Tale of tales Interview

Sort of. Not in a contemporary art sense though. We're definitely disconnected from that, although a lot of my friends are successful contemporary artists with gallery shows and whatnot.

We're not active in it. We go to openings. Our work is most related to new media work, or work involving computers. The more mainstream contemporary art scene we are not really part of.

The context of that was that we really appreciate craft in creation, and we saw a lot of craft video games; people learned skills and could actually make things. While in fine art, they often hired people to make the art.

We had a problem with that.

How we came to video games? We were just playing games at the weekend. Every weekend we were renting a different video game. It turned out we liked playing games more than we liked watching movies then. We were like, "Ah, this is fun." We kept looking at it thinking, "Well, this is interactive, and this is art. Why don't we make video games?" We kept playing the games, and then asking questions about them that we didn't have answers for.
We were asking, "Well, why are they like this? Why are there only like five genres?" It seemed you could do anything with it. We were like, "Well, why don't we just go do the things that we're asking all these questions about and find out why that is," so we took two years. We went to Jan Van Eyck Academy in Maastricht. We got a research fellowship there researching game design. In those two years we made our first game prototype, started going to GDC, talking to game developers, figuring out how games were made and why they were the way they were.

What we found were more questions, of course. Then we tried to figure out how we could make games and market them. At first, we were just like, "What could possibly go wrong? How could it be difficult? Let's just do this. PlayStation game, go." It turned out to be much more complicated.

There's been a change in what we do, of course too. We were always trying different things with each game. But in the context, there was a growing attention to what we did, and a growing appreciation. We saw so much potential in the medium, I think a lot of game developers maybe still dream for video games to become a more general medium that's accessible and appealing to the wider audience. We would always say, "We make games for people who don't play games," implying "yet".

We've been quite disappointed with exhibitions, where people would come and play our games, but we also wanted them to play them at home because that's what they were made for. That rarely happened. But simultaneously, the game audience became more …

I think a lot of it comes because many people who play games are very young. We watched a lot of kids grow up over our careers since we've been involved with games for quite a long time. Some kids started playing our games when they were 10, and then we talked to them again when they were 21, and they graduated from school and they're cool people now. We've had kids who were annoying to us when they were younger, write us apology letters. Like, "I realized that I said this on YouTube to you a long time ago and I really shouldn't have." It's like, "Oh thanks. You grew up. That's great."

A lot happened retroactively to our games. The Path was quite weird and controversial when it came out in 2009. But now it's seen as a timeless classic. "Oh, what a lovely game. I remember playing that when I was 14 and it's beautiful. I totally want to play it again." Whereas at the time it was controversial. Nobody remembers that. People don't remember that when The Graveyard came out it was strange and controversial, because now it's totally not.

That's very simple. It is related to what Auriea was saying about how we played games and what frustrated us. The problem is that we are both as players and as artists, very interested in those fictional experiences being in this world and meeting these characters and just feeling that presence. When there's a game structure, to me it feels like the game structure's put on top of that. Then when you start paying too much attention to that structure because you have to, because otherwise you're killed or you can't progress, and then you're mentally moved to that higher level of that abstract game structure and you're basically gaming for numbers, for winning.

If we create a virtual world, we don't want people to ascend to that systematic level and game the system. We want them to stay in that world with all its problems, and all its ambiguity, and all its strangeness because that's what we find interesting. This pure game play where you do certain things and you get rewarded and then you do other things is just not very interesting to us. It's distracting. As a player, I'm also always frustrated. You find yourself in something, "Oh, this is beautiful. Look at how that guy moves. That's really nice," and then there's a pit and you have to jump over it, and then it's over.

Which was the purpose ultimately. Disregarding the name, the purpose was to be able to discuss the creativeness of video game technology for projects that were not necessarily games. We could've called it Not Necessarily Games.

If we're going to discuss language, our point has always been that we make video games, computer games. Those don't have to be games. That is just an unfortunate name for these things that you make. We live in Belgium, we speak Dutch, where the English word game specifically means video games. In Dutch, they don't have two different words for game and play.

As we said before, we did play a lot of video games so it's not like we were unaware of what they were, it's just that we didn't agree.

What we liked in video games, we put in there. What we didn't like, we didn't put in there. But the inspiration came from video games, it is not we wanted to make whatever and just stick the label game on it. We were very much aware of that context.

There is a similarity there. I've only come to think about it that way in maybe the past eight years.

It's almost the conceptual basis for what we were doing with games. There is a contradiction there that we never reconciled. It's kind of funny to think about.

Part of that also comes from our relationship with the actual contemporary fine art outside of video games, in which there still is this tradition of the avant-garde. For us, it seems like they've been doing the same thing for over 100 years. Novelty is basically what it's all about. They try to do something that shocks people or whatever. In a way, we are the true avant-garde-ists by rejecting that tradition.

Going back to older traditions. I don't know. It's kind of a typical modernist reaction to be conservative now.

I think the main criticism was that we couldn't make our games better, quality-wise. The problem we always had, even far back as The Path, was that they were comparing it to games like Uncharted. We're sitting there like, "We made this game for 300 grand, guys. It took us three years." We were a team all-told eight people, compared to Uncharted, which had huge teams. When Thatgamecompany was making games, we would also get lumped in with them. Again, we cannot compete. They're backed by Sony; they were far better trained in terms of making video games. We're sitting there like, "Well, at least we're flattered by the comparisons," but our games never got compared to games that were made in the same way.

It wasn't until Dear Esther came out, which was made by basically Dan [Pinchbeck] and a few other people, where we felt like, "Okay, finally, a game that we can be linked together with." Before 3D, I think fully realized 3D worlds as exploration environments became a thing, around 2008, 2009 when those games came out, before that we kept getting compared to things that were far more polished. But we were flattered by the categories we were put in, even if it wasn't fair.

We wanted to work out all the bugs too, it just wasn't possible with our resources.

We generally hated that type of style because we felt like was very disingenuous. We're computer geeks, so it felt disingenuous to us to emulate a pixelated style when you don't really need to. It also didn't appeal to me as art director. I really just wasn't interested in that at all. I was always more interested in high-fidelity games. In that sense, it was no mistake to compare us to an Assassins Creed, because we loved that. At the same time, we knew that we couldn't compete because it's basically just us. We had to develop a certain philosophy it – what can we do well?

Actually, we nailed it on our first game, The Endless Forest, which I still think looks great even though we made it in 2005. It was this principle: it doesn't have to look real; it has to feel real. I was thinking about the world holistically, about this entire experience with the sound, and the animation, and the action. I think there was a lot more accepted freedom to design a navigation scheme back then. We were able to really tailor how the game worked. I think we did also on The Path, the way you have to interact with the world. Even will all the bugs, I think it's aesthetically in keeping with the look of the world.

The navigation scheme was treated as an aesthetic element, and along with this bombastic soundtrack, and all of it going together was important for us. Even if the models are not perfect in The Path, you look at it and you still feel like these girls are doing these things, and everything still feels alive. That became incredibly important. I think we also perfected that on Bientot L'ete. That's, to me, is the most beautiful synthesis of our total idea, our aesthetic ideals. The way you close your eyes and you see this wireframe world; you open again and then the time of day has changed and so have the colors and everything.

I think what we did was fairly typical for an artist to do: when you approach a technology, you try to figure out what it can do. Not what I can do with it, not a preconceived notion, but just look at it. Then dedicate yourself to bringing that out, that thing that you think it can do. A more traditional way of approaching game design, would be to decide on the look beforehand, or have a concept artist, and then try to emulate that in 3D.

We wanted our games to be beautiful, not just the preparatory sketches. We felt we needed to work in the medium. This is also why we have a preference for visual programming interfaces, preferably real-time so that we can also do the programming, all the changing of the numbers. It's not just abstract code, it's also aesthetics that happens. We're very fond of the computer as a living thing that can create life basically.

We're geeky, but not in technical programming. I think the way you described it sounds like a challenge they take up. Our challenges are elsewhere. We have to deal with how to turn off the default head bobbing in a game engine.

It’s a simple example, but when you work with Unity or with Unreal under the hood you feel that they really want you to make a first person shooter. That's been the challenge. "Okay, but we're not going to make a first person shooter," so we work around it. But what elements can be used from a first person shooter?