DOMENICO QUARANTA

A GAME FOR PLEASURE. Interview with Michael Samyn & Auriea Harvey
by Domenico Quaranta
© A Minima. All rights reserved

“We are trying to make a game that does not have any of the conventions that we dislike so much and which, in our opinion, ruin a lot of the joy that can be found in games.” With these words, Michael Samyn & Auriea Harvey are introducing 8, that should be published in January 2007. Samyn and Harvey, at first independently (as zuper! and entropy8), then together (as entropy8zuper) developed during the Nineties a double career of artists and multimedia designers. In 2002 they founded Tale of Tales, a games development studio. This name is the title of a famous collection of Italian fairy tales, Lo cunto de li cunti by Giambattista Basile (1634): but it gets also all the heritage of the frame stories (from The Arabian Nights to Boccaccio’s Decameron) and it links them to the open and non-linear narratives of the time of multimedia.

So 8, their first videogame, is inspired by the different versions of the Sleeping Beauty, and it gives them an atmosphere stolen from XIX century orientalist painting. The result should be an atypical and strangely innovative videogame which, as the authors say, wants to make us play preserving us from game’s frustrating mechanics and conventions, giving us the game experience without the struggle for winning. In this game the main character, a deaf mute 8 years old girl, is not a simple avatar of the player, but an half-autonomous character, whose behaviour can be modified by the player, but not determined. A game without levels, without menus, without words; a non-linear structure, where the amusement lies in the exploration of the narrative paths.

DQ. How is “The Tale of Tales” born? Why did an artist’s duo feel the need to create an indipendent team and work together on a videogame?
ToT. We were never simply an artists duo. We were also a design studio. But we made a point of not distinguishing between the two too much. When we designed a website, we wanted it to be meaningful. And when we made art, we wanted it to communicate.
There have always been playful elements in our work. And we have always had an interest in creating virtual environments of one kind or other.
When web technology started stagnating and the whole thing started to resemble a shopping street, we turned towards a technology that was still growing rapidly and allowed for much more sophisticated applications: real time interactive 3D.
Also we were a bit fed up with the distinction between doing commissioned jobs to earn money and making art without any financial compensation (we famously failed at making pay-per-view art on line with Skinonskinonskin). On the web people want everything for free. But they don’t mind putting down money for a disc in a box in a store. It’s a contradiction that we accepted since it allowed us to make something of our own invention – and get rewarded for it (which means we could afford to be more serious about our work).

DQ. The project will need some years to be completed. Can you tell me what should be the main stages of this process?
ToT. I think the most important stage of preproduction is behind us now. We have written a scenario, designed the game, made a demo and put together a team for production. That has taken about 2 years. We have also found publishers who are willing to invest in this production (which took another half year). Now all that is left to do is actually make the game. When this is done (in a approximately a year), the publishers will handle the marketing and distribution. And then people can buy the game and enjoy it, hopefully.

DQ. How much is the internet community involved in this process? What is its role in it?
ToT. Is there still an internet community? When we started with this medium, around 1995, we were inspired by an ambitious and intelligent group of people with near to utopian ideals. With the turn of the millenium, the internet has started to resemble the socalled real world more and more: loud, boring and dirty. It’s no longer the safe haven for the gentle and the kind that it used to be.
That being said, we still use it, perhaps nostalgically. It’s a nice medium to discuss things and research people’s responses to certain ideas. The internet is still part of our work process: Our design document is a Wiki for example, and we communicate with all of our team members through various internet technologies.

DQ. The videoludic scenary sees a continous flourishing of indipedent teams, working, like you or Selectparks (www.selectparks.net), on demanding big games or on small softwares, like instant games inspired by politics or news (I’m thinking about Newsgaming or Molleindustria). What do you think about the indipendent game design scene? What, in your opinion, will be its future? Do you think it will be able to carve out a niche for itself next to the big game corporations?
ToT. I don’t really see how this independent scene has anything to do with game design. They just seem to use games ironically for one or the other purpose. I see no proof of these people being serious about the craft of making games. I think they have already carved out a niche for themselves. Or better: they are filling a niche that has always been there. Academics researching games are very receptive to this type of stuff. I’m sure they prefer looking at intelligent parodies of first person shooters rather than Doom or Half Life. Whether that entitles them to any authority on the subject of games, game design or game culture is another question.
I think these activities are part of the art world and as such part of a self-sustaining and marginal system that has cut all ties with the world inhabited by humans because it is its only means of survival.
Within the games industry, there is also an independent games scene. Usually this is about games that can be made cheaply and sometimes they contain innovative designs that are so extreme that only other designers can appreciate them. In general, much like the open source community for other software, the independent games scene is an excuse for the games industry not to have to do anything moral, ethic or even aesthetic.

DQ. Do you think a transformation of the videogame industry and of the way to think of videogames as cultural objects is being carried out?
ToT. I see a certain polarization happening. The big publishers are getting even bigger. And their products are mostly crap that appeals to the masses. Since they are getting so huge, a lot of smaller publishers simply cease to even try and compete with them. As such, I think, there will be more opportunities in the future for more original and experimental games to be made. As long as we can find ways of making these for relatively modest budgets. I’m not sure what you mean by “videogames as cultural objects” and what it means to think about them as such. Can you explain?

DQ. Well, it’s non so easy… I think I am a victim (more or less conscious) of the idea that videogame is a “lower” cultural form, but is slowly growing and refining, becoming a culture and an art. This idea implies that the first videogames are crap only able to satisfy the need to enjoy ourselves shooting some bad guys, but that they are developing more and more fascinating and articulated narratives. And that the situation is evolving from Lumiére’s train to Ford’s indians. I guess you don’t really agree…
ToT. Well, to make the link to cinema complete, we also have to be aware of the fact that early Hollywood cinema was considered low popular culture at the time. But now all those Bogart movies are considered to be great classics. We think to some extent, society needs to develop an understanding of new media before it can appreciate them.
That being said, we totally agree with you that most videogames are of poor artistic quality. But we don’t think this will get better in general. I think there will indeed be more highly artistic videogames in the future but there will also be more crap ones.
We would argue though that the crap videogames are as much part of culture as the good ones. It’s a sad fact that in modern society everybody’s opinion is valued equally and since statistically speaking, most people only have average intelligence or sensitivity, most of modern culture will be of low quality. Especially now that education on aesthetic and intellectual issues are not a high priority, since our democratic rulers have discovered mass media.

DQ. “8″ is an ambitious project that tries to mix up a refined narrative with interaction and videoludic experience. Is it art that tries to restore itself through videogames or videogame that tries to rise to the level of art?
ToT. That’s a good question. I think it is both but also more than that. I think “8″, like a lot of our older work, is an attempt for a non-modern kind of art to come to the surface. We think that modern art is a dead end. Postmodernism has pointed this out already but has been unable to provide solutions. I don’t think future art historians will care much about the museums and galleries of the late 20th century. They will look at cinema and advertising and design to find out about our culture. And as you are probably aware of, a lot of rubbish is being created in these media. One of the reasons for this is that too many truly creative people are hiding cowardly behind their barricades of art magazines and gallery display windows.
In other words, we try to bring an artistic experience to a larger audience, yes. I think video games are art. In most cases they are bad art. But most fine art is also bad art. So “rising to the level of art” is not something videogames need to do. They are already low enough.
Some games are even better than a lot of art. Some art is better than a lot of games. If anything needs to rise to the level of art, it’s art itself.

DQ. “8″ will be a somewhat strange game: no levels, no scores, no competition, a refined design based on orientalist painting, a narrative inspired by Sleeping Beauty folktales from around the world, an autonomous character who evolves throughout the game in response to the behaviour of the player: is this your way, anti-ideological and aesthetical, to react to the aggressive and militaristic ideology of mainstream videogames?
ToT. I wouldn’t call “8″ anti-ideological. The fact that we choose to make a non violent and non competitive game that focusses on pleasure is very much an ideological statement. The fact that it displays a positive image of a culture inspired by Islam is also not without ideological implications these days. I would even say that making a game that attempts to be aesthetically pleasing is even an ideological decision.
Mainstream videogames, like all other mainstream cultural expressions are only mirrors to a society. I don’t think George Bush attacked Iraq after playing Counterstrike. If an industry behaves aggressively, it is because there is a large tolerance (of not appreciation) for this type of behaviour in society. So if we counter that in our work, we are not just attacking the videogame industry but society at large, I guess.
Western countries are becoming more and more conservative and aggressively right-wing. In Belgium this is referred to as people’s mood turning more “acid”. With our work, we are trying to counter this acidification by allowing people to have pleasure. Pleasure is the sweetness than can dissolve acidity.

DQ. What distribution system will you adopt for “8″?
ToT. “8″ will be distributed by various publishers. So we’re not alone in making decisions about this. It will definitely be available in stores where people can buy boxes with discs in them, since this is something many people still like to do. But if we can help it, we would like to have it distributed electronically as well, for the people who have the luxury of broadband internet.

Michael Samyn & Auriea Harvey
(ToT) – Tale of Tales – http://tale-of-tales.com