This afternoon we are leaving for a short trip to Trouville-sur-Mer, a small town on the coast of Normandy where Marguerite Duras lived for long periods of her life. Aspects of Trouville appear in several of her novels and films. The sea, the beach, the boardwalk, a villa, a hotel, a casino, seagulls. So this trip is a bit of a pilgrimage. Trouville is only 4 hours away from where we live in Belgium.

I’m sure the hearts of people who have read Duras skip a beat when I mention S. Thala and T. Beach. Places that recur in her novels, the descriptions of which reminds strongly of the pictures I have seen of Trouville.

Duras’ writing warms my heart so much. I want to share this. A lot of the subtle beauty of her work gets lost in translation (especially to English). I hope our little videogame can cross that U. Bridge at least a little bit.

Duras was not the only artist enamoured with the fishermen’s village turned tourist destination. The place also inspired Dumas, Proust, Monet and Flaubert. In fact, Duras lived in an apartment in the same building Proust had more than half a century before.

Places along a river or the sea play an important role in Duras’ work. Memories from her childhood along the Mekong delta in Saigon mix with experiences from old age at the seaside in Trouville. Along with people encountered or imagined, who all get similar names, as if they belong to the same family, or doll house in the writer’s mind. Climaxed by the strange mirroring of her teenage experience as the lover of a rich Chinese man in Saigon, in her own love affair with a young man in the last years of her life, here in Trouville. Both of which are described beautifully across several of her novels.

The weather report says it’s raining in Trouville. Perfect!

I have been asked the question a few times: whether it will be possible to form same sex couples in Bientôt l’été.

Answer: no.

There will be two avatars in the game: a man and a woman. Each will have a voice: a male voice and a female voice. You choose which you play. Since players will be matched anonymously, you will not know the gender of the person you are playing with. But his or her avatar will always appear of the gender opposite to yours. If you play a man, the other player will look and sound like a woman. If you play a woman, the other player will look and sound like a man. That is the story.

There is an economic reason for doing this: allowing for same sex couples would require 2 male avatars and 2 female avatars, doubling the amount of work. But even if our budget were sufficiently large, this would create a design problem that runs contrary to the artistic concerns of this project: we would have to design avatars with specific characteristics. To differentiate the men form each other, one would have to be tall and the other muscular, one would have a beard and the other a lip piercing, etc. That is not the story. This story is about a man and a woman. Not a specific man or a specific woman.

That being said. The love of which Bientôt l’été speaks is specific. It’s about cet amour-là. It’s about love how I have experienced it in my life. And how I recognize it in Duras’ work. Sure I’ve kissed with boys when I was young. But I would never be as presumptuous as to make any statements about how it feels to be in love with another man. I cannot talk about this. I simply assume that it feels similar to being in love with a woman. And I hope that gay players can extrapolate from there.

Bientôt l’été is about something very specific. It’s about cet amour-là. About the feeling. Not about the people involved. I don’t know how many people will recognize this feeling. Or what their sexual preference will be. I’m curious to see it. I’m trying to share something here, not appeal to the desires of the masses or conform to their demands.

We’ve already made a game that features only male avatars. So those who feel like sniffing the face of another male, rubbing against his fur or sleeping in the sunshine with him, should go and enjoy!

Meanwhile I’d like to encourage gay designers to create videogames about their experiences. Instead of counting on the bland political correctness of their hetero colleagues, I want them to tell their stories, express how cet amour-là feels for them.

When we fall in love, we are overwhelmed with strong emotions, we feel so very much alive. The blood races through our veins, we are short of breath. And we don’t mind if other people see us cry -in fact we’re secretly proud of our deep emotions.

But this intensity never lasts. It couldn’t. It would probably kill us.

Most love stories are about this period, the beginning of a relationship, about falling in love. Bientôt l’été is no exception. But I still hope to capture part of what it means to be in love, to love. Steadily, far away from the distractions of falling in love.

To be grounded in life, to live with love as a permanent presence, a tenderness that makes us feel at home. And a little bit sad too, somehow. A smile holding back tears. We know that even this will not last forever. But it’s the very best we can do in life.

Sometimes it feels strange to be working on something that I doubt will find a large audience. It feels wasteful to be spending so much energy on something only a small group will appreciate. Not to mention self-indulgent, self-important.

There seems to be a correlation between popularity and convention. The more popular something is, the more conventional it turns out to be. I’m not opposed to many conventions. I quite enjoy them, like everybody else. But creatively I get impatient with building things that have already been built before, and much better than I ever could.

Some of our games are more popular than others. The ones that sit more comfortably with the conventions of the medium. Bientôt l’été will not be one if those.

Sometimes I wonder what the point is of making something that only myself and a handful of people will enjoy.

I guess such things contribute to diversity. And I do find diversity important. Especially now, in a time of Following and Liking, when we’ve all become numbers to each other. Maybe Bientôt l’été, simply by existing -even if not many play it-, can function as a reminder of being human. Which is not necessarily something lofty, something grand. But it is more than being a number.

Bientôt l’été will be another disaster to show on festivals and fairs. It’s quiet, it’s subtle, it’s slow. There’s not even a whole lot to see. To enjoy it, you’ll need to concentrate, you’ll need to carefully monitor your own feelings. It’s about stopping, being still, musing more than thinking, allowing things to float through your brain to see if they touch something. That’s when it grips you.

It won’t jump up and demand attention. It doesn’t even want to exist without you. It’s an introverted game.

It deals with the kind of emotions that push an otherwise bright and gifted woman to drink. Not depressing thoughts or fear, but the sort of nervousness that passion can arouse. When you know that your body is too small and too inadequate to deal with the storms inside.

So you sit in silence. And you try to find a way to share the gleeful despair that love brings.

The sea is a metaphor for everything.

Bientôt l’été might be the first game we make in which the avatar is just a representation of the player. Usually things are more ambiguous, and the character you control serves as both the virtual body you use to explore the virtual environment as an independent character that is part of the fiction, someone you play the game with, not as.

In the earliest prototypes of Bientôt l’été, I was playing with such ambiguity. I loved the emotional effect of having the character walk away from the camera, becoming small, against the enormity of the sky over a flat beach. But when I started implementing interactivity, trying to express the introverted contemplation I so adore in Duras’ work, this stopped making sense. In Bientôt l’été, you need to be close by the character. You play their role. It is you who takes walks on the beach and collects things. It is you who meets a stranger in a café for an intimate conversation.

The background story of the space station, does add another later to your identity, though. You are not really playing this man or woman in the coastal town. All of that is a program running on a holodeck somewhere in space. You are actually playing a space traveller engaging in a romantic game with another space dweller.

On the other hand, one could say that the whole space situation is just a metaphor and not an actual story. I love the ridiculous complexity of this medium. It feels so natural!

Au bord de la terre, le soleil est au bord de mourir.
Il meurt.

The romantic theme of Bientôt l’été combined with its two-player aspect introduce an exciting range of simulation opportunities. I’m fascinated by the complexity involved with emotions one might feel for an anonymous partner represented by a virtual character. It’s easy to accept that shooting a virtual character controlled by another player is not murder. But I think we’re far less comfortable with the idea of falling in love with a virtual character controlled by another player. Just imagine your real life partner doing it with somebody else in a game!

So I feel a little bit perverted thinking what I’m thinking.

I was already considering a way for both players to express to each other how they feel about each other when they are talking at the café table. A simple gauge expressing amount of fondness would work fine. And each player sets it for themselves (no need for complicated deduction or vague symbols: each player decides for themselves how they feel -or want to play).  And then perhaps, if both players feel exceptionally good about each other, as a sort of reward, perhaps they could get to walk on the beach together. I imagine that could feel wonderful after all the solitary walks and the awkward conversations.

And why stop there? The “love gauges” could still be present when on the beach. And when both players agree, their characters could take each other’s hand while walking. When they stand still and both players notch up the love gauge a bit more, they could embrace, and then kiss, and then…

There’s nobody else on the beach…

It’s not that cold…

The sand looks soft…

Why not?…

When I think about it, I have to admit that what is most important to me in my work, is that its players enjoy it. So I’m not as different from other game designers as I sometimes flatter myself to be. They may call it fun, and I may call it joy. But that’s only a difference in nuance, if it is one at all. During the actual work, we have the same goals: we want to make something that gives pleasure to the player .

I’m far more satisfied by a player finding joy in my work without getting any deeper meaning out of it, than I am by someone who “gets it” but didn’t find the experience enjoyable. In fact, I don’t really have any message to share, or any insight -the interactive medium forces an author somewhat in such a position, anyway. I find joy in certain things and I try to share this joy with others in my work.

If there is a difference with designers of more conventional games, then it’s simply that I find other things fun than they do. But given the variety that already exists among even conventional games, isn’t this just a matter of adding to the range, rather than a subversion of the format?

Some of us find pleasure in running races or solving puzzles, others prefer shooting alien invaders and playing saviour of the universe, and once in a while, some of us like taking long walks along an empty sea shore. Since there’s already plenty of my colleagues involved in providing opportunity for the former, I’ll happily try and cater to the latter. So that everyone may have some software that amuses them.

The effect of reduced appreciation of the craft of painting through familiarity with photography, described in the previous post, does not apply to videogames yet. Even though many videogames use photography as a reference for aesthetic quality, we can still be impressed by the images they produce. I think this is, at least in part, because we know that there exists no technology that can capture a three-dimensional reality the way a videogame presents it. We know that all of what we are looking at is hand-made. This puts videogame artists in a position similar to that of painters before photography.

When I create a 3D situation for a videogame, I want it to feel real to the player. I want the player to feel like he is in that place, or at least be reminded of what it feels like to be in a place like that. If this place is inspired by an existing place, I can only rely on photography and audio-recording for part of the presentation. For the actual mood of the place, the atmosphere, the way it feels, there is no capturing technology. I need to create computational processes and make combinations of all of the elements that make up a realtime 3D scene, to present this reality.

So when I am in that place, in the real world, my body becomes a capturing device. I don’t photograph, I don’t record, I don’t make sketches. I stand there and try to soak up the place, to store what it feels like in the memory of my body. So that, later, in the studio, I can reproduce it in a game engine. Maybe this is how painters worked before photography.

And maybe this is why those old paintings feel so much more saturated with reality than any contemporary pictures (be they photographic or painterly). The artist could only present reality as he had experienced it, reality as he had lived through it, as a human. And maybe this is why I respond so much more emotionally to a painting than to a photograph. Maybe, watching the painting, my body re-produces some of the human processes that the artist went through to produce the image. And that feeling of sharing a sliver of life with a remote person on such a physical level, is very moving to me.

Let’s hope that 3D capturing technology is not invented before the Ingres of videogames can make his work. A few centuries from now.