Games in spite of themselves
Auriea Harvey and Michaël Samyn
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Tale of Tales is a Belgian design studio founded by the couple Auriea Harvey and Michaël Samyn in 2002. Samyn set up the fine arts collective Group Z in 1992 and started creating digital art and web design under the name of Zuper! in the mid-90s. Prior to moving to Belgium, New York-based internet artist Auriea Harvey was known as Entropy8 and designed beautiful websites. They first worked together as Entropy8zuper! and now join forces to create emotionally rich interactive entertainment, including for example "The Endless Forest", a multiplayer game in which everybody plays a deer. There is no chat and there are no rules in this forest, and playing in it doesn't require much of your time. Come and meet the other deer and take in the scenery!
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We like computer games. But it often feels as if we like computer games in spite of what they are. We like being immersed in their fantastic environments. We like meeting their virtual characters and being absorbed in their stories. Not as spectators but as active participants. We like how the interactive medium stimulates our senses as no other medium can. And how it allows for meeting other people in dreamlike circumstances.
But games themselves often ruin these experiences. By forcing us to engage in violent activities, even when they are inappropriate. By offering only cliché and boring storylines and telling them in a way that is alien to the medium. By preventing progress until we have collected impossible numbers of trophies or beaten gargantuan monsters that make no sense. By allowing other players to mess up our experience with chitchat that is not relevant to the story. By making us feel as if we're manipulating numbers in a spreadsheet rather than participating in a mysterious tale.
With Tale of Tales, we want to make games in spite of themselves. Games that do not contain the rigid rule sets, stale stories and focus on violence that ruin playful interaction and poetic experiences. Games that will never prevent you from amusing yourself and having fun in your own way. Games that are "Built-For-Joy". The Endless Forest is one of our first attempts to accomplish this. In the following, we try to explain some of our design decisions and how and why they are different from what is common in other games.
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This is just the beginning of a much larger project. The Endless Forest is being developed in phases, each of which is released to the public for free. Continuation of the production is as much influenced by the global design of the game as by the input of the players and opportunities offered by arts organisations. The Endless Forest was originally commissioned by the Musée d'Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean (Mudam, Luxembourg) and has been featured in several art exhibitions. When the budget allows it, we add an element to the Forest especially for the occasion. This is how a romantic ruin, strange pagan gods and recently new fawn characters became part of the game's persistent universe.
Being able to release the game in different stages of its development has been an incredible experience for us as designers. The multiplayer aspect of the game allowed us to observe how people interacted with newly added elements. Especially, seeing how players make up games in the relatively sparse game-world was a revelation.
We are not very interested in rules-based structures. We feel that in much digital entertainment the game often stands in the way of the playing. And our focus is firmly on playing and on the new forms of storytelling that the realtime interactive medium allows for.