Spielinfo Bilder Videos

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.

immersive environments. Ceremony of Innocence was important because it showed that interactive media could deal with mature content. Later Silent Hill, Shadow of Memories, Black and White and Ico helped us figure out how to deal with narrative and characters in real-time 3D.

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.«

to many different people. Then, and only then, games will become a medium.

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.