The creation of nothing.

I am happy with the opportunity that the new point-and-click navigation on Bientôt l’été‘s beach offers to just watch the game and think, dream, empathize. We’re often so obsessed with interactivity when making videogames that we underestimate the power of doing nothing, the luxury of just being able to watch something and allow all our energy to flow to our thought processes.

I click a distant point on the beach and my avatar starts walking towards it. I release the mouse, lean my head on my hands and watch. The waves float in, texts appear, a solitary gull in the sky. The world is alive. There is nothing movie-like about this experience, despite a superficial similarity.

I watch my avatar from the back. Nothing in her body language betrays any response. But I know how this sight makes her feel, how the words touch her. How she wants to see more, feel more, even if it hurts. There is a strange sort of self-indulgent pleasure in emotional pain. It almost feels addictive.

I’m very pleased with this game. By reducing the activity, I think I have managed to capture the wonder of the very core of many videogames. We often forget how truly remarkable it is that we have these synthetic characters traversing virtual environments. This fascinates me so much more than any sort of gameplay.