I love stories. But I dislike the way they occur videogames. The only reason why I appreciate cut scenes is because they offer relief from the immense tedium of most gameplay. But I don’t like the holy grail of many an intellectual game lover either: interactive storytelling where the actions of the players change the story.

This rubs me the wrong way on a philosophical level because it puts such great value on cause and effect. And I just don’t believe that reality is so simple that it can be presented as a logical linear sequence, not without losing many aspects that I find important.

We should, on the contrary, use the unique qualities of this non-linear medium to explore the many other relationships between events, between elements, or maybe even learn to enjoy the lack of any such relationship, the lack of understanding, the joy of pure existence, with no story, no explanation, just the heartbreaking beauty of being.

There is something very moving about finding each other in a situation that we both recognize but fail to understand how it happened. Something about touching the timelessness of the cosmos, perhaps. As long as things make sense as strings of cause and effect, we are only dealing with the petty issues that occur on our human time scale. But if we abandon that, maybe we can touch a reality that exists on a much larger scale, so large that time itself becomes but a minor nuisance.

Trying to use games to tell a story is like trying to use Macbeth to tell a story. It’s perfectly fine a long as you’re telling the story of Macbeth. But don’t try to talk about your walk in the park with your dog or the love of Jesus Christ for Maria Magdalena. It’s not going to work. Macbeth does not offer the means to tell those stories. Because it already is a story.

And so is “game”. Game is that story about learning how to do something and then being better at it than others. You can set this story in different contexts -much like it’s plausible to make a Macbeth that takes place during World War 2, or in a hi-tech future. The game story is often told as the victory of an initially weak individual over evil. But it remains the same story -even when it is “subverted” by making you feel bad about killing the enemies. And trying to make all content fit that model is silly.

Bientôt l’été does not offer such a story. That’s one reason why a game format wouldn’t suit it. Maybe there’s no story at all in Bientôt l’été. I certainly didn’t write one. And while the texts come from novels that do contain stories, they have been removed from their context and cannot be put back.

I try to create a certain mood in Bientôt l’été. And there may even be a sort of theme. But as much as there is no game, there is neither a story. Bientôt l’été is just and only what it is. A sort of simulation, a virtual place, something to do, something to play with. It is potentially heavy with meaning, and it is probably capable of bringing tears of joy or sorrow. But it does this, or not, on its own strength, without relying on story or game.

Whether it does this successfully or not, I do believe that this is an important field to explore: the opportunity offered by the videogames medium for creating art that is not narrative, and that introduces a new way of dealing with content, of exploring reality.

Many artists whom I admire are complete jerks in real life. I am so used to this phenomena by now that I have become suspicious of any nice person who tries to be an artist. I don’t have high expectations of the work made by somebody gentle and sympathetic.

I am seldom disappointed in my prejudices. With the caveat that my taste in friends is probably rather odd. I often end up respecting these weirdos far more than people who are probably more deserving.

To me it makes sense. The -let’s call it- “lack of social skills” of many great artists is a logical consequence of my belief that an artist is a mere vessel, a medium that makes a connection between the eternal and the now.

Inside of every artist’s normal human appearance, there is another person: a wiser man, a holy man. This sacred being is by no means the “essence” of the person, or his “true self”, or anything like that. On the contrary: this is a virtually parasitic relationship in which the alien saint inside simply uses the body of the human host to give birth to works of art.

The human vessel often has no better understanding of the work produced by the saint inside than any other member of the audience. But he is aware of this process and he knows that there is a holy being living inside of him. A being that is so gentle and kind and wise and empathic that it surpasses any sentiment and intellect that humans would ever be capable of.

In the face of such absolute superiority, the human incarnation of the artist has no inclination whatsoever to compete with this divinity that he is confronted with every moment of his life. In a way, he doesn’t care about what happens to him, whether people like him or not, whether he offends his fellow earthlings or not. Because inside of him is pure nobility, the Creator of Beauty, the Generator of Meaning, the Giver of Comfort.

The artist knows that his art is his gift to the world. There is nothing his human form can do to surpass this, to bring more joy to people’s lives. So he behaves like an ass. And makes a total spectacle out of himself. And he doesn’t care.

I admire such people. To a fault, probably.

Submitting the work-in-progress build of Bientôt l’été to IndieCade, creating screenshots, video clip and web page for the jury, and asking our collaborators to have a look, gives me that familiar feeling of trying to tell the world about what we made. Twitter! Facebook! Vimeo! Youtube! Even videogame trailer websites! Tell all the world!

But no no. Not yet. Can’t do this yet. It’s not done yet. Hush hush. Don’t tell anyone. And -heaven forbid!- don’t show anyone! Brrr. There’s still a lot of work to do!

I want to get everything just right. All the details should be perfect. More so than in any other game we’ve made. Because this one is so minimal. And it plays with emptiness as part of its content. So I don’t want it to feel unfinished or lack the subtle detail that will serve as reward for the attentive player.

This is why I have reserved almost a third of the development time for polishing. All assets need to be finished by the end of June and then Auriea and I will spend the next three months making everything as pretty as we can manage.

We just submitted a work in progress build of Bientôt l’été to IndieCade. The festival takes place around the release date of the game. So a selection would be nice promotion. Fingers crossed.

But having played some Bientôt l’été yesterday -admittedly only for testing and making screengrabs- my heart is now filled with doubt. Why do I always have to make these weird things? Next time I really should just make something that I know people will just like. Doesn’t have to be candy coated rubbish. Just something that pulls some strings that I know people who play videogames have.

Maybe I’m getting too old to still be amused by the barrage of WTFs every time we release a game. Or, maybe things have really changed in games now! But I have a feeling that instead of enjoying the current goodwill towards non-gamey games, Bientôt l’été takes things yet another few steps further. Into no man’s land.

It’s of course entirely possible that Bientôt l’été is no good. Not just too experimental or too strange, but simply not entertaining, not beautiful, not meaningful. Maybe I suck as an artist. Or I had a bad day when I thought up this game.

Or maybe I haven’t had enough sleep lately and I just need hugs.

Sometimes, in a non-linear environment where multiple systems run alongside each other, things coincide in a way that feels beautiful. When this happens, I immediately feel I should make certain that this event occurs, or at least improve the chances that it might.

But part of the impact of such events is exactly that they are rare, surprising, unforeseen. This gives such an event a certain reality that a more orchestrated, controlled event does not have.

Of course, for a player coming to the game fresh, there is no difference between a chance event and an orchestrated one. Both are new for him. Only after a while may one become aware of the sort of life this system has.

A very important aspect of my work for me has nothing to do with games, or stories or any sort of meaning. It’s actually an attempt at expressing a love for reality. Reality how I find it, how I observe it. Not reality as in truth, or How Things Really Are. But the much more modest every day wonders of existence on this planet.

A fleck of dust that flies up when I pass by, the way our hallway smells of wood, the light playing with the leaves of the trees in the park, rain drops sinking into warm stone tiles, a blackbird perched on the highest chimney in the street singing its strangely random tune, the sound of church bells on Sunday morning.

And it’s not even because of the beauty of these things. It’s much more basic. It’s a sort of love, with a touch of grattitude perhaps. That’s what motivates most of my work: to pay homage to reality as it exists, to existence itself, freed from meaning, from purpose. And yes, in my work, I think the love I feel for reality is translated in the attempt to create beauty. But beauty was not the driving force, merely an expression of love.

This is probably why I like realtime 3D so much. It’s the technology that is best equipped to create reality in. Not just how things look, but the events in their entirety, what they feel like, and how things respond to my presence. One of my greatest joys in Bientôt l’été, for instance is to run towards the seagulls standing at the shoreline and make them fly away. It’s such a real thing, such an understandable thing. We know this to be a manifestation of life on earth. If the gulls would not fly away, it would feel weird -or if we would not feel inclined to run towards them, equally so, perhaps.

There’s no message here, no meaning. Just a love for reality.

This might be a very busy time in the project, preparing a build of Bientôt l’été for IndieCade. But it’s also an easy time. Finally I have a sense of what this game will be. And I’m just working to implement everything needed for that to become a reality.

I have a long but very concrete to do list. So I’m just going down the list. Easy! It feels comfortable to know what I am doing, for a change. Not that there’s no new issues to deal with all the time. But it’s different from not knowing what you’re making at all and doubting everything.

I don’t think I like prototyping very much. The uncertainty that comes with it is unpleasant. I know it’s important to have a healthy measure of doubt when you’re creating. But in truth, I much prefer to just make something and risk utter failure, than to break my head over how to do it right. But then again, I have been known to do things that I didn’t like doing too. I’m kind of obsessed with getting results. The idea that the journey would be more important than the destination, is not something I adhere to much in my work.

So, yes, I know what Bientôt l’été is going to be. It’s a strange project. On the one hand, it’s a very modest and quaint little art game. There’s not much going on, neither in terms of story or in terms of play. And yet, on the other, it’s very rich. There’s a single player part and a online dual player part. There’s lots of text, all voice acted by two actors, and subtitled in three languages. There’s beautiful music. There’s two fully developed 3D interactive animated characters. You can choose your avatar. I still want to make an iPad extension to the game. And there’s a whole solar system, of course.

This looks like a list of disparate elements. But it all hangs together very well, I find. The fact that some aspects of previously unfinished projects have snuck in probably helps my confidence. It feels like we’re building something that we have been wanting to make for a while. I look forward to playing it!

I got up way too early this morning. Couldn’t sleep any more. Kept thinking about the work on Bientôt l’été. It’s a bit of a crunch period at the moment as we’re trying to get a presentable work-in-progress version of the game ready for IndieCade‘s late deadline on Monday.

I’m not the only one working hard. Walter Hus is delivering new music tracks at rocket speeds. Laura Raines Smith is animating the dressed characters out of Texas, while Auriea is modelling their undressed version here. Our very first intern Daniel Hellweg is working on the café table at the moment. And Theresa Schlag is taking care of the architecture. And even outside of Tale of Tales, somewhere in Russia, Universe programmer Neodrop is studying a troubled system from Bientôt l’été in an attempt to improve the performance of their wonderful visual programming tool.

This busily buzzing little hive adds quite a bit on my plate. I need to communicate with collaborators and evaluate the assets that come in, in between adding the final essential features to the programming and making the whole thing run acceptably. But they’re delivering such good stuff that I’m happy to interrupt my work for it. And after each such occasion, the game looks and sounds a little bit better.

Bientôt l’été is starting to feel very nice. Once in a while, I get a glimpse of what it can do. I’m beginning to see it, to understand its potential. Like vaguely deciphering the silhouette in the mist of a person I would like to know better. But I don’t have time to really sit down with it. And when I try, there’s always this or the other thing that urgently needs fixing. Hopefully the build for IndieCade will be playable enough to evaluate (and perhaps do some much needed playtesting).

When I look at Bientôt l’été I know it’s not going to make a lot of sense to many people. And I feel a bit weird about feeling concerned about this.

I remember when I was younger, in the 1980s, we took pride in being original. We liked that our work was confusing to people. We wanted to be special, to be different. To be misunderstood was an admirable quality.

Now, in the futuristic years of the 2010s, originality has become a liability. The internet has turned into a world wide popularity contest, mimicking the neoliberal free market with likes and pluses and numbers of followers.

You have to be successful now, popular, or you don’t exist. It’s a strange notion to me. In my mind success is a sure sign of mediocrity. I guess I’m getting old.