interview

Essays In Conversation 4: Video Game Art Shows and Third-Places

Eron Rauch — Thu, 15 Feb 2018 10:54:27 +0000

Essays In Conversation 4: Video Game Art Shows and Third-Places

Eron Rauch Do. 15 Feb 2018 - 11:54

Curating artwork that deals with video games has a number of unique and often hidden challenges. In the past, most video game art shows took place at informal or mixed-use fan spaces like comic book stores, parties, or conventions. As video games become more mainstream, and the fine art world increasingly engages with video games and video game culture, the venues and curation of these shows become critical factors for how these broader audiences experience the art.

Fresh from curating and installing the art show “Screen Knowledges: Photography in the Era of Videogames” at a space called ETA (a hybrid music venue, bar, and gallery in the trendy Highland Park neighborhood of Los Angeles) Kent Sheely and Eron Rauch sat down to share some of what they learned from curating the show.

Eron: The installation of Screen Knowledges took better part of a day, so we had quite a while to chat as we worked. One of the things that stuck with me was that you mentioned you really loved art shows in bars. How does that display space change the process both as an artist and the viewing process of someone who's coming to see the work?

Kent: What I think about mostly is the viewing process, because a bar is a more informal setting. Your expectations are lowered in a bar. You're free to engage with other people. You're free to be more raucous. You're free to be more expressive about how you feel. Whereas, at least in my experience, even coming from an academic arts background, the gallery has always been kind of this almost hallowed space.

As someone with a social anxiety problem my entire life, I've always felt more comfortable in a bar situation where you don't have those expectations. It cultivates conversations more, personally for me, than an academic context.

Eron: I’m not sure what it says that I have done probably more shows in bars than I have done shows in galleries… But I was recently listening to this amazing podcast from the Long Now Foundation, that was talking about great social infrastructure inventions. One was the public house. Its easy to forget the pub was an invented thing! The podcast talked about how critical they were in the fermentation in the American Revolution. The pub was one of the core spaces that the ideas were debated and spread, because people didn't feel those obligations to play by other rules.

Kent: Playing by the rules, I think is a perfect description of what I feel the museum and gallery space mandates. In a situation like that, I'm more willing to fear that kind of criticism and engage with people about it. You know what I mean?

"Art is just a prompt for people in this broader conversation"

Eron: Art's always part of a conversation. The art work itself is not like some church icon where Jesus speaks to you off the wall and privately tells you what the art exactly means, right? I think the arts are part of the world, so treating them as this magical “away” thing is a little weird to me and always tied up with class issues. Art is just a prompt for people in this broader conversation, which is really healthy.

Kent: I think that's where the best ideas come from is just that of mentality of “let's just see what comes up.” This is my entire process for creating work. The way that a lot of my work just goes out onto Twitter is probably a very similar. I’m not putting it in a gallery. I'm just throwing it out onto the web where people can see it and inviting conversation.

Eron: But, to return to showing physical versions of this work in a bar, think about how long you typically spend looking at an image on the internet. Not long. Think about how small, how low resolution that digital image is on your phone or in a window on your computer. Then, for example, think about looking at one of Maddison Morgenstern’s datamosh prints, where even in an informal of third space, it is normal to just stand there looking at a 24” ultra-high-res print for two minutes. When was the last time you spent two minutes looking at any one image online? That’s an eternity in digital time!

Kent: Right. This would be like the equivalent of staying on one person's tweet for two hours.

Eron: I had this amazing class with Michael Asher when he was still alive at Cal Arts called Post Studio, which was started by John Baldessari. The idea was that it's this radical class where you talk about a group of art until no one wants to talk about it anymore. That is the only framework.

Kent: Holy shit.

Eron: That can mean two hours. But we also had times where there were huge dust-ups and proxy-arguments that took 10 hours. But the one thing I learned that has inspired my art and curation most is the idea that what you think of a piece of art is always changing. What you think at 10 minutes and what you think at 50 minutes, and three hours, and three days, and seven days, and a year, and five years will not be the same.

Kent: Everything that happens after that conversation informs it as well.

Eron: The internet so often denies that. It denies that changing existence in time. It says, "Just retweet."

Kent: Right. Yeah, just fave and move on. If you can even take on the physical task of scrolling back that far, even finding it in the sea, even a month's worth of tweets is impossible.

Eron: This show is up for two months. 17 pieces for two months! Think about that in relationship to internet time. I love the internet — I am a happy participant in so much of what's going on online. But that's also why it's critical to get this work from the screen, from the web, into physical conversations that are not restricted by algorithms, that are not restricted by friends’ lists. Committing to a much broader possibility of outcomes in many cases, but you're also committing to a much more intimate group of outcomes in the good cases: It's that pain of living, right? There were certainly a couple people that were very angry at the work at the opening!

Kent: Really?

Eron: There were two groups of people that actually walked out, just left their drinks and walked out, they were so angry about the art.

Kent: Wow, I didn't know that.

Eron: I think that was after you left.

Kent: I kind of think that's more interesting to me now, knowing that people walked out. With the exception of if you're deliberately trying to be a dick, there's something very validating about having someone be angry about your work or be completely unaccepting of your work. There's something that kind of says, "Well, okay, maybe I'm doing something right here because if I'm getting to someone without trying to be offensive."

Eron: None of the work was at all was attempting to be offensive. Some of the stuff is provocative…

Kent: There's a massive difference between being provocative and being intentionally offensive.

Eron: All the work is earnestly trying to make a place for itself in this bizarre world with artificial intelligence and social media. We live in a very complex, media-saturated time! All this work is thinking about different ways of engaging with this new media landscape.

Kent: It really speaks to the way that I've sort of gotten used to the social landscape is that it came as a shock to me that someone would find it offensive to have a video games project. Because I've gotten so used to acceptance online.

Eron: While 60 percent of people play video games, video games are still contentious-as-hell media. All you have to do is look at what happened with Ian Bogost's post on the Atlantic, right? He says something pedantic and retrograde about narratives in videogames and tens of thousands of people jump in to argue about it! This is a contentious space. Which, yes, has major problems with normalizing hateful and toxic behaviors. But this fervor over an otherwise pretty bland post expressing an art opinion also shows that this is space is not ossified. That’s why it's exciting. It's like painting was in 1910!

Kent: Yeah, and then over the course of the show itself, who knows how many people looked at the stuff and talked about it?

Eron: It's kind of magical to have 100 people standing around talking about glitched images from a PC 98 or Garry's Mod, cell phone photos of someone moving coconuts around an island in a game, black and white photos of Grand Theft Auto gas stations, or grainy snapshots out of the window on a virtual car ride.

Kent: Prior to the opening, I'd only seen the artists' work mostly on the internet and primarily during wee hours of the morning. A lot of artists who work with games post their work [online] during the early hours of the morning. That's how they originally intend their work to be viewed. How well do you think the bar venue suited this work?

Eron: One of the difficulties about all bars, this is across the board, is that no one likes a bright bar. You want it to be dim and cozy. Unfortunately, that is antithetical to good viewing conditions for physical art. But more importantly, for practical reasons, most bar spaces don’t have a way to show video art.

My first reaction to that restriction was indifference. I mean, its was mostly supposed to be a photography show anyway. But in retrospect, that unexpectedly turned into a huge frustration. The reason is, I was really hoping to have a 50/50 gender representation for the show. When I started contacting artists, I found out there's an overwhelming male bias for artist working with physical prints as the final product for their video game related photography. This happened over and over with about a dozen women artists. I'd check in and realize they only did work that displayed on screens. The moment we couldn't show screen-based work, we unwittingly excluded a whole host of artists.

"The moment we couldn't show screen-based work, we unwittingly excluded a whole host of - female - artists."

I was naively unaware of that bias, since I had never before really divided up screen-based and print-based artists looking at portfolios online. When I started asking around about this to curator friends, I was given a partial answer in the form of a fascinating essay: ”Why are there so many great women video artists?"
, which talks about how during the time of massive minimalist sculptures, macho photographers, and aggressive painters, a lot of women were making videos because it was a medium that didn't have that lineage of oppression, which seems resonant with what is still happening in art and online in 2018.

And because we were showing in a bar, we weren’t able to get all the work we wanted for some other reasons I hadn’t previously considered. For instance, part of the reason Angela Washko’s hugely important “Heroines” cyanotypes weren’t included was because most of them had been sold to private collectors. Not like they’re going to lend expensive, historically important, work to an informal space filled with sloshing glasses of sugary liquid! Similarly, we weren’t able to get the amazing retrogame time-lapse work by Rosemarie Fiore. So what I consider to be some of the most important artists working with video games, and some of the most important of early projects, weren’t able to be included.

Eron: So the biggest frustration for me, not knowing this in advance, was quite simply not having anything resembling a good representational survey of what's really happening with this field of video game related art.
But on the positive side, the show still served to activate some radical potential of work around video games to spawn interesting starting points for conversation. Look, 60 percent of Americans play video games.

Why, then, when you look across all the surveys of all contemporary art, would you think that it was 1979 when it comes to video games? Why, when you look across all of the end-of-the-year lists in video games, would you swear that there's no art being made about video games? This show was a first attempt to get that richer conversation going.

How about yourself, Kent? What was your takeaway?

Kent: Well, again, I think what worked the best was the conversation. I think what worked the best was the inspiration of a conversation that happened because it was an informal space. I think you absolutely nailed it when you said that we could get a little better lighting. You could get a little better presentation or maybe have a better space to explain your vision for the work.

Eron: Oh sure, and I definitely want to do a real show of this where we could show all the video artists, all the other artists that weren't able to be part of this show! I would love to do that. I'm by no means saying—

Kent: That everything should be done in a bar?

Eron: Hah. Yeah.

Kent: I'm with you there. I really enjoy shows that take place in more informal spaces, but you do lose that ability to really direct people's attention. When they see it in a context like a bar, they're maybe not gonna get everything out of it that you wanted them to. And you don't really have a space to maybe express everything you wanted to with them. But you do get the more organic conversation as a result. So I don't think that we could've done any better honestly with the way it went.

Eron: What I kind of love about these shows at third spaces is that they're always temporary. This isn't a solo show at a New York gallery, right? This is part of an organic, lively conversation with the real art scene. We’re going to make mistakes and learn from them. This is the opening statement in the conversation that's ongoing.

Part 1 of this series can be found here, part 2 is here, and part 3 is here.

Essays In Conversation 3: Building Your Digital White Whale To Take Its Photo

Eron Rauch — Wed, 07 Feb 2018 12:51:55 +0000

Essays In Conversation 3: Building Your Digital White Whale To Take Its Photo

Eron Rauch Mi. 7 Feb 2018 - 13:51

Photography, and how we use it to understand the world, is undergoing massive changes in the era of digital information technology. While these fractures, slippages, and mismatches can be frustrating, they can also be incredibly fertile sites for artistic production. After all, what could be more apt a metaphor for media-bombarded 2017 than the awkward, sometimes distressing act, of trying to figure out how use a technology that is almost 200 years old to deal with the implications of the futurist-media du jour, video games?

My own work, dealing with photography, virtual landscape, glitches, and the unseen traces of online gaming, has been fueled by this tension. And who would be a better partner in conversation about this often amusingly awkward, but also surprisingly potent, act of making art that combines these two massive cultural forces, than Kent Sheely, an artist who is perhaps best known for his video art/performance piece “Modern Pacifism,” in which he tried to play through Call of Duty without killing anyone. Inspired by our collaborative curation of a show about photography and video games called Screen Knowledges, we sat down to discuss the ways we find subject matter in our relationship to video games and art history.

Eron Rauch: Your project for Screen Knowledges was a return to Garry's Mod as a source material. Can you tell me a bit about your history with the game and what makes it such a compelling foil?

Kent Sheely: I was introduced to Garry's Mod shortly after it came out. So it would have been like 2005, 2006. It was when I was still in school and trying to figure out what I wanted to with my work going forward. It was something I'd do with a friend of mine who was in the same program as I was. We would both join the same game of the same server and collectively let whatever came to mind just build. Because Garry's Mod is a sandbox, you can bring in objects and build with them. Build vehicles, build structures, whatever you want. And there's also a wealth of assets and tools that people online have uploaded. So it's really, it's an endless creative realm.

It has so much creative potential in it but it has its own rules. It has its own framework. It's built in Source Engine. So it's got the Source Engine's collision detection and gravity. It became the template for what a lot of my later work about working within restrictive rules to create things that were unintended from the original. Garry's Mod was originally just intended as a toy. But I continually come back to it just because it's like a big bucket of LEGOs, where you have to work within the rule set that the toy has in place. But you can pretty much build anything. You're restricted but it has unlimited potential if that makes sense? So that's why I keep coming back to it. Just because it's the only mainstream game I've ever found that works that way.

Eron Rauch: I want to hear more about this notion of returning to what got you artistically fired up a long time ago. The reason you came back to Garry's Mod was that you were going through a creative slump, right?

Kent Sheely: Yeah. I was just thinking back to what got me excited about working with games as art. Garry's Mod was something that I found a lot of joy in, but it also lead to me creating things that have informed my work to this day. So I just really wanted to tap back into that source and figure out what it was that I found so enjoyable about it: It was breaking things in a structured way.

Garry's Mod itself breaks Half Life 2. So I think that was what inspired me. I was going through this period where I didn't know what I wanted to do going forward. And so I thought, “Knowing I've gained knowledge from the past ten years, let's see what I can do with the tools that I started with.”

There's so many other things that Garry's Mod does now. There's a server where it's just movie theaters, where you can just go in and watch a movie with random people online and they all have My Little Pony avatars. It's insane, but it's just something that I still enjoy going back to. Because it is constantly evolving just like my work processes.

Eron Rauch: I wanted to talk a little bit more about the process of your current body of work. The whole framework of the show is photography in the era of video games. Photography has evolved in the last 100 years, and is up to very interesting things now, whether it's Thomas Demand making—

Kent Sheely: Structured scenes.

Eron Rauch: Structured scenes is very Jeff Wall too! Or Trevor Paglen trying to photograph the un-photographable, like spy satellites. The current photographic discourse is very interesting and complicated. The reason I'm asking about this is because in the early days of screenshot photography it often felt like we were photographing gardens or architecture. We were rooting around for interesting choices made by the people that made our subjects.

For instance, my interest in World of Warcraft came from a broader interest in the visual language of imperialism and colonialism in photography. I was fascinated by the way that the visual language of World of Warcraft'+s world was very similar to photos of ancient Egypt in the 1800s or photos of the American West before it became formal states. There's this visual language of beauty but mostly bounty and adventure.

So in the early days of screenshot photography, interest was maybe more about resonance, about saying “This is an interesting connection.” But what's changed is that much current work is increasingly becoming about producing either a situation or object to be photographed, much like Wall and Demand.

Kent Sheely: It's kind of like: “If I can't find my white whale, I'll build the white whale and take a photo of that.” It's setting up the ideal world that you want to photograph.

Eron Rauch: Well, your ideal world is very interesting: it shows the command console! That's so the opposite of a “beautiful” scene trying to pass itself off as real.

Kent Sheely: That was a side effect because originally I was doing structured wireframe photos, where I was just setting up situations. A little bit of context: Garry's Mod has a hidden function that lets you reduce the world you're looking at to just its wireframe, removes all the texturing. It's just the structure.

Originally, I started just setting up scenes that I wanted to photograph as wireframes. I was still constructing those scenes, creating the photograph that I wanted, creating the color palette or the layouts I wanted. But then I discovered is that you can turn off the skybox (the thing that draws the fake sky).

Eron Rauch: So the landscape just goes to Tron infinity?

"Once I realized I could create that directed chaos, that became my focus."

Kent Sheely: Yeah [with the skybox missing] the game gets confused. It's just infinite space out there. Normally, each frame that you see includes everything that's in that shot, the background and foreground elements. When you take away the background, it starts trying to draw the foreground on top of itself because it doesn't have anything to put it on. It ghosts each frame cell. One frame has a house in it, and then you move the mouse, and the next frame that it captures has that previous house in its former location, still there, ghosting on the screen because there's nothing to render in its place. It's like long exposure photography.

Eron Rauch: It's like an afterimage?

Kent Sheely: Yeah, an afterimage. Once I discovered I could remove the skyboxing and create those kinds of broken images, I was more interested in that than the structured still lifes that I was originally working with. Once I realized I could create that directed chaos, that became my focus. “How can I move my mouse? What console commands can I use to create a more interesting image than just what I'm looking at?”

Eron Rauch: I've thought about a lot of these things in musical terms, like expanding on the electric guitar, right? The electric guitar originally exists as this proxy-but-louder version of an acoustic guitar.

Kent Sheely: But the thing is, this tool has new properties.

Eron Rauch: Distortion. Feedback. Sustain.

Kent Sheely: They're accidental originally. That's what people do with kit bashes with electronics, like hacking fucking Tickle Me Elmos. They discovered these things that were built into the software that are horrible, but they make really interesting results.

Eron Rauch: Or like Chris McCaw in photography, who has those incredible Sunburn drawings where he exploits the idea of light focusing through the lens of the camera. He physically etches the film with light from using the camera “wrong.”

Kent Sheely: “What if light, but too much?”

Eron Rauch: Yeah, so he has to mod his cameras with smoke vents! The final pieces are awe-inspiring because they're reminding you of a physical property that is usually hidden. In a lot of cases, all the artists in the Screen Knowledges show are reminding us, in one way or another, about some physical property of video games and photography that normally goes hidden.

Kent Sheely: When I was in my undergrad installation class, they always drilled into us, "Don't show your magic. Don't show how this effect is achieved. Just show the end result.” But then I found it so much more interesting to show the magic.

I had that piece called "Skybox" that was creating a skylight that was a virtual. It would change what you saw through the skylight based on real weather patterns. But everything you saw was digital. It was all captured from video games. Originally, I wanted to hide the magic and have all of that shit up in the ceiling, where you couldn't see it. It would just look like a skybox. But I found it so much more interesting to have the box in the room projecting.

"It feels like such an antiquated notion to me to be like, 'Oh no, don't look at what's going on behind the scenes!'"

Eron Rauch: That notion of "hide the magic" is different in an era where everything technological is vaguely magical it is so unfathomable. It's like, “Who here can engineer a phone?” Or how it takes a team of 100’s of people $100 million to make these games. The corporate and oppressively banal side are all based on hiding magic! A better magic is pointing out that real people made these decisions; that these are things are malleable human-scale objects, despite their monolithic façade; that they are fallible. That's why glitches are so great.

Kent Sheely: It feels like such an antiquated notion to me to be like, "Oh no, don't look at what's going on behind the scenes. Only look at this finished play. Don't look at the people clad in black that are pulling the strings. Don't look at those people. Those aren't important to the story."

Eron Rauch: It's like the old valuation of “hiding your brushstrokes” in painting. This is what's fascinating to me: as a curator dealing with both video games and conceptual art, people have not been saying to “hide your brush strokes” in the fine art world for almost 150 years! It has been all about Manet and his deliberately showing brushstrokes, right?

Kent Sheely: It's making it less arrogant, too. “Yeah, here's everything that I typed into the console for the last half hour. Here's all the error messages that I got. Yeah, I made this in a fucking video game. I made this in Garry's Mod. This is how I did it.”

Part 1 of this series can be found here, part 2 is here.

Essays In Conversation 2: Remembering The Body While Playing Videogames

Eron Rauch — Thu, 25 Jan 2018 08:50:04 +0000

Essays In Conversation 2: Remembering The Body While Playing Videogames

Eron Rauch Do. 25 Jan 2018 - 09:50

In the lead-up to collaborating to curate an art show Screen Knowledges, which looks at what contemporary artists are doing to advance screenshot and in-game photography, Kent Sheely and I did a large number of studio visits. These meetings involved looking at each other’s work, but also sprawling conversations about the threads that wove through our own artistic oeuvre, our personal lives, the work of each other, and of our fellow artists.

My massive ongoing project Valhalla Nocturnes, which is made up of long-exposure abstracts and self-portraits shot while playing video games late at night, became something of a focal point for our conversations around artistic process. After we finished the show, Kent used this project as a jumping point to talk about some of the often thorny and contradictory aspects of the process of making art that often get covered over by institutional wall blurbs and PR language.

Kent: With my own work, some of the ideas come about completely by accident while I'm just goofing around. Was that essentially your method for coming up with the concept for the series Valhalla Nocturnes? Or did you kind of exert more control over the evolution of it? Tell me a little more about the inspiration and how the project built itself.

Eron: I need to provide a little historical context, because while the work seems like I stumbled on it, it actually comes from a really odd overlap with other things I was doing in photography at that time.

I had just finished up a project doing a massive screen drawings that were made by tracing the entire mouse movement from a League of Legends game. These traces of everything your mouse has done during that hour looks like a jumbled gnarled Expressionist etching. I was really interested in ways we could use digital imagining to see things we otherwise couldn't see.

At the same time, I was also photographing a lot of experimental and avantgarde music shows.

Kent: I was actually going to bring that up because I noticed that kind of similarity to your older documentarian photos?

Eron: I was trying to develop a language for these experimental musicians—and I'm not talking like crazy punk shows where people barf on the audiences—we're talking stuff like James Tenney, Pauline Oliveros, Cornelius Cardew. Maybe 60 minute pieces where minor tuning differences are exploited, that don't have performers doing extravagant gestures, that were very time-based, that were very subtle. Or this this ferocious heterodoxie of sound from free jazz. Making photographs of those kinds of performances is really hard!

To do that work, I had been building this language of kind of really long exposures, manipulating the camera while it was exposing with focus shifts, double-exposures, multiple exposures layered on top of each other, or even covering half the lens with my hand. I started interacting with the camera in a very physical way to improvise along with the time-based bodily actions of the performers.

I was also just having a really crappy time in my life. So I’d come back from these shows half-drunk and be like sitting there playing League of Legends until godforsaken hours, just trying to kind of forget about everything and how tough life was. The camera always sitting next to me on the desk, because I had just downloaded the cards. I’m playing video games as the camera is there, and at some point I'm like, “Whatever. Screw it.” and started taking photos, using those techniques. Pretty quickly, I was like, "Oh, wow! This is really a radical evolution of the screen drawings. These techniques are even more radical when you apply in the video games." So it started more like accretion.

"Now I have this technique which allows me to show the screen, the VFX, the time, the haziness of self."

Kent: I think that is probably the biggest similarity between the workflows that we each came up with the pieces that we did for Screen Knowledges, is using the glitches; knowing what sort of movements create a very specific result where there's still that unpredictability, but you are directing it.

Eron: Yeah, and the big moment was when I realized I could turn the camera around.

Kent: Yeah?

Eron: This was the move I never made when I was doing the experimental music photography. This was a huge realization. Now I have this technique which allows me to show the screen, the VFX, the time, the haziness of self. Much like you're breaking the surface of video games so you can see past the facade, these digital images were deconstructions of the fundamental fiction of flow: going into the magic window. Pointing out it's not a window. It's a panel that displays things based on outputs from hardware that you're sitting and manipulating in a room, with all this other crap going on! We're acknowledging the rest of the crap going on. The whole Screen Knowledges show is about different ways to get at that.

Kent: Yeah, it's like when you play with an Etch-a-Sketch, and you erase a very specific square of the screen so that you can peak at the mechanism underneath. So you make a little window for yourself to see the world underneath.

Eron: It was weirdly like learning to remember. I don't know if that makes sense? The whole process felt like a remembering: Remembering my body, remembering the computer. Remembering the hardware. Remembering the crap that's smeared on the screen, because that gets captured when you're doing this technique, because it'll glare weird.

Kent: Yeah, it's like when you catch yourself realizing your own sentience.

Eron: For me having this really severe anxiety and depression for multiple years, this process of photographing while playing became a way for me to remember to be alive, to not check out. The camera awkwardly dragged me back into remembering: “I’m here, I'm a person, my fuck-ups are okay. I’m this crappy person up playing Overwatch at 3 AM and I should really go to bed, but you know what? That's not the worst thing anyone could ever do in life. You're here. That's enough.” It became the way of being more present with what I was doing with games, rather than just using them to check out.

Kent: Pulling yourself back from the distraction just a little, just enough to check in on yourself.

Eron: Yeah. Somewhat comically in this case because the camera so much interrupts what you're trying to do in the video game. Just grab a pint glass and try to play Overwatch but never put the pint glass down. You really need three hands to do that!

Kent Sheely: So, taking the photos [for Valhalla Nocturnes], you found it difficult to actively play the game at the same time. That was actually part of the process that I was really interested in seeing. Was it simply the inclusion of the physical camera that caused the distraction? Or do you generally run into similar challenges trying to succeed at the game while also creating work from that?

Eron: Artistic disruption is a standard technique for me. I really very much love running interference in the materiality of making photographs. Much of my work has been about trying to actually get people to notice the things they don't normally notice. One of the first steps is always acknowledging the thing you're looking at for what it is. It's like remembering a painting's a painting. That's why I like Jackson Pollock so much. I mean, I know everyone kind of has a love-hate relationship with him—

Kent Sheely: Mixed feelings…

"I have very little interest in realism. It seems to disregard materiality, realism forgets these computers heat up on our laps."

Eron: The one thing I love is that he used car paints and house paints. There's cigarette butts stuck in there. There are footprints. He's using the materials of his every day life in post-WWII suburban America, right? It makes you re-confront physicality. You're never going to pretend that one of his paintings is a beautiful landscape. And simultaneously you're also being confronted with a new physical arrangement of things you see around you all the time but never notice.
So in Valhalla Nocturnes, the camera-as-disruption becomes the physical metaphor.

Kent Sheely: But at the same time it's kind of like the observer effect: when you observe and try to document it, it changes the thing that you're documenting.

Eron: Oh, and triply-so when you're talking screenshots. The moment you're starting to work in these video games, you’re disjuncting our preconceptions about the medium — Everyone always says, “Video games are gonna be the holodeck". But that seems so fundamentally to miss the point of why video games would be interesting to me. It seems to disregard some many things beyond “realism” for instance. I have very little interest in realism. It seems to disregard materiality, realism forgets these computers heat up on our laps.

Kent Sheely: Like for half an hour you can be Genji.

Eron: It's seductive to forget you exist. But it ultimately strikes me as artistically and socially destructive to disembody yourself. For me, the art is a way to assert my own being-ness, in all of its crappiness and incompleteness.

Kent Sheely: Right. You're turning the focus back on yourself. It's sort of like a lucid dream in a way. Like you were suddenly aware. The camera flips around and you're aware that you're a person in front of a screen.

Eron: Yeah, it's about retraining a degree of meta-critical conceptual control. Understanding that I am doing this thing [playing a video game] as a choice rather than just sliding under the digital river Lethe. Every time you're trying to slide in, the camera's like, “Nope, you can't do that. You can't headshot that. You can't strafe. You're dead because you’re trying to hold this camera.” It's kind of like a little like tap on the shoulder.

Kent Sheely: “Hey look in your right hand, you've got a mouse.”

Eron: And I’m no longer just existing to improve my aim accuracy on McCree from 38 % to 39 %. I also have this social obligation to make interesting things that I know have to go on a wall eventually.

Kent Sheely: Yeah, it's like a constant notification that something is happening outside.

Eron: Playing video games can be about fun, but what's even more interesting to me is having an experience in a video game I want to talk about with my friends. Having something so interesting happen that I want to talk about it is another tier above “enjoying” a video game. The camera becomes a way of reminding me over and over and over and over that you are a part of that social contract: “You're here to share something. So bring something interesting back with you. You might be diving, but bring something interesting back!”

Part 1 of this series can be found here.

Essays In Conversation 1: The Evolving Relationship Between Video Games and Photography

Eron Rauch — Thu, 18 Jan 2018 07:30:52 +0000

Essays In Conversation 1: The Evolving Relationship Between Video Games and Photography

Eron Rauch Do. 18 Jan 2018 - 08:30

Though it waxes and wanes in public consciousness and gets called by different names (screenshots, virtual photography, or more recently, in-game photography) over the past decade there have been a whole host of artists who have explored video games through photography. My first project that combined the two was a series from 2001 which re-printed cryptic landscape images found on Everquest forums, after learning the reason one of my old friends had dropped out of high school was to play the game. Kent Sheely has also been exploring this far-flung cultural space for just about as long as anyone else.

After collaborating to curate a recent art show about video games and photography, titled Screen Knowledges, I had a moment where I realized what a long, winding trek it has been to get to this artwork in 2017. Given his status as one of the most veteran artists in this genre, I wanted to talk to Kent about the arc of his oeuvre and hear his thoughts about how the field has changed over the past years.

Eron: As of 2017 we both have been working with video game imagery and screenshots for over a decade. I was wondering what your first screenshot project was? Working together curating the Screen Knowledges art show made me realize I didn't know anything about it, or even what inspired you to make it.

Kent: That came about in college when I was still figuring out what direction I wanted my work to take, and I had been playing GTA San Andreas on the Xbox. That was the first game that I ever played that had a built in photo mode. It's for a mission in the game. You're supposed to kill someone and take a photo of the body, so it's only used for one instance, but it'll actually save photos to your Xbox hard drive. I figured that out. I didn't have a way to get the photos onto a computer, because I was just taking them through the Xbox, so I bought a video capture card just so I could get my screenshots out of GTA San Andreas. I think I ended up calling it Grand Theft Photo?

Eron: Was this for a class?

Kent: I ended up using it for a class, but it started out realizing that I could take photos inside this built virtual landscape. I gave up beating the game entirely. I just quit at that mission when I first got the camera and never looked back.

Eron: How did you end up showing it? Through video? Or did you make prints?

Kent: I made prints from the video capture, which is 480p or something on Xbox. They ended up really small, so they ended up looking like they're from a toy camera or something. But then later I got the same game for PC, so the captures that I was able to get were a lot higher quality. That led to me making an interactive version where I actually built like a custom (camera-shaped) controller for it, so you could take your own photos in the game, just by moving the controller around.

Eron: So like a motion sensitive thing?

Kent: It was actually a Wii remote inside of a camera body.

Eron: Oh, interesting. What camera did you use?

Kent: It was a fake camera. I just built it from PVC parts.

"The primary reason that I've been moving towards video is just because it's easier for me to share it."

Eron: Fast forward a decade, when we were selecting work for the show, you mentioned your work has tended towards video. A lot of other artists who work with video games are also moving towards using video as their primary medium of exploration. Why do you think you've been favoring video as a medium when you make art about video games?

Kent: I think I've been really motivated by the ease which video can be shared now. Especially through social media and Instagram. When I started out, I was coming at it from a photography background. The primary reason that I've been moving towards video is just because it's easier for me to share it.

Eron: Do you think that that has to do with the way the internet platforms have changed?

Kent: Yeah. It didn't use to be that easy to share things on the internet. Before YouTube especially, you would have to either have someone download the file or have them download a player to run it. It was really hard to share video work. More artists are sharing video rather than photo work and I think that it's probably a similar situation that I'm in, where I'm just always recording video clips when I'm playing the games. For me, publishing those short sketches is really satisfying to me. It helps me reach more focused goals. It's sort of the spaghetti method, but in a way, it pressures me into trying to look deeper at something, because once I share it, I want to push it further.

Eron: So much of the way we exist in images, both in art and online, is performative. It feels as though maybe there's something in video that seemingly more succinctly captures the performative context of video games?

Kent: Another thing I was thinking about was that video games are time-based media. So video, I think, more accurately emulates the way that we encounter video games. So it sort of lulls us into a false sense of security.

Eron: Yeah. One of the biggest issues about being a screenshot artist is we're almost inevitably genre-fied as 'screenshot’, right? People want to talk about the action of making a photo in a video game as the primary source of the content. Accessing any other content than that, is very, very hard in the face of this kind of incredibly aggressively avantgarde gesture of what might be seen as defying the video game. In a screenshot, there's no sound, no motion… No screen!

Whereas with video, you're right, there's this slippage. I can watch you playing a video game and fall into believing at some meta- level that, "Oh, this is you doing something in a video game that has meaning." Rather than, "Oh you took a video of a video game, therefore it has meaning."

Kent: Yeah. I still haven't really landed on any one answer for that. And there probably isn't one.

Eron: You make games as well, yes?

Kent: Yeah.

Eron: What was the first game you made?

Kent: The first complete game I ever made was probably in RPG Maker, which came out in like '95. I was probably like 12 or 13, I think, when I did that. But it was basically just fan art. It was a fan game for Dragonball Z or something, taking existing sprites and making my own story out of them.

Eron: Which isn't that dissimilar from what you're doing now…

Kent: Oh gosh, yeah. I think that may have been the first complete playable game that I made. I fucked around when I was a little kid in Q Basic and older programming. You know what? I made a "Choose Your Own Adventure" game when I was like nine!

Eron: Oh god.

Kent: Yeah, because I figured out how to do the GOTO structure. It was based on old text adventures and "Choose Your Own Adventure" books. I took the structure of "Choose Your Own Adventure," where the page is like a function in BASIC, and based it on that book structure. Did you ever play FlameWar Deluxe?

Eron: No.

Kent: The first Twine game I ever made. All the text came from a forum chat. It was a flame war that sparked as a result of ... oh my god, I can't even remember what game! It was completely unrelated. It started like a chat about Quake? And it turned into this geopolitical flame war that was the most expansive thing I'd ever seen.

You know how there's branching conversation paths that happen in chat? So I took node of that chat and made a Twine game where the objective is to get the most replies out of a thread by taking branching paths. One person says this, and your choices are the two people who replied to that.

Eron: You were basically are making art about something in the Trump era we now know to be a very real thing affecting the world! It puts you in the mindset of gaming a forum, which is incredibly interesting because the Russians do this to affect elections, GamerGate to influence the media, and Facebook to maximize their income.

Kent: Right. “How long can you keep people talking?” It's figuring out not what I (as a viewer/player) can do, but what moves I can make; what steps did this person take to push this further, advance the plot? It's making choices by proxy.

"'Flame War Deluxe' puts you in the mindset of gaming a forum - like the Russians do to affect elections, GamerGate to influence the media, and Facebook to maximize their income."

Eron: It's a psychological investigation, as well, like a good novel. A great novel doesn't just tell you what happened, it entices you into feeling why those choices happened.

Kent: There's some branching path of conversation that made this the biggest flame war ever. There's one branching path that has more comments, more discussion. But what led to that? It's sort of breaking down which comment pushed this forward. It is getting into the mind of gamers and people who instigate bullshit online. The other people you're playing with remain kind of untapped (as a subject). A lot of people, especially people who do screenshot photography, focus on the game world. I feel like they're kind of missing a layer that a lot of people don't tap into, and that's the real people that are behind the screens controlling these avatars.

Eron: There's so many kinds of photography that get subsumed into this dog-pile of "screenshot photography.” I don't like using that term because it's caught up in a specific idea of video games. I really prefer video game-related photography (or art). Work that doesn't take account of time or people often feels like it mindlessly believes the Wired Magazine 1997 version of Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” in an overly literal way.

There's so much that comes along with re-acknowledging the existence of time and people. It's fairly radical. Just acknowledging aging in fandom, the fact that people get older, change, make decisions they can’t take back, have to live with, is pretty radical.

Kent: We've evolved past the singular label of screenshot photography.

Kommentare

Josh Taylor So. 21 Jan 2018 - 00:29 Permalink

Bravo!

Wonderful essay/conversation guys and what a wonderful quote by Kent, "We've evolved past the singular label of screenshot photography". Looking back over the years virtual/in-game/screenshot photography really has come a very long way from where it was. Video Game-Related Photography is a wonderful and fitting title for this beautiful genre indeed.

I can only imagine what it will be five or ten years from now.

Josh Taylor Creative

DEEP-ROOTED GAMES: Ein Interview mit Dominique Yakan Brand (Kiro'o Games)

Christof Zurschmitten — Mon, 27 Feb 2017 08:40:22 +0000

DEEP-ROOTED GAMES: Ein Interview mit Dominique Yakan Brand (Kiro'o Games)

Christof Zurschmitten Mo. 27 Feb 2017 - 09:40

DEEP-ROOTED GAMES ist eine Serie von vier Interviews mit vier Entwicklern von vier verschiedenen Kontinenten, die eines gemeinsam haben: Sie haben sich inspirieren lassen von Sagen, Mythen und Folklore aus Ecken der Erde, die vom Medium meist ignoriert werden.

Dominique Yakan Brand ist Lead Designer und Mitbegründer von Kiro’o Games, einem Entwicklerstudio mit Sitz in Kameruns Hauptstadt Yaoundé. Ihr erstes international bekanntes Projekt ist Aurion: Legacy of the Kori-Odan, ein ambitioniertes Actionrollenspiel, dessen Setting von der lokalen Kultur und Überlieferung inspiriert wurde – und sogar in Hollywood auf Interesse gestossen ist.

Aurion ist – in euren eigenen Worten – das erste Rollenspiel mit afrikanischen Inspirationsquellen, angesiedelt in einer afrikanischen Fantasywelt. Habt ihr viel recherchieren müssen für den Hintergrund des Spiels? Oder seid ihr aufgewachsen in einem Milieu, in dem das Erzählen traditioneller Geschichten noch Teil einer lebendigen Kultur ist?

Die Tradition mündlichen Erzählens von Sagen, Legenden usw. ist tief verankert bei unterschiedlichen ethnischen Gruppen in Kamerun. Die meisten Mitglieder unserer Generation (die heute 25- bis 35-Jährigen) sind aufgewachsen in einer Epoche, in der man sich noch abends bei Mondschein versammelt hat und die Älteren uns Geschichten erzählten. Im Spiel gibt es eine Szene, die davon inspiriert wurde. Wir haben jedoch den Eindruck, dass diese Tradition heutzutage immer weniger praktiziert wird in Kamerun, auch wenn ihr in der Schule, im Fernsehen und andernorts noch eine gewisse Bedeutung eingeräumt wird.
Wir sind von dieser Basis ausgegangen und haben anschließend viel recherchiert, sowohl im Internet als auch andernorts, um das Szenario von Aurion zu entwerfen.

Kamerun ist ein Land mit einer sehr heterogenen Bevölkerung, mit mehr als 300 Ethnien und einer Vielzahl unterschiedlicher Religionen. Es gibt insofern vermutlich nicht ‚die Mythologie‘ Kameruns. Wie seid ihr mit dieser Vielfalt umgegangen? War das Ziel eher, eine Art ‚Essenz‘ herauszudestillieren oder war es ein eher eklektischer Zugang?

Aufgrund seiner geographischen Lage (ein wenig unterhalb des Äquators und im Herzen Afrikas) und seiner Vielfalt wird Kamerun oft „Afrika in Miniatur“ genannt – man sagt auch: „Wenn man Kamerun besucht, hat man ganz Afrika gesehen.“ Es stimmt also, dass wir eine enorme Vielfalt haben und dass es nicht einfach war, dem allem in einem Spiel gerecht zu werden. Tatsächlich wollten wir aber kein Spiel nur über Kamerun machen, sondern ein Spiel, das dem gesamten Kontinent oder sogar der ganzen Welt zugänglich ist. Darum haben wir uns für eine Mischung entschieden, die nicht nur inspiriert ist von unterschiedlichen Kulturen in Kamerun, sondern auch von solchen aus anderen Ländern (Südafrika, Nigeria, Ghana, Mali, Kenia u.a.m.).

Ich stelle mir vor, dass es nicht einfach ist, eine Balance zu finden zwischen dem Wunsch, eine authentische Geschichte zu erzählen und jenem, auch für Spieler interessant zu bleiben, die kaum Kenntnisse der Kultur Kameruns haben. Wie seid ihr mit diesem Problem umgegangen?

Die Handlung selbst ist leicht zugänglich und folgt bekannten Codes des Mediums Computerspiel. Es sind der Kontext, die Thematik, die Charaktere und die Spielwelt, die inspiriert worden sind von Afrika. Wir denken, diese Elemente fördern die Verständlichkeit und motivieren die Spieler, die Welt nach und nach für sich zu entdecken.

Ihr seid vom Ministerium für Kunst und Kultur unterstützt worden. Welcher Art war diese Unterstützung? Und gab es von dieser Seite Vorgaben dazu, wie die Kulturen Kameruns dargestellt werden sollen?

Der Minister war der Meinung, unser Projekt habe das Potential, die Kultur Afrikas in all ihren Facetten zu repräsentieren und hat uns deshalb gefördert. Ganz konkret hat uns die Förderung auch Zugang verschafft zu einer Datenbank, die wir für die Recherche nutzen konnten.

Gab es Werke – Bücher, Filme, andere Spiele – die als Inspiration für das Spiel mit seiner Verschmelzung von genre-typischen und traditionellen Elementen dienen konnten?

Filme und Spiele konnten nur beschränkt als Inspirationsquelle dienen, da diese Industrien in Afrika nicht sonderlich entwickelt sind. Es gab aber einige lterarische Inspirationsquellen. Wir haben verschiedene Sammlungen von afrikanischen Sagen und Legenden konsultiert (Les Contes d'Amadou Koumba, Contes et Légendes d'Afrique, Fables des Montagnes, etc.). Außerdem dienten der Neuvième cercle von Jean-Christophe Chaumette oder auch Chroniques de l’empire Ntu von Momi M'Buze als Inspiration. Tatsächlich sind wir ironischerweise bei Chaumette, einem französischen Autor, auf den Begriff ‘African-Fantasy’ gestossen.

Denkt ihr, dass interaktive Medien ein Potential dafür haben, die lange, vielgestaltige Tradition des Geschichtenerzählens fortzusetzen?

Spiele wie Year Walk zeigen offenbar, dass Games auch ein Träger der Kultur sein können und in der Lage sind, Traditionen und Geschichten zu überliefern. Für uns war es durchaus auch ein Ziel, Wissen über unsere Kultur in diesem Medium zu vermitteln. Der Großteil unserer Generation hat ja sein Wissen über die nordische, griechische oder japanische Mythologie ebenfalls von digitalen Spielen oder anderen Formen von Populärkultur.

In Aurion gibt es nicht nur einen Helden, sondern auch eine Heldin, Erine. War sie von Anfang an Teil des Konzepts? (Ich frage unter anderem deshalb, weil in Kamerun im Gegensatz zu vielen anderen Regionen der Welt traditionellerweise Frauen die Rolle übernehmen, Erzählungen vorzutragen.)

Erine war tatsächlich schon seit 2003, also von Anfang an, Teil des Projekts. In Afrika wird die Frau generell als Sockel der Familie betrachtet, als Fundament der Gesellschaft. (Dies ist allerdings auch einer der Gründe, weshalb in manchen Dörfern die Vorstellung vorherrscht, die Frau solle daheim bleiben und sich um die Familie und den Haushalt kümmern. Diese Situation ändert sich aber allmählich mit der Globalisierung und dem Aufkommen der Massenmedien, da alle Arbeitskräfte benötigt werden, um die Entwicklung des Landes zu garantieren.) Im Spiel ist Erine eine Frau, die an der Seite ihres Mannes kämpft. Wir haben als Namen für ihre Ausrüstung „Le Mur du Coeur“ (Die Mauer des Herzens) gewählt, in Anlehnung an das afrikanische Sprichtwort: „Der König schützt das Königreich vor der Welt, die Königin schützt den König vor sich selbst.“

Welche Spiele verwenden eurer Ansicht nach Folklore in interessanter Weise?

In Afrika kommen gibt es kaum Beispiele dafür. Die meisten Studios auf dem Kontinent konzentrieren sich auf Smartphone-Spiele, die recht simpel sind im Hinblick auf die Erzählung. Aurion wird aber oft verglichen mit Never Alone. Beide Spiele vermitteln ein Universum und eine Kultur, die nicht oft repräsentiert ist in Computerspielen. Grundsätzlich sind wir aber ohnehin alle Gamer und holen uns unsere Inspiration bei allem, das uns begeistert.

Was sind eure zukünftigen Projekte?

Wir haben selbstverständlich Pläne, aber ob und welche davon wir umsetzen können, hängt ab vom Erfolg von Aurion. Wir würden DLC für das Spiel entwickeln. Darüber hinaus würden wir gerne weitere Welten erkunden, vermutlich in erster Linie mit Mobilspielen. Falls die Umstände es zulassen, würde es uns aber auch reizen, die Herausforderung eines MMOs in Angriff zu nehmen.

Herzlichen Dank für eure Zeit!

DEEP-ROTED GAMES: An interview with Simon Flesser (Simogo)

Christof Zurschmitten — Mon, 20 Feb 2017 15:51:26 +0000

DEEP-ROTED GAMES: An interview with Simon Flesser (Simogo)

Christof Zurschmitten Mo. 20 Feb 2017 - 16:51

DEEP-ROOTED GAMES is series of four interviews with four game developers from four different continents who looked for narrative inspiration and found it in unusual places: In the folklore of their own people, region or family, and in other storytelling-corners of the world which are too often neglected by the mainstream.

Simon Flesser is one half of Simogo, a successful and widely praised development studio from Malmö, Sweden. Charateristic for their work is the emphasis on unusual visual design and the inventivness with which they find new uses for the mobile platform they mostly develop for. For their acclaimed game Year Walk, Simogo took inspiration from the ancient Swedish tradition of årsgång, a ritual that lets one see into one's own future. And yeah, we here at VGT are definitely fans.

Year Walk seems to be a bit of an outlier in your work, when it comes to mood (which is dark, not to say horrific) and setting. Let’s maybe start with how the game came to be. In his article “He Met His Own Funeral Procession. The Year Walk Ritual in Swedish Folk Tradition”, Tommy Kuusela writes that you came across the tradition of årsgång by reading a popular book on folkolore, "Årets högtider" by Ebbe Schön. Is this correct? If so, was it clear for you from the beginning that this would make for an interesting game setting and did it take a lot of effort to convince everyone to make this the next Simogo game?

That is indeed correct. Jonas Tarestad, who wrote the script that we, losely, based Year Walk on found it in the book you mentioned. So, when Jonas sent me the script, the first thing I thought was how very game-like the whole tradition seemed, and so I joked a bit about it over the phone with Jonas. But later the same weekend I started to sit down and try to imagine how a game like that would play out, and I later suggested it for Jonas and Magnus. It didn’t take much convincing to be honest. I think our biggest fears was making something that felt this large in scope.

What kind of research did you do for the game? Year Walk sometimes feels like a veritable compendium of Swedish folkolore. Did you find all your relevant information in Schön’s book? It would be especially interesting to know if you also spoke to people, or if it’s purely a “bookish” take on folk tales.

It’s a little bit of everything. We did some research, both in books and on the internet, but I think the great thing about basing something on folk lore is that it’s so much about hearsay, altering the stories, and so in that way we only continued the tradition of lying to children.

One thing that is of interest for me is what place folktales do have in your life. Year Walk’s “origin story” makes it seem like it was pure coincidence that you stumbled upon Swedish folk tales as a game concept. Is that correct or is there some sort of living “story telling culture” where you grew up?

I mean, it’s obviously not like our grandparents sat us down and told us lies to try and keep us out of the forest, like people did back in the day, but we very much grew up with the stories anyway. Be that in books, through children’s TV, kindergarten and so on.

This one is a bit of a longer question, but bear with me: When we exchanged letters on Year Walk on Videogame Tourism, I wrote that I was struck by the fact that ‘narrative’ of the game in tandem with the ingenious ways you used the functions of the iPad gave the game the character of some sort of lost artefact, or even a grimoire of sorts, thus deepening the intriguing character of the whole experience. Kuusela writes: „What characterises folklore is the tendency of traditions to change or alter shape in transmission from one generation to another. But even if details change, as well as the accepted reasons for different practices, the basic principles can remain and fall into a discernible pattern.“ Did you encounter any particular obstacles in adapting those “patterns” in a medium that is in some ways very distant from the stories that originated hundreds or even thousands of years before it came into being? And was that experience of holding an old artefact, a folkoloristic objet trouvé of sorts, in the hands by design?

Yeah, the reason we went with the two-app design, was for the reason you describe; to sort of make it feel like these old stories were physically entering our own world. I think in any design, adapting your vision into the medium you’re working with is always a challenge in some way. I think the meta perspective and the companion app of the game actually has more of the tradition of folk lore than the game itself. Just like the creepypasta culture of the internet, it’s folk tales in the digital age.

In our letters, we also talked about how from the distant perspective of people in Austria and Switzerland, Swedish (and, in some parts, Finnish as well) popular culture is often deeply moving and fascinating because it seems to be able to tap into an (often somewhat dark) vein of myths, tales and legends that is not that pronounced in other countries – for example, Tove Jansson’s work seems to have that kind of mood. Would you agree?

Yes, I’d say so. I think it’s just the culture of how people are. The weather. There are reasons to stay inside and tell stories, haha.

As graphically oriented artists, where there any historical pictures, images or other visual depictions that you used as an inspiration for the look of Year Walk?

I definitely looked at things like Bauer, Kittelsen and such, but in the end Year Walk’s look is a little more inspired by more modern, simple, illustratory styles. Animation of the 1960s, that kind of thing.

One very original component of Year Walk is the companion app and the fictional expert on folk tales you came up with. (Fooling a lot of hopelessly intellectual types into hitting their local libraries and/or Google to find his works.) When and how did you come up with this idea?

I think as many things it started as sort of a joke. I think Jonas and I were drinking beer, basically. I can’t remember the exact reasoning, I knew we were talking about that it would be good if we could sort of explain the background of the game’s universe, the creatures and such. I think it just rolled from there. I’m a big fan of meta-perspectives, where the work is self-aware and enters, becomes a part of, our world, so I guess I often try to find ways of that happening.

While arguablyJapanese videogames have a long tradition of more or less directly tapping into their country’s mythology and folkolore as part of the setting, in Western games, this seems to be less of a case; you often do get “popular” myths that are often not part of the culture the developers actually grew up in (Greek or Roman mythology, for example), or the second-order mythology that is filtered through the likes of Tolkien. Are there games you know and/or enjoyed that try to turn towards more “local” traditions and that could maybe even have inspired Year Walk?

I agree that it’s not common and that it’d probably be fun to see more of it – I think I’d be happy if I could see more original game universes overall, not neccesarily based on regional culture.
The games that springs most to mind that I enjoyed are the Project Zero games that feel very rooted in Japanese lore and such.

To give over the word once more to Kuusela: By the end of his article, he specifically singles out Year Walk and writes the following: „This tendency to market folklore and supernatural beings for entertainment serves another purpose: It makes sure that the old narratives and beliefs survive in a new environment.“ Kuusela explicitly is of the opinion that your game might be an important factor in preserving the knowledge of årsgång, which according to Kuusela was on the verge of being virtually forgotten. How do you feel about this? Was it a goal you set yourself when creating Year Walk to preserve that knowledge, that tradition? Do you actually do feel like a link in the long chain of telling stories about årsgång and the other creatures and tales you used in Year Walk?

No, that was never the reason or a goal, but I agree that we’re just continuing the tradition.

And last but not least: Could you imagine working with such “traditional” material again, or would it feel like repetition?

We already did with Bedtime Stories for Awful Children! Having made three very distinct versions of Year Walk now, I don’t think we’re super keen on returning to a similar universe for quite a while.

Thank you so much for your time!

DEEP-ROOTED GAMES: An Interview with Arvind Yadav (Pyrodactyl Games)

Christof Zurschmitten — Mon, 13 Feb 2017 09:01:03 +0000

DEEP-ROOTED GAMES: An Interview with Arvind Yadav (Pyrodactyl Games)

Christof Zurschmitten Mo. 13 Feb 2017 - 10:01

Arvind Yadav is a resident of Jaipur, India, and head of the international development team Pyrodactyl Games. Arguably their best-known game is 2014's Unrest, a Kickstarter-funded RPG that shets light on the political turmoil in a fictional city which is both inspired by Indian history and mythology. In the summer of 2016, Pyrodactyl's latest game Good Robot was published, a shooter with roguelike elements.

Could you tell me a bit more about Pyrodactyl Games? Your team seems to come from quite a few places. In what form do you do you work together, and how did you find each other?

We’re a group of people who met over the internet. I met them over the years and asked them to work with me. We work using online tools like bitbucket and google docs. We chat using hangouts, steam or skype depending on what’s needed.

Let’s talk about Unrest, then: Could you tell me how this game came to be and how you had the idea to create its setting? Pyrodactly Games obviously is eager to make games that are, to quote one of your titles, “atypical”. How much was the wish to do a “different” setting a point of motivation for Unrest?

I always wanted to make a game set in India due to not seeing any other games in the setting. After I had a couple of games under my belt, I felt the time was right to make Unrest.

Are there any books or works of art that you looked to for inspiration? And what kind of research did you do for the project?

I mainly drew upon the mythological books I had read as a kid, along with a style of storytelling similar to the The Wire.

Your setting is inspired by a specific historical, cultural and ethnical background. Since your team seems to be pretty diverse, it’s likely that not all of you were equally familiar with that background. Was this a problem when working on the game? Where there any special precautions you took not to fall into the trap of cultural misappropriation?

No, everyone was completely on board with the vision of the game. Every team member took their time to research the setting and contribute to the game in a meaningful way.

Did you feel like having to do extra work to make the setting accessible to players not familiar with the historical, cultural and ethnical background you’re drawing from for Unrest?

I don’t think Unrest needed too much of that work - fundamentally, the story is about a group of people struggling in a kingdom under political turmoil. I feel a lot of us can relate to that!

While Unrest’s setting is fictional and historical, fantastic elements are used rather sparingly. The Naga, one could say, are mostly a cipher for The Other. Did you at one point in the development think about shifting the setting further into the realm of the fantastic and use more mythological elements? What was your reason for choosing this half-way point between a fictional historical and fantastic setting?

There were both practical and creative reasons for wanted to keep the story grounded and keep the mythological elements to a minimum. Not having too many set pieces kept the game’s budget low, which was necessary - but allowing a light mythological touch meant we had to get creative and get the maximum use out of that.

What were your reasons for choosing the mythological figure of the Naga to represent The Other in the game?

The truth is, there’s no particular reason behind choosing the Naga instead of something else. I suppose I felt they were the ones that could be integrated while maintaining the serious tone of the game.

While doing my research for this piece, I came across an article arguing that Simogo’s Year Walk may have saved the tradition of Arsgang from slowly being forgotten entirely. The game would thus be participating in a tradition of passing down stories through the ages. Do you think that games should aspire to doing this? Do you maybe even think that the interactive form has a “special” potential when it comes to passing down such stories?

Yeah, games can aspire to do anything they want to. I think it is too early to tell if games have the longevity of other mediums, because we often find it very difficult to preserve old games once technology moves on.

Could you imagine returning for a future project to a setting that is inspired by history and mythology? What are your upcoming projects, anyway?

I’ll probably make another game set in India soon enough, although it probably won’t be related to the story of Unrest. We released Good Robot in 2016, and I'm working on plans for my next game (it involves a heist).

Thank you for your time!

DEEP-ROOTED GAMES: An interview with Kevin Snow (Bravemule)

Christof Zurschmitten — Mon, 06 Feb 2017 08:42:07 +0000

DEEP-ROOTED GAMES: An interview with Kevin Snow (Bravemule)

Christof Zurschmitten Mo. 6 Feb 2017 - 09:42

Kevin Snow uses the moniker Bravemule to publish games in collaboration with a group of like-minded artists. His platform of choice is Twine, which he uses to tell complex (if often short) stories adorned with unusually lush illustrations and soundscapes. His first interactive fiction game The Domovoi – distributed for free – took inspiration from Slavic folklore to ruminate on the nature of storytelling and truth. His second (still free) game Beneath Floes puts a creature from Inuit mythology front and center and was translated into Inuktitut, thanks to Kickstarter. Currently, Snow is raising funds for Southern Monsters, his most ambitious and most personal game to date, and another one strongly influenced by myths and (urban) legends. We talked with Snow about his background, his sources of inspiration and the potential of the videogame as a medium not only of storytelling, but of preserving age-old stories and tales.

Since you mostly work with Twine, I’d like to begin by asking you what you would call yourself: Do you consider yourself a writer, a game designer, a story teller – all of those things, or none of them at all?

I’ve started to call myself a narrative designer, because that title suggests a combination of systematic design and prose. I also code, direct the other artists, and a ton else, but that’s just how independent development goes.

Could you tell me more about your background? Considering that one of the piece’s focuses is on how people can rely not only on different cultural backgrounds, but also cultural backgrounds they are familiar with: do you have any Slavic or Inuit roots?

I grew up in the state of North Carolina, but I’ve lived in Arkansas ever since I got out of the military in 2010, so I’ve always lived in the South. I’m twenty-seven and a recent graduate of a college history program. I’m white, and have no Inuit or Slavic ties.

Do you know where you interest in folk tales and myths does come from? Is it purely a “bookish” thing or do you, by any chance, have a background in which story telling is a “living and lived” thing?

Since I’m from a rural area of the South, I lived and breathed folktales, superstitions, and monsters as a child. I never believed in them, and that interests me. My dad controlled the household I was raised in (my mom and I weren’t allowed to have friends, and he spied on the neighbors with binoculars), and I didn’t even recognize that as abnormal or abusive until I left at nineteen. Folklore exists in this kind of liminal state of truth I find emotionally calming. Sounds like an abstract connection, I know, but I’m fixated on how stories are told over time, and their power to change people.

How did you come up with the ideas for the The Domovoi? And what kind of reserach did you do for the project?

The Baba Yaga has some presence in the states, and she was my gateway to Slavic folklore. My research for The Domovoi focused on Soviet folklorists, especially in the late 1930s when they started to rebrand folklore to fit ideological trends.

You said that Slavic folkolore is not part of your heritage. Since you are not “of the culture” you are tapping into for this project, do you feel a responsibility to be careful not to fall into the trap of cultural misappropriation?

Cultural appropriation must be at the front of any outside creator’s mind. It’s not enough to read books; Western academia is tied up with colonialism and appropriation. Outside creators should never feel comfortable with themselves or their work.

According to the Kickstarter page, Beneath Floes started as a collaboration with Pinnguaq. Could you tell me more about how that collaboration came to be? Was it you who approached them or the other way around? And how did the collaboration work exactly? Also, was the idea to translate it there from the beginning?

I contacted Pinnguaq because I knew I’d need a collaborator to have any chance of writing about Indigenous history in a way that didn’t perpetuate colonial depictions from the past. I did a few months of research and made a prototype, then cold e-mailed them with what I had, my mission, and how I’d do all the work and run a Kickstarter to fund their localization if they were interested in overseeing my work and distributing playtester builds to folks in Nunavut for feedback. Luckily, they were incredibly generous and genuinely seemed to believe in my approach. I knew from the start that Beneath Floes would need to be available in Indigenous languages.

Do you think that the interactive form has a “special” potential when it comes to telling folk tales, or to continue the long, polymorphous tradition of story telling? If so, what would that be?

You know, I’m cautious about applying any specialness to games, because I’m afraid people overlook what games can learn from novels, theatre, sculpture, and other forms of art. Most games take too much inspiration from Hollywood films. But I do believe interactive games can contribute to folkloric traditions … I’m just not convinced it’s different from other forms of art. A painting of a domovoi is interactive, too.

Both The Domovoi and Beneath Floes do tell seemingly “traditional” stories set before a more “modern” background -- 1962 in the case of Beneath Floes, and post-revolution Soviet Russia in the case of The Domovoi, with its unreliably narrator who basically slaughters the “old superstitions” in the name of progress. How important is it to you to “update” traditional stories? Is it something that makes them more interesting to write for you, or do you think that it is vital for the survival of those stories to change and adapt? Could you imagine writing a “folk tale” set in your own present age?

Both The Domovoi and Beneath Floes are about how stories are told, so it made sense to include narrators who are emphasized as historical actors themselves. There’s a risk of a clusterfuck when you have a narrator from 1938 telling a story set in 1920, but I think it was essential, and it also de-legitimizes myself. Like the fictional Soviet folklorist, I’m another writer in the chain with some thoughts about old stories.

The idea for this piece came with my frustration with how “mainstream games” endlessly reproduce the same generic tropes (which, ironically, are often based on reinventions of folk tales themselves), while ignoring the endless richness of folk tales, legends and myths of different cultures (even the developers’ own). Are there any games -- commercial or not -- that you like for the way they deal with those kind of story elements?

Let’s see! Of course, all of Emily Short’s work comes to mind. Meg Jayanth (Inkle Studios) does amazing work decolonizing genres like Steampunk with historical research. I don’t think Michael Lutz (the uncle who works for nintendo, my father’s long, long legs) would be too mad if I said his work is about modern folklore. A more commercial example, I love the Witcher franchise’s deep love for Slavic folklore. That game has a vibe unlike most studio games, because they don’t mimic Hollywood.

Do you have any upcoming projects?

I just launched a Kickstarter for Southern Monsters. It’s about a disabled person in South Arkansas who posts on a messageboard for cryptid hunters. The scope is larger than my first two games, it’s much more overtly autobiographical, and it’s about the folklore I grew up with.

Good luck with your Kickstarter and thanks for your time!

"The Signal From Tölva": An interview with Jim Rossignol

Rainer Sigl — Fri, 04 Nov 2016 11:45:33 +0000

"The Signal From Tölva": An interview with Jim Rossignol

Rainer Sigl Fr. 4 Nov 2016 - 12:45

Jim Rossignol used to be a games journalist before he ventured into games development with Sir, You Are Being Hunted. Now, his studio Big Robot is working on The Signal From Tölva, a single-player FPS set on an alien planet. I wrote about this promising project for Der Standard; here’s my full interview with Jim.

You have made the switch from writing about video games to creating them. How did that happen?

Gradually. In 2010 I worked on a project commissioned by Channel 4, and ended up forming a small games studio to get the game - an educational puzzler called Fallen City (sadly now defunct) - designed, produced and published. With the money left over from that, plus a Kickstarter in 2012, we raised the money for Sir, You Are Being Hunted. I didn’t work full time on that, because we needed to pay the designer, programmer and artists, and so I remained a writer at Rock, Paper, Shotgun through most of its development. Fortunately it did well enough that I was able to work full time for past two years on our new game, The Signal From Tölva. It has only being during that period that I’ve really considered myself to be a game creator, although the switch still remains sort of opaque to me, perhaps because of how slowly it has happened..

How many devs, artists and collaborators are working at Big Robot, and specifically your latest game?

Several people have contributed small, vital things to the game. Mondo Ghulam and Ian McQue, both formerly at Rockstar, provided animation and concept art respectively. The main team, however, remains small. James Carey and Tom Betts - the pair chiefly responsible for Sir, You Are Being Hunted - have been joined by enormously talented CG artist Olly Skillman Wilson, and we’ve also had some help from another programmer, Dan Puzey. So we’ve all had to take on a number of roles, and call in specialists to help when we needed them. Consequently the workload is high and the progress slow, but being so heavily involved in all aspects of the process is, I think, rewarding for everyone.

How did Big Robot’s first game, Sir, You Are Being Hunted, fare commercially and critically?

"Gaming, as a commercial and design space, moves faster than anyone could anticipate"

Commercially it did extremely well. It has so far sold over 450,000 copies and more than a third of those were at full price (while many were of course sold heavily discounted in bundles and so forth). Critically it fared less well. Traditional press focused heavily on its lo-fi production (it was made extremely cheaply, because we simply didn’t have the resources for a high-fidelity game) and I think the overall oddness of development (Kickstarter, followed by Early Access) gave people a strange view of the game. The poor reviews didn’t seem to hurt its popularity, of course, and we’ve found it extremely rewarding how many players “get” what we were trying to do.

What’s the most important lesson you took away from working on SYABH?

Probably that gaming, as a commercial and design space, moves faster than anyone could anticipate. When we announced the game there was no such thing as survival games, and by the time we came out it was a flourishing genre, led by Day Z. In the time it took us to make the game Early Access, as a commercial concept, was announced, heavily adopted, and then subsequently backlashed against. Games are extraordinarily prone to whims and trends, of fashion, of commerce, of player attitudes. Any analysis of a game’s development and success (or lack thereof) that doesn’t take this into account is essentially being dishonest.

SYABH had a firm focus on procedural generation, which is absent from your latest game, SFT. Why?

We wanted to try something different. Two years or more on a single game is a long time to work on a creative project, and the length of time focused on that thing is taxing in and of itself. We wanted to make sure we were challenged and served by what we were doing. We’ve also regarded both Sir and Tölva as learning processes. We are still relatively new to game development, despite being old hands in related industries, and so both these games are about us figuring out how we make games, and what we’re interested in. As players will see in Tölva, the specific decision to world build is at the fore this time.

There is a notable renaissance of 70s SF aesthetic in games - most prominently in No Man’s Sky, but also in SFT. What’s so interesting about it to you?

Commentators have been keen to connect Tölva’s aesthetic with that of No Man’s Sky, via the palette of 70s SF, but I think our route to a sci-fi aesthetic has actually been quite different to that of Hello’s game. No Man’s Sky was a very deliberate attempt to evoke those kinds of images - explicitly so - and I think the colours and scenes the game creates strongly evidence that they succeeded in that at a high-concept procedurally-driven level. Our interest is rather more abstracted. Tölva’s world is just one world, and it focused on two concepts, that of “alien highlands” (our initial code name for the project was Highlands) and secondly the art of Ian McQue.

Our focus was to make a game that was faithful to at least some of his personal sci-fi vision. I think it’s absolutely fair to say that McQue’s work has been influenced by 70s painters like Peter Elson or Chris Foss, but his own style is far more painterly and impressionistic, and his themes are strongly related to the ‘kit-bashed’ style (Star Wars’ “used” future look) and also the scrappy, junk-repurposed style of Mad Max and, well, his studies of real world machines and industry. Tölva’s style is, therefore, an interpretation of McQue’s interpretation, which puts us some distance from those 70s masters.

How did the cooperation with renowned concept artist Ian McQue happen?

I’d admired Ian’s sci-fi art for a long time, and had been keeping track of it for a while before he left Rockstar. Once he was working solo we talked and together decided that he’d do some sketches and paintings for us to work from. It was fairly tentative, as he was off to do Hollywood stuff, and we had never really worked with a concept artist, but I think the results speak for themselves. Ian went on to design, robots, weapons and spaceships that would feature in the game. Our primary 3D artist, Olly Skillman-Wilson, has worked hard to create assets that were faithful to this, including using the same splattery brushes to produce our textures, and giving the world a “hand-painted” feel.

"Both STALKER and Tölva are games about landscapes and the life that inhabits them"

A comparison that has come up in regard to SFT and its announced features - AI, factions, open world - is the STALKER series. Would you agree? If you do, what’s the “legacy” of that game for you in SFT?

I think the legacy of Stalker for me as a game designer is that it permanently diminished my interest in the “linear” template for first-person games as set out by Half-Life and others. (I still regard it as the most interesting first-person game to have come out of any studio since Valve made the first Half-Life.) Stalker was also a game about landscape, as Tölva is, and when you create a landscape you need to create appropriate systems of “life” to inhabit it. Both games do that in their own way, and while Tölva and Stalker are very different in many ways, I think they share a sort of spatial and design gene in that sense.

´SFT seems to aim for a bigger audience than SYABH - do you even see it as aiming at a niche?

Tölva is probably more populist than Sir - it’s prettier, it’s more about action and blowing up robots! - but I think it can’t help being niche by virtue of being made by a small team on PC. We can’t compete with the Far Cry’s of this world by simple fact of their vast budgets, and so the experience is necessarily shorter, lighter, more austere, and - for now - limited to one format.

Big Robot’s focus, so far, has been on creating FPS. What’s the most interesting aspect of this genre for you, and how would you describe the current state of the genre, both in Indie and AAA?

I think both “survival” and “walking simulator” genres are a measure of the health of the first-person perspective. Easily accessible tools - Unreal and Unity - have made the genre one that teams of all sizes can readily contribute to, and I think we’re seeing that in terms of output. Perhaps the most interesting trend, though, is in “first person puzzlers”, which became inevitable after the success of Portal. These - as well as walking and survival sims - suggest that combat and violence is only a small area of design in which these games will be successful, and I’m keen to see how new genres will open up when building on those in the future. I certainly feel like Tölva has learned from puzzlers and walking simulators, as players will see when they get to grips with the game. (We’re stepping back from survival tropes this time, however!)

As head of a small indie studio, how would you describe the situation in regard to visibility, the “indie bubble”, profitability and the future of indie?

We’ll find out next year. Sir, You Are Being Hunted benefited from a unique set of circumstances, and was able to trade on the novelty of both Kickstarter and Early Access being new and exciting when it appeared, as well as riding high on the boom in survival games. Tölva will not benefit from these trends and also enters a marketplace that is increasingly saturated with high-quality games. We’re very nervous about that, and keenly aware that we face an uphill struggle to get notice. Exactly how steep that climb will he, however, we don’t yet know!

Is the distinction Indie/AAA still viable?

Yes, I think so. But I think it’s increasingly a distinction of scale and cost, rather than quality. We’ve seen in the past few years that indie teams can make AAA-quality games, but the size and length of them will necessarily be small. The AAA studios continue to make the very large $60 games that have high-production campaigns and a heap of secondary quality stuff. An indie team might just be able to make a game set in Adam Jensen’s apartment, but it’d take a team of hundreds more to make the rest of a Deus Ex game!

“Small” indie releases like No Man’s Sky have had their share of hype (and the ensuing drama) - does that make you wary of an association with a big publisher or platform?

Not at all - I think there’s every reason to benefit from big publisher marketing power, especially in this increasingly competitive space. No Man’s Sky might have generated a lot of bad noise, but it was also a tremendous success in most other regards. Hello have created an extraordinary platform to build upon, a unusual and experience and - luckily for both them and Sony - lots of money.

Looking at games journalism “from the other side”, what is something you feel is lacking? And, inversely, what has improved?

"The problem with games journalism is almost always knowledge"

The problem with games journalism is almost always knowledge. No one knows enough, or can know enough, to really get to grips with games as required by their diversity and complexity. Even the smartest and most versatile journalists find themselves hitting a wall with certain games, genres, or audiences. And there’s really little anyone can do about that.

What has improved, though, is also a consequence of this: journalists increasingly recognise that the games space is so huge now as to be essentially beyond easy survey, and so they either specialise and go deep on specific games, or they work hard to articulate to gamers just how wide the territory is now, and give examples of what can found in there.

Finally, a (maybe duh) political question: Do you, as a game dev, feel that you’ll have to face any consequences from the UK’s decision to leave the EU?

It’s too early to say, really. I expect the UK’s economy to suffer, and that will make all our lives more difficult and expensive. The decision to leave the EU was catastrophically narrow-minded and idealistic, and it will have terrible consequences that no one has yet foreseen.

"'Burroughsian', rather than 'Burroughs: The Game'": An Interview with Alex Harvey of "Tangiers"

Rainer Sigl — Sun, 31 Jan 2016 10:15:03 +0000

"'Burroughsian', rather than 'Burroughs: The Game'": An Interview with Alex Harvey of "Tangiers"

Rainer Sigl So. 31 Jan 2016 - 11:15

Tangiers has been on my radar for a long, long time. Announced and Kickstarted in 2013, the stealth game inspired by the surreal and dark imagination of William S. Burroughs has had a few delays. I talked with Alex Harvex, Tangiers lead developer, about games and literature, Burroughs and the experience of mixing literature and video games.

Literature - at least "serious", high-brow literature - and games usually remain worlds apart. What inspired you to try and take William S Burroughs' (WSB) work as the starting point for Tangiers?

Quite simply and quite selfishly, I wanted to make a game that I'd want to play! When I entered into thinking of making Tangiers, there was a significant trend of indie games relying on introspective nostalgia. The appeal of Fez for example was completely lost on me, and I found that incredibly alienating.

Do you think that WSB's work is especially suited for this kind of crossover? Why, why not?

The biggest hurdle with Burroughs is his embrace of the non-linear. The abstraction provided by literature doesn't nearly begin to transfer well to the continuity required by video games.

Jim Rossignol's speculation on a Burroughs game - only available here at the moment: - sketches a few ideas on how to do WSB justice with gameplay and mechanics. Do you agree with his analysis and ideas? How important is Tangiers' gameplay - the stealth mechanics - in this regard?

When we drew up the original design document for Tangiers, I wasn't aware of Rossignol's essay. But shortly after announcing the game, we came across it - and were surprised to extremely close parallels throughout.

We're not quite as explicit, though. Tangiers is a very Burroughsian game, rather than Burroughs: the game. Stealth as a mechanic is our anchor, both figuratively and literally. Acting as an agent of disruption, avoiding agents of control. Being forced as a matter of form to exist on the periphery.

The "easiest" way of combining literature and play is by limiting interaction, often to great effect, like in The Chinese Room's games (I hate to call these games "walking simulators, but the term has kind of stuck). In Tangiers, is WSB's work used for atmosphere and setting or do you see the mechanics as an integral part of interpretation of WSB's ideas and themes?

I've always felt that the supposed conflict between mechanical interaction and authentic expression (as raised by The Chinese Room) happens to be entirely false. What are gameplay mechanics? They're the medium's cinematography: a means to an end and another tool for communication.

Judging by the images and clips I have seen of Tangiers, you have used strong surrealist images and designs. Did any visual artists' work especially inspire you?

Too many visual artists to note, but the one thing that has especially found its way into the visual stylings has been album covers. Almost all of our character designs (and overall visual mood) have been prompted by the covers of release by Industrial Records and their contemporaries.

Will there be a blending/contrasting of "real world" levels/themes with the more nightmarish/drug-induced surroundings and themes?

Absolutely! The game is permeated in blurred boundaries.

I was very impressed with Tangiers' music, which reminded me of NaissanceE's atmospheric avantgarde soundtrack. How important is the soundtrack to you? Will WSB's characteristic voice be heard anywhere in the game?

Gameplay, Visuals and Audio are all of equal importance in video games. To enact this, our way of work has them all integrated in the development of the game. Rather than stitching audio on to accompany the prior two facets, they grow together. The game's environments are just as directed by the soundtrack as the soundtrack is by the world! As for Burroughs himself, there is a character in parallel to him. As for that character's role in the game, I don't want to be touching on spoiler territory just yet...

WSB famously worked on a videogame, The Dark Eye (1995). Did you play it? What, in your opinion, made WSB work in that medium?

I played The Dark Eye a very, very long time ago. I've been meaning to revisit it, but sadly time has been far from permitting.

As to Burroughs' motivatons, he's has always seemed to be eager to partake in a range of extracurricular works! Among metal tracks with Ministry, working with Cobain and film cameos, there isn't much that he hasn't dipped his fingers in.

A few years back, I speculated about a potential rise of "literature games" (German) - do you see Tangiers as the forerunner of a potential trend in (niche) gaming?

I think that such a trend is inevitable. The accessibility of development is reaching a point where people who didn't grow up with video games as their main cultural reference point can engage with the medium.

Which other authors' work would you consider good material for games?

As development progressed, J.G. Ballard's influence in Tangiers has become more prominent. I think as authors go, there is a lot of potential to explore Ballard's work and expression in games, and I hope that with the new film adaption of High-Rise we will see renewed interest.
Past Ballard and going in a very leftfield direction, I'd absolutely love to see someone embrace Alfred Jarry as a design & narrative mentor.

While gaming is very much mainstream and a billion dollar business, experimental literature certainly is a niche interest - and a game inspired by the works of an experimental author will be more niche still, considering that there's bound to be plenty of prejudice towards games in traditionally "high brow" audiences and the average gamer's mistrust of many more unconventional approaches to the medium. Still, Tangiers made its Kickstarter target. Did that surprise you?

Not too much, though the attention that we've received post-Kickstarter has! In terms of pure scale, the size of the gaming audience is so incredibly massive that even niche products can see sustainable results. What has surprised me is that we've seen a very positive crossover reception from people who aren't familiar with the works we draw from.

I think the thing we've done right there is that while yes, we fully embrace the fact that we're doing something different and not entirely accessible, but that we're trying to do so in a manner that isn't elitist or alienating to the average gamer.

The release date has come and gone - could you recap in a few words what went wrong?

In short, we hit an unpredictably high number of hurdles that were out of our hands in the first six months of development. After that, we lacked the necessary experience to bring things back on track in a timely manner.

What was your experience with Kickstarter?

Initially fantastic, now a great source of anxiety as we work to make up for the disappointment of a delayed project.

What was the greatest problem, financially, personally or creatively, that you encountered in making Tangiers?

Always financial - the pressures from that lead to a knock on in all other areas! After the initial delays, we needed to bring on board further funding to ensure stable completion. With our efforts there, we've had a lot of problems with sourcing stable investment - with that burden hitting us we've had all our other issues magnified.

What would you do differently now?

Better understanding that Tangiers' audience is larger than I initially anticipated, I'd have aimed for a large enough Kickstarter goal to bring onboard a second programmer. That would have given us enough extra breathing room to better navigate the worst of our hurdles.

And finally: When will Tangiers be finished?

We're currently tieing things up with a publisher so can't give away any specifics, but it won't be too far into the future now.