watched, by your creator, by the writer of your story. And since he has written you, there is nothing you can do to disappoint him. All your quirks and doubts and fears and desires are fine by him. There is only love here.

Duras loved her characters. She lived with them. And since they were fictional and thus, in some way, perfect, her love for them was unconditional and infinite.

I’m becoming weary of this choice we have in videogames between first person perspective and third person perspective. I just want to be in the game world sometimes without having to be somebody.

In film this is perfectly normal. As a viewer you are not any of the characters. And you are not looking through an invisible character’s eyes (none of the characters in a film ever pays any attention to you).

Board games ditto. I’m not a character on the chess board. I may be moving a pawn around. But this pawn does not represent me in some way. Neither am I, the player, an entity in the fictional system that is the game. I look at it and I interact with it. Without having to be part of it.

I love virtual worlds. Realtime 3D environments that are alive, in which things happen. Is our designation of the player as one of the entities in this world a clumsy attempt to prove that indeed this world is happening in real time, and is not prerecorded, that it is alive. Is it so important that we prove this? And doesn’t the player of videogames know this by now already?

Sometimes I just want to have a world that simply exists, with characters that I can observe. Without those characters representing me or even acknowledging my existence. I want to figure out how to do this in realtime 3D.

I have been nagging quite a bit here about my inner conflicts between popular success and original quality. I apologize if it has bothered you. It bothers me too. I vastly prefer good art over popular art. I admit I’m even a bit of a snob here. But I have Walter Benjamin on my side. Popular works have simply lost their aura.

For art to be good, it needs to be very specific and very nuanced. It’s only logical that this limits the audience. For a wide appeal, the work needs to be broad and general.

But when it comes to judging my own work, I find it difficult to distinguish between good and popular. I create art for other people. I know there is a tendency among some creative people that says you should create for yourself. I simply don’t understand that. I don’t see the point.

I want other people to see my work. I want them to enjoy my work. And if and when they do, I tend to consider the work good. I’m that shallow. I believe people. So, naturally, any game of ours that reaches the biggest audience is the best game.

But this conflicts with what I say above, that good art, per definition, cannot be popular.

Extreme popularity is more or less a guarantee for low quality. But extreme obscurity is by no means a guarantee for high quality. Humans are not that different from each other. If a work is good, there generally tends to be a group of people who agree that it is.

But how large can this group become before the consensus on high quality turns into plain popularity, and thus low quality?

And is it really just a question of numbers?

I was brought up in the notion that being different is good, that being weird in some ways implies being superior. This is probably a sort of defensive rhetoric that people use to console themselves. But it gave me an acute sense of respect for originality, for deviating from norms, and also a feeling that I too should be respected for my own deviations.

In the real world however, deviation is not respected but by a few stuffy intellectuals here and there -probably also more out of self defense than anything else. What gets respect, what is admired is always things that fit well within the norms, that even in relative originality still contain a large conventional part, or are an expression of an already generally felt sentiment.

One can really only be either weird or popular. And I would probably be a much happier person if I would just accept that and stop having any kind of expectations of recognition, let alone success. Success is not for the weird. And I just don’t have it in me to be normal. Miss-educated, I’m sure. Or born in the wrong age, whatever.

This doesn’t mean that I don’t see how my work and words relate to their context, how they perhaps influenced things, or at least were ahead of their time. I should just not expect anybody else to recognize this, let alone find any value in it.

Because there isn’t much, I think. My parents greatly exaggerated the superiority of originality or being different, and overestimated its importance. It’s much more important, and even influential, to live within one’s own time, to expand on ideas that are shared by many. Anything else is just yelling in the desert. Pointless.

I can’t stop yelling. But I can stop expecting people to actually hear me. After all, I don’t really need them, do I?

I wish they would stop the dominant rhetoric of originality being desirable, the encouragement to “think different”, to have ideas “out of the box”. It’s all a lie. People cannot comprehend the extraordinary. Per definition. Only the ordinary is comprehensible.

There seems to be a correlation between motion and text. I personally dislike reading text in a game. I’m just too eager for (inter)action to just stand still and read. Even listening to a character speak gets on my nerves if it requires me to stay in one spot.

But if the text coincides with motion, I find it pleasant. The linearity of moving from one point to another meshes with the linearity of a text in a way that is aesthetically pleasing.

I have just implemented “Passing Thoughts” in Bientôt l’été and it feels strangely satisfying to see the text scroll by in overlay as I move the character through space. It even helps me to read the text and to concentrate on its emotional effect, as opposed to my earlier assumption that standing still and doing nothing was the optimal condition for focus.