4Players: First of all, who are you and what kind of game developer are you? What do you do for a living?

Tale of Tales: We are Auriea Harvey and Michaël Samyn. We are artists who use game technology as their medium. Our purpose is to create interesting and emotionally engaging interactive experiences. Not necessarily games in the strict sense of the word, but playful activities nonetheless. We feel that videogames have exceeded their origins in games and have the potential to become an entertainment medium as rich and varied as cinema, music and literature. We're exploring part of this potential.

Developing games is our full time occupation. Before this, we designed websites for a living. But creating games is so time-consuming that we cannot afford to do anything else these days.

4Players: Is there a story of how, where and when the founding people of Tale of Tales came together as game developers?

ToT: We met in hell. In an artists collective surrounding the hell.com domain, to be precise. We started collaborating as net.artists and web designers first, as Entropy8Zuper! (entropy8zuper.org). A few years later, we founded Tale of Tales . We also fell in love with each other and got married.

4Players: Why do you make games?

ToT: Because we love games and because we hate them. There's a lot of things we adore in videogames and that we think could be expanded further (interactive narrative, generative systems, emergent gameplay, immersive worlds, autonomous characters, etc).

Michaël and Auriea - literally one of the most artistic games development couples.

While other developers may create games for diversion and fun, we use them to explore themes and subjects that are difficult to deal with in non-interactive media. Typically questions that don't have simple answers, issues where good and bad are hard to tell apart, stories without endings, riddles without solutions. The interactive medium excels at dealing with complex topics and multiple meanings. Because it, quite literally, puts the user at the center of the experience.

We market and distribute our work via traditional games channels because it is a way to reach a wider audience than museums or galleries would allow. We are also not interested in making art for the happy few. We believe that there are many intelligent and sensitive people out there. So we try to make our work as accessible as possible.

To some extent even more accessible than traditional games, because we choose themes that appeal to a wider audiences (there's no space marines, ninja's or zombies in Tale of Tales) and we try to create input controls and interaction structure that are easy to understand for non-gamers.

4Players: While you explained on your website how you didn't want games to be frustrating you introduced a very unusual control scheme with Fatale. Why so?

ToT: The control scheme in Fatale is only unusual to gamers who are used to typical game control schemes. These game control schemes, however, are completely unusable for people who are not accustomed to them. They are all but intuitive! And some, especially the first person »ASWD« scheme, cause motion sickness in many. So we painstakingly developed a first person control scheme that does not make people sick. While at the same time, expressing the emotions we find important in the experience.

Fatale is only difficult to play if you play it like a normal game. If however, you try to understand its system and work with it, rather than against it, the use of the controls will enhance your experience tremendously. Our

- Review: The Path (German)

- Special: Tale of Tales (German)work, and definitely Fatale, is not about finding the quickest way to get from point A to point B. On the contrary, even! It's about taking as long as you can. This is very explicit in our previous project, The Path (of which even the title refers to this). Fatale is more open, more experimental. It puts the responsibility in the hands of the player: it is your choice to treat it like a game and get bored, or to relax, take your time and enjoy the experience.

This is an experiment with openness. Something that is oddly lacking in games. Possibly because of the early stage in the development of the medium (and the acceptance/understanding of the audience), most videogame designs still carefully take you by the hand and guide you through the program (as if it were as linear as a film or a book). In a way, the game structure itself could be seen as an artificial way of imposing linearity onto a non-linear medium. Linearity is a very powerful tool for crafting an experience. Players rarely have an opportunity to make real choices in videogames, to take responsibility. Everything is left up to the designer. At Tale of Tales, we like to subvert this status quo and see what happens if you make the player responsible for their own entertainment.

4Players: Do you have some kind of dream project?

ToT: Yes. In a way. But it's very vague. We have this desire to make something. And every project we work on feels like a stepping stone towards this one ultimate dream project. Without knowing exactly what we are evolving towards, every time we learn a little bit more. We see the whole of our work as a research project, an exploration of some of the potential of the interactive medium.      

4Players: How supportive/helpful/useful are Steam, Xbox Live and other distribution platforms for independent developers? Do they encourage indie projects?

ToT: We only have personal experience with Steam. They are supportive of independent developers in as far as they offer us access to a large group of gamers. But they don't do a lot to educate their audience. So it's down to the individual person to decide whether they will play an indie game or a commercial one. Microsoft seems to be similar in this respect. Although they are a much bigger company that operates in a much more corporate way, and thus less indie friendly. Some independent games would not be commercially viable without XBox Live Arcade, which obviously puts some questions next to the so-called independence of these games. The being said, the rampant piracy on PC and the lack of accessibility to high powered graphics in consumer computers hurt the viability of that platform.

While offering a distribution channel is very encouraging in and of itself, neither service does anything else. They don't invest in independent games production, they don't offer technical support, they don't market independent games. So there is some room for improvement.

4Players: What games have influenced you? What other books/movies/music influenced you?

ToT: Doom, Tomb Raider and Myst were early influences. Experiencing them didn't lead directly to making games, but it did put the idea in our heads of wanting to create interactive

Tale of Tales' biggest project to date, The Path, dares dealing with subject matters games are usually steering clear from.

More than books, movies or music, we have been inspired by painting, sculpture and architecture. Probably because, unlike the former, they are non-linear media. What they taught is that narrative does not need to rely on plot, but could be something that is established in collaboration with the player. Specific influences come from medieval painters like Van Eyck, van der Weyden and Petrus Christus, the sculptures and architecture by Bernini and the Saint Bavo Cathedral in our home town of Gent.

4Players: Have you grown up being gamers?

ToT: Not really. As children we played games on home computers or in arcade halls. But it wasn't a life style. Later we didn't touch games at all. Even when we started working with computers, it was to support our art and design work at first and later to create web sites and internet art. We played the occasional game but it wasn't a hobby. And it still isn't. Not because we don't want to. Just because the industry doesn't offer much that appeals to us. This way, as consumers, we join that majority of humanity that is indifferent towards videogames. But we also point out a flaw in this supposedly commercial industry: We are consumers, we have money, we want to spend it. But the industry is giving us nothing that interests us. We like to think that, as developers, we are working towards a solution to part of this problem: increasing the diversity of the offer so that new people are introduced to digital entertainment.

4Players: What is particularly fascinating about games? What potential do you see that might not yet have been unlocked or even scratched yet?

ToT: Where to begin? Videogames have hardly started as a medium. Which is odd since they have been around for decades. But games don't seem to evolve. Space Invaders, Mario and FPS games are still the norm. They are just being re-skinned over and over again. In a sense, it is normal that games don't evolve since games as games are thousands of years old. Everything you can do with a game, has been done.

But we believe that videogames have the potential to grow into a real medium, on the same level as cinema, literature and music. For that to happen, however, developers need to reject the notion that interactive entertainment can only be a game. Games have very specific structures. They have rules and goals. They are about competition, about overcoming conflict. They are about winning and losing. This is a very narrow range of themes that only allows games to tell very specific stories. Stories about fighting, basically. Like sports.

But if we stop thinking in those terms, suddenly the entire spectrum of narrative and emotions opens up. Suddenly we can make »games« that deal with many different topics, games that appeal

»Why do you make games?«, we asked. »Because we love games and because we hate them.«

4Players: Looking at the way players navigate through your games, they seem like interactive pictures, books or movie stills.

ToT: This depends a lot on how you play. If you go into our games expecting to be taken on a journey or to be told a story, you will be disappointed. Our games do not take you by the hand or force a story onto you. They are environments that allow you to explore certain themes, ideas and emotions. Interacting with our work requires a lot of responsibility and activity. We feel that this is a strength of the interactive medium: to allow the player to direct their own experience.

In a way, we feel that traditional gameplay in videogames acts as a superficial way to add linearity to an otherwise non-linear medium. It's understandable that designers do this because players are familiar with linearity, and gameplay offers a kind of transition between passive entertainment and truly interactive entertainment. Obviously, our way of creating interactive projects is just one way of many. We hope other designers will discover other ways.

Our games are only like pictures, books or stills for players who are passive. But passive players will probably not enjoy our work. You need to actively engage with our games to enjoy them. But we're not forcing you to do so. It's your choice.

4Players: One common thing about your work is that it appears open to interpretation - as opposed to the linear story-telling of mainstream games. Is this openness a unique quality you are explicitly looking for?

ToT: Yes. In fact, it is one of the main reasons why we chose to use interactive media as our artistic tool. We are not interested in telling a single particular story. We are much more interested in the many different meanings that a story can have. Because to us the experience that the viewer has is more important than any sort of message we might want to share. Like Marcel Duchamp we think of art as something that happens between art work and player. A kind of electricity he called it. But unlike Duchamp we have access to a technology that allows us to author this exchange. In the end, art is always about the viewer/user/player, not about the artist. We're trying to create little machines that can generate things that are relevant to the player.