2013 Interview for Lee Witney (never published)
1. Why have you chosen to create with this medium, what are you trying to communicate and why is it important to you?
The answer is a complex one, because what we end up doing in our lives is often a result of many different experiences. The obvious, uninteresting answer is that we've always been fascinated by games and video games, as most kids are. As friends (we met when we were 17 and 20, respectively) we were enjoying discussing our different play experiences, analyzing them, and imagining how we'd have done things differently. It started as a fun exercise of thinking "what ifâ we had a voice in the making of our favorite games, and as naĂŻve sense of discovery about how things work. When we grew up and began to feel like we had something to say for ourselves, games were naturally the medium we had invested lots of thought in, and we had matured a genuine belief in its expressive potential. We decided to actually start making games with the intention to create something that wasn't catering exclusively to the games world, but was also aimed at a non-gaming audience, who share our sensibilities for themes and aesthetics. We are interested in seeing how things that are typically communicated with other media look through the medium of games and video games (like politics, for example, in our 2013 game http://finalcandidation.it that we designed for the Italian elections).
2. The term 'Game' seems quite limiting for a tool that allows a person to interact with another's ideas. Do we need a word that articulates the medium accurately, that embraces protean experiences, if so could you suggest one?
It could be argued that words like "game" and "play" are not limiting in themselves. They accommodate many different meanings that keep changing based on locations, players, social interactions, narrative content, and more. Games may be perceived as puerile, because they represent concepts and actions that are deeply rooted in our human nature, but are typically experienced for the first time during infancy. We've found that trying to define the meaning of the term "game" or "play" could be as hard as defining the meaning of the term "art". We like to consider play as a behavior and to think of games as tools that enable a play behavior. This way we do not have to think in terms of restrictions such as goals and rules. Instead, we focus on what, to us, are more important design challenges like âinspiring actionsâ.
3. It is important to respect history but not be constrained by it. In the mediums inauguration developers innovated because they basically had a blank canvas. Where are we now, are we bound by our history or enriched because of it?
As you say, in art, history certainly has this dual effect -- it simultaneously restrains and frees the artist. This might be true for every medium, and it might simply depend on the approach. Surely, games themselves suffer from an excessive dependence on the history of video games. We wonder if it is because game-making was for so long only relegated to engineers. On the other hand, even people with different backgrounds today choose to make âretro gamesâ. Â For instance, pixel-art is extensively celebrated, often merely out of custom or tradition, without considering the implications. There is nothing inherently wrong with making games about old games, but it is a little saddening when this celebration is all that creators are interested in participating in. Imagine if every movie was like Michel Hazanaviciusâs âThe Artistâ.
4. How can you sell diversity to risk averse consumers, especially when the work of the imitator is embraced more than the risk taker?
There was a very interesting talk by Nathan Vella at GDC China in 2012, called âPerhaps a Time of Miracles Was at Hand: The Business & Development of #Sworceryâ that explains how Capybara Games managed to have a successful product by relying on a completely niche market. If the question is about surviving while making the games we want, then Nathanâs talk possibly has the answer: there is always a niche market large enough that shares our mindset, and fortunately, contemporary distribution models enable us to reach them. We, personally, do not worry too much about the ârisk averseâ consumers. They will eventually turn to things they are more interested in as they develop their passions and taste. What is more important is to reach people that are interested in diverse entertainment or culture that resonates with them. The interesting part is that these people may not be familiar with games, or may have never considered that games can satisfy their need for low-fi, political science fiction worlds, and the challenge is to reach those people.
5. What responsibilities do consumers have? Their demands for the videogame to be respected contradict their buying habits; which support the same immature themes over and over again.
It is tempting to say that consumers have a responsibility. When people keep buying the third or fourth chapter of the same game with more than two hundred updated guns for $69.99, well, itâs very tempting to point fingers. But developers have really as much of a responsibility -- to do whatever they can to make the games they want to make, without starving. Letâs face it: nobody is in the game industry because âitâs an easy jobâ. It isnât. Crunches, sacrifices are way too common, and it is mind boggling how so many devs are willing to go through that to work on games they dislike. Some of them might be trapped in some financial loop where they are stuck in producing the most profitable game possible, but that canât be the final goal for people that want to express themselves through games. Another responsibility game creators have is to enrich oneâs own life with enough diverse experiences. Itâs hard to be original in making games if we do not have personal, deep, original experiences to draw from. Finally, itâs really disheartening the amount of sexist, misogynist, overly violent, homophobic, and transphobic content there is in games and it is our responsibility to do better. We face the problem of an audience approaching gaming as pure entertainment and not as a medium capable of convey meaning, and we, as developers, should focus on ways to change that.
6. As new concepts are explored surely critique needs to evolve, especially when trying to define experiences that do not fit into our current forms of measurement. Is there an alternative to how games are currently evaluated?
The technical focus, for instance, could shift to accessibility. Instead of telling us if this or that game is making the best use of a technological expedient, critics could tell us whether it was built with a degree of accessibility appropriate to the audience the game is addressing. Â It could also be interesting to see mention of relevant media to contextualize the overall experience offered by a game. If you are playing a game about fairy tales, how does your experience relate to different works by Hans Christian Andersen or the Grimm Brothers? Why are these themes treated aesthetically differently in the game with respect to early 20th century illustrations? The tendency to evaluate games only from the game prospective and not refer to the rest of human culture and history can be limiting.
7. What happens to an idea that could advance the medium but fails to tick the boxes under our current review system. Is it left in obscurity or maybe refined by someone else. If so what is the originators role; a sacrificial stepping stone for others?
I like the idea of failures as sacrificial stepping stones. We've been inspired by our own past failures as well as by various unsuccessful game productions from obscure developers in the '90s. Thereâs nothing wrong with failed projects and going back to see what was good in them. It would be unfair to say that projects fail just because they donât tick all the review or feature boxes -- there are so many factors to a gameâs success.
8. Please explain your definition of quality? Does it reside in a score, an accolade, sales, mass consent, personal opinion or is there something else?
This is a tricky question. It is helpful to distinguish between what we consider a successful execution of the design we set out to realize vs how well-received the final product is. In the first case it is really a matter of scale. Not all projects are born equal, and we always put this into perspective when evaluating the quality of what we create. What was the budget? How much time did we have? The quality is the ability to forecast the scope of the project based on these values and do the best you can under the circumstances. If we couldnât have made anything better (or, should we say, more interesting), within those constraints, then the project is successful. If, instead, we are discussing success in terms of âenabling us to work on more projects through salesâ, for us success can be measured based on whether or not the revenue will allow us to work on a bigger project than the one we just finished. This is especially true now, because we are very small, and we feel we still do not have the funds to work on projects with a big enough scope to let us experiment in the ways we would like. For example, we would love to hire artists and engineers to work with us and add their vision to our projects.
9. The crash of the videogame in the 80s was due to excessive poor quality and saturated plagiarism. Do you think the market could fall again and would that necessarily be a bad thing, especially given that the videogame could be reinvented without the limitations they face today.
Back when video games rose from their ashes, the industry welcomed a new approach to game development, championed by Nintendo, that set the standard for the modern industry until this generation of games. Around this time, the whole developer kit and seal of approval model was invented, in part, to prevent plagiarism. It created a safe environment where customers could finally have fewer but better games, but it also made designing games prohibitively expensive from the start (the sky-rocketing royalties to print cartridges and the cuts Nintendo would take from the sales). The result was fewer, better games on the market but also a culturally sealed world, with not much variety of exp. Today, easily accessible platforms and big online markets like Steam or App Store, things are similar to the 80s somehow, but the medium and the consumers are open to developers with different backgrounds. Â Meanwhile, thanks to new accessible frameworks like Unity, Game Maker, etc, the barrier to entry is much lower. New generation consoles so far also seem to go further in this direction. The difference might be that we now have the capacity to create independent networks that filter or curate content for end users in efficient and particular ways, so that the public wonât be as lost as it was in the early 80s.
10. How do we pursuit other forms of emotional content if there is always this expectation of fun? What is the most significant hurdle in creating work that might not be accepted commercially or critically?
The separation between âfunâ and âemotionalâ content is not always so clear cut. Many recent games find spaces between these two areas, where interesting, elevated, or even touching content can be experienced through an entertaining series of interactions. Of course there are productions that try to distance themselves from âfunâ as much as possible. But there are also many productions that stay somewhere in between these two extremes and could serve as a bridge for players from one type of content to the other. It is also fundamental to understand that fun in itself is not intrinsically related to âlaughsâ or âdelightâ. Greek theater was undeniably a form of entertainment, hence âfunâ, but its themes go certainly beyond those of comedy.
11. What needs to change in the developer/publisher/consumer/critic relationship to encompass new ideas. Does any one group hold more influence than the others?
Yes, consumers have the biggest influence, as well they should. They are spending their hard-earned money, as they say, and they certainly have the right to get what they want. It is our job to reach out to consumers, critics, and publishers that have a sensibility akin to ours. If publishers and critics are responsible for slowing down the maturing of the medium, it is because they are sometimes slower at capturing the new trends, the new needs of the consumers. Some game experts can fail at seeing how a certain phenomenon, apparently non-game related, is eventually going to radically shape the way games are made. It took a while for everyone to understand, for instance, the potential of tablet/portable/mobile games as a legitimate, expressive platform for games -- Â the first to understand this were certainly the consumers.
12. In your ideal future what would a videogame represent and how would it be perceived?
As a medium capable of conveying meaning, not just tied to the entertainment industry, we wish for games to be part of an interactive literature, to put in Espen Aarsethâs terms. We hope people will mainly approach video games for what they communicate, rather than for just killing some time. Cinema has a great diversity, from Sundance to Cannes to the Oscars, for example, these are events that celebrate different ways to use the medium, differentiating content and other aspects, all the way down to the duration of the movie itself. We should hope for this kind of diversity for video games in the future. We would also like to see the indie community outgrow what sometimes looks like an elitist behaviour. Self-referencing groups are not bad, per se, and they are pretty common in fields where the research goes beyond the common knowledge on a topic (for example, scientific publications are often aimed at an Ă©lite for a reason). But we think itâs not good when our community scorns those who believe that games can also evolve in different directions outside the âindie manifestoâ. It feels like we are going against our own goal, which is to explore the communicative power of games. The recent interview with Kurt Bieg (developer of Circadia, Twirdie and SwordFight) at penny-arcade.com addresses this problem in a very critical, but interesting way. It is definitely an important issue, and we cannot afford to lose the voice of talented and passionate developers like Kurt.
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