There’s a man on T. Beach. Or a woman. I don’t know. I’ll decide later. The man is alone.

There is wind. Wind and waves and sky. And the man. Or the woman.

He closes his eyes: the glowing energy of machines.

— What? This is not real!

He opens his eyes. Looks around. And around again.

Then he walks. Or she. And the gulls fly away.

The beach is endless.

Everything disappears, becomes fluid, becomes immense. We are lost in space. Looking for a man. Or a woman. To talk to. In French, if possible.

Far away. Nearly summer.

It’s frustrating how clearly I can judge the design of Bientôt l’été now. I know exactly what I would keep and what I would leave out. Why do I not see these things at the beginning of a project?

If I compare with the new projects we’re starting up, one of the reasons is probably uncontrolled enthusiasm about the concept. The idea itself is so exciting that practical execution seems like a minute issue. This is a mistake, though. Practical execution is everything. Ideas are worthless.

Another reason is probably that I have learned a lot during this project, and I am simply not the same designer any more. What seemed like a good idea six months ago, I now consider to be silly. Because I have learned a bit about me, a little bit about the public and a bit more about how to design towards that illusive dream about this medium. Or at least changed position a little, if only for a while, if only as an experiment.

Ironically, Bientôt l’été is already an old project for me. I’m almost starting to become nostalgic about it. We’ve spent so much good time together. And it’s not even finished yet. So I’ll take good care of it before I let it go. It almost feels like its birth will be a burial.

We are happy when other people like us. We are happy when other people like a thing we made. So we try to make things that other people will like. It makes us happy.

I assume there is some grand evolutionary reason for this behavior. But it doesn’t seem very productive in terms of civilization. Maybe civilization is a weak trait that evolution will remove in the long run. In the fight between nature and culture, nature always wins. At the expense of life itself, if need be. It’s for the best, I’m sure.

Maybe being wired for success is how nature tries to slow us down. The rapid evolution of civilization as a result of many people stubbornly going against the grain has lead to a very perilous situation. We are endangering the entire planet. If we would stop our revolutions and just do things that pleased other people, we would evolve a lot more slowly. And perhaps not endanger our environment so much.

Whether this is a good idea at this very moment is another matter. Maybe we should first do some more rapid thinking, before we can slow down in a world that isn’t threatening to wipe us all out.

It’s tempting to think that being forced to work so hard for acceptance, will make our work better. But is this really true? It might be if the audience we were trying to win over was the audience for literature, or film. But they don’t give a damn about what we are trying to do.

The audience we are working for is the games audience. And the only luck we will have is with people who like both games and what we do. Given the nature of these games, such people must be incredibly generous and open minded.

But who knows on what grounds our works are rejected by gamers? Or accepted for that matter. Will finding a way to please the gamer audience lead to the highest possible quality that this medium can achieve?

I worry about this. Because I care about this medium. Or what it could be. And maybe we should be more stoic in our dedication and not hold success with the gamer audience in such high regard. At this point it seems like a necessary step towards anything else. Which is a distracting pity. But we owe it to this medium, and humankind, to remain critical, both of our failings and our successes.

I was disappointed not to find Bientôt l’été among the Indiecade finalists. But I guess this is a healthy reminder of the fact that I’m not working on a popular game. Despite my new found desire to engage in such a project in the future, Bientôt l’été is not it.

Good thing too. In a way it’s easier to make art than it is to make entertainment. When you make art, all you need to do is be sincere. Your primary goal is not communication but honesty and precision. Art is closer to science than to entertainment in this way. Art will also chose truth over a simple story. Even if that truth is difficult to understand or appreciate. If the result ends up being unpopular, you can safely blame the audience, the context, the times, etc.

When making entertainment, however, you aim to please. And whether your work pleases or not is directly expressed by the audience’s response. If they don’t like it, you have failed. There’s nothing else to blame but yourself.

Not that I think Bientôt l’été is some sort of untouchable magical artistic masterpiece. I can definitely see its weaknesses. And I can understand that for some people these weaknesses might be deal breakers. Not for me, though. I’m in love with this piece. And I love everyone who loves it.

I am happy to adapt my artistic approach to the response of the audience. And I often prefer works of art myself that were tweaked to appeal more to a larger audience. But is this ultimately a good thing?

There’s a lot to say in favor of an artist being pushed to please his audience. The most obvious is that there is no point in the creation of something that brings joy to people if it, well, if it doesn’t. If one tries to make something beautiful and nobody likes it, one should probably try something else. The other important advantage, in my opinion, is that it offers an escape from the modernist cult of the personal, of extreme individualism, the artists as hero, etc. This trend has produced such astounding ugliness paired with unbelievable arrogance, that sacrificing the few exceptions feels completely justified.

There is still a strong tendency in popular opinion that argues in favor of originality: “One should just make what one really wants to make, what one is personally driven to make.” This theory is not supported by practice, however. When it is time for the proletarian preachers to put their money where their mouths are, they often opt out and choose to invest in the easier, less experimental, less original. Perhaps those pieces were still created in all honesty. People with a popular personality will create work that is popular. People with a less popular personality are still encouraged to make personal work. They just should not expect anyone to actually appreciate it. In a way, this could be interpreted as an aversion towards craft: only do what you are already good at.

Before the internet, it was a lot easier to travel one’s own path. One didn’t know if people liked or disliked one’s work. One could always blame one’s lack of success on many external factors. But the internet gave artists direct access to the opinions of their audience. And humans being what they are, negative opinions often have greater impact than positive ones.

I do believe that this is not necessarily a completely bad situation. I believe many artists’ work even improves when it is made with its audience in mind. I believe I might be one of those artists. But I can’t help but feel that there should be more support for the Einzelgängers, for people who stubbornly do what they believe in, without much support from the audience. We may be losing a lot of good ideas if, as a society, we cannot find a way to support and encourage unpopular creativity. Not everything should be decided by the market.

In my efforts to come up with a description of Bientôt l’été for potential players, I had forgotten about something. Auriea reminded me of it when I told her about the presentation of a new project to the Notgames Critique participants last Wednesday in Köln. I explained the concept of this new game to nothing but blank stares and blinking eyes. But after I showed the early prototypes, a lot of encouraging reactions bubbled up.

We get that all the time. Our games are based on weird ideas. But we do try to make them into pleasant experiences. On the surface, the ideas don’t work, or are too flimsy. But when realized as interactive environments, they can bring deep joy to many players.

This is not really a coincidence. We feel challenged by unlikely proposals. Making something that sounds plausible does not get our creative juices flowing. So we end up making multiplayer games in which you can’t speak, games about old ladies, games in which you win by losing and games in which nothing happens. We find such ideas exciting. Because they are so unlikely, because it’s hard to imagine what such a game would be like. But I should understand that other people probably don’t share our enthusiasm.

So trying to describe the concepts or even the stories of our games as an introduction to potential players is probably a bad idea. That doesn’t mean that all we can do is hope that they play the games and make up their own mind. What we should do is not describe the concept but the execution, the end result. We should talk about the atmosphere we create, the thoughts and feelings the game might provoke, the aesthetics, etc. I’ll try that next.

My desires for what I ultimately want Bientôt l’été to be are being torn between two extremes. On the one hand there is my love and admiration for Marguerite Duras, whose life, writing and films the immense beauty of which I cannot but want to pay tribute to. On the other hand there’s the medium that I work in and what I know of its audience.

This is not a choice between high art and low art. It is a choice been different kinds of pleasures.

I deeply enjoy the confusing, cerebral, ambiguous but also charmingly naive and seductively romantic work of Duras. And part if this joy comes from knowing that not many people share it. Not that Duras doesn’t have a big readership -she is one of the most famous French contemporary writers. But the pleasure feels so personal that it cannot really be shared.

Videogames offer another type of pleasure. Far less cerebral, but certainly not less emotional. I have always thought of interactive media as a way to connect to people much more directly. On an almost subconscious level, beyond the limitations of language, and even culture to some extent. Perhaps videogames are the medium must closely related to music. They certainly share some of its properties.

But how can I bring these two tastes together? Can they even co-exist? And should I even bother with Duras, given that my love for her work is so personal and that there is hardly any overlap with games culture. I guess in the end, I have no other guide than my inadequate heart. And I am cursed to make a(nother?) torn piece.

Even more so than the previous description, this is how I might explain Bientôt l’été in person, to a stranger or a friend, casually.

Bientôt l’été is a videogame in which you walk on the beach. There’s not much else to do, or to see. It’s mostly about experiencing a certain mood. There’s not even much of a story.

As you walk on the beach, you can see phrases of text appear, short quotes from novels by French writer Marguerite Duras. Many of these refer to love and relationships.

In the second part of the game, which takes place indoors, the phrases that you saw can be used to communicate with another player. You sit on opposite sides of a small café table. To say something, you move chess pieces across the chess board pattern on the table top. All spoken text is in French. But there’s subtitles in English and some other languages. You can also drink and smoke and listen to old French songs.

The whole thing takes place on a holodeck of a remote space station. The person you talk to is a transparent hologram and talks with a machine-like voice. Also, when you close your eyes in the game, you can see very digital looking grids of pink and blue neon lines.

Once in a while you find something on the beach. When you do, you get another chess piece. You could collect all chess pieces and play online chess. But that’s not really the point, of course. It’s just a pleasant, atmospheric experience that may perhaps inspire some interesting thoughts about your life, about love, about loneliness maybe. Not in a dark and brooding way, but rather relaxing and meditative.

Perhaps it’s not necessary to explain the entire game. Maybe I should think about the highlights and only mention those. Either briefly, or expand on some details.

Bientôt l’été is a videogame in which you take walks on an empty beach. The game plays in third person and you choose whether you want to play a man or a woman. On the beach, you see phrases appear, often related to love. All you do is walk.

There is one building on the dike. When you enter it, you sit down at a small café table decorated with a chess board pattern. Soon another character comes and sits across from you. This other character is in fact another player who, like you, is playing Bientôt l’été, somewhere on the internet. If you chose to play the man, the other player shows up as a woman, disregarding their own choice.

The phrases you saw on the beach are now available for you to use in a conversation with the other player. By moving a chess piece over the table top, you select what you want to say. All you do is talk.

The other player looks transparent, and so do their chess pieces. And their voice sounds like it comes from a loudspeaker. When you leave the café, you find a strange object, a different one every time. It looks a bit glitchy and when you approach it, it disappears. And if you walk very far along the beach, the sky becomes transparent and turns into a giant window through which you can see stars and planets, even during the day time.

As it turns out, the entire world your avatar lives in is artificial. The other player is real. But they are playing on another artificial world, far away from yours. When you close your eyes in the game, you get an impression of the computer systems that are running this simulation.

In a way, Bientôt l’été is a metaphor for playing videogames. And for the contact we have with other people through the internet, very far and yet close. I met my wife through the internet. She co-directed the game and designed the characters. So, in a way, Bientôt l’été is about us. Welcome to our world. Hope you feel comfortable.