Simulating simulations.

It makes me very happy to hear people say that they enjoy our videogames. I’m glad that they can look past the faults in our work and find the thing that we intended the games to be.

There’s something inherently frustrating about creating with videogames technology. Everything is always a lot of work. And the only way to get even close to excellence is to throw buckets of cash at problems. Sadly those buckets tend to come with conditions and expectations that usually end up neutralizing the effect of the excellence (i.e. a pretty skin on a dead carcass).

Like the players who find ways to enjoy our work despite their lack of such excellence, we as developers need to find ways of approaching our vision without actually being able to execute it.

It’s almost like making a simulation of a simulation. Maybe in our next game you will play a gamer who plays a videogame. And then you simply imagine how great the fictional videogame is that your gamer-avatar is playing.

Perhaps this explains the emptiness in Bientôt l’été. We can’t really make the beautiful game that should exist, but we can allude to it, we can hint at it, we can evoke an emotional impression of it. Maybe that’s enough. It should be enough. It better be enough.