Our latest game, Wheels of Aurelia, is vailable from TODAY on the App Store! We hope you’ll enjoy 🤘 Head over to http://wheelsofaurelia.com/ for all the infos!
We’ve been invited to talk at the General Assembly of Photography - Reggio Emilia. Nicolò is taking part at the round table “Photography, information, post-truth: digital revolution and social media” on May 5th at 11.45 am - Teatro Cavallerizza.
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 if” we had a voice in the making of our favorite games, and as naïve 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 “inspiring actions”.
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 “retro games”. 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 Hazanavicius’s “The Artist”.
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 “Perhaps a Time of Miracles Was at Hand: The Business & Development of #Sworcery” 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 Nathan’s 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 “risk averse” 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, it’s 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. Let’s face it: nobody is in the game industry because “it’s an easy job”. It isn’t. 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 can’t be the final goal for people that want to express themselves through games. Another responsibility game creators have is to enrich one’s own life with enough diverse experiences. It’s hard to be original in making games if we do not have personal, deep, original experiences to draw from. Finally, it’s 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. 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. There’s 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 don’t tick all the review or feature boxes – there are so many factors to a game’s 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 couldn’t 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 “enabling us to work on more projects through sales”, 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. 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 won’t 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 “fun” and “emotional” 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 “fun” 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 “laughs” or “delight”. Greek theater was undeniably a form of entertainment, hence “fun”, 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 – 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 Aarseth’s 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 élite for a reason). But we think it’s not good when our community scorns those who believe that games can also evolve in different directions outside the “indie manifesto”. 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.
Wheels of Aurelia is a narrative road trip game set in the roaring Italian 70s, it tells the story of Lella, a restless woman driving on the roads of the western coast of Italy.
Thank you for coming to the first Milano Game Festival. We had a wonderful time and I hope we managed to demonstrate that a different kind of video game event is possible! The picture above is by Alex Camilleri and you can find more HERE.
Learn more about the Milano Game Festival and its selection on the Official Website.
We have to delay Wheels of Aurelia’s launch by a few months (originally promised it would come out before end of Spring 2016) because we’ve got a little carried away with adding new content and we want everything to be perfect before we ship.
As it says on Bandcamp: “At launch the game will be available on Steam standalone OR bundled with the soundtrack, so if you’d rather wait for that, please do! The game + full soundtrack is coming out this Summer 2016”
Now before I go back to polishing our narrative driving game, let me write some of the features of the release we are preparing:
16 different endings (+ 6 from the beta)
16 Illustrated epilogues!
New 3D art, more unique buildings with story and dialogue.
10 new illustrations by Patrick Leger
New dynamic soundtrack with 3 new songs written and composed for the game
Improved and revised control system
Playable intro
Cards and Achievements!
Secret mode, and much more…
Available to answer any question here or on twitter.
Check out our latest effort! Santa Ragione produced the Triennale Game Collection, a downloadable virtual exhibition of video games created for the XXI Triennale by some of the world’s most renowned independent game designers, showcasing these artists’ experimental approach to interactivity.
The collection, curated by Pietro Righi Riva, features work by Mario von Rickenbach & Christian Etter (Dreii, Plug & Play), Tale of Tales (Luxuria Superbia), Cardboard Computer (Kentucky Route Zero), Pol Clarissou (Orchids to Dusk), and Katie Rose Pipkin (Mirror Lake).
5th International A MAZE. Awards 2016 - the nominees are…
210 games from 31 countries have been submitted over the last 6 months - After weeks of playing, close to 150 experts, professionals and journalists selected the nominees.Now, we present you the 20 nominated games. An international jury will decide the winners of the four award categories: The Most Amazing Game Award, Human Human Machine Award, WTF! Award and Other Dimensions Award.
The award show is on April 22, 2016, 19:00 at Haubentaucher, Music by TinTin. (Entrance only for ticket holders)
The nominees of the A MAZE. Awards at A MAZE. / Berlin 2016 - 5th International Independent Videogames Festival are:
Killbox is an online game and interactive installation that critically
explores the nature of drone warfare, its complexities and consequences.
It is an experience which explores the use of technology to transform
and extend political and military power, and the abstraction of killing
through virtualisation. Killbox involves audiences in a fictionalized
interactive experience in virtual environments based on documented
drones strikes in Northern Pakistan. The work is an international
collaboration between U.S. based artist/activist, Joseph DeLappe and
Scotland-based artists and game developers, Malath Abbas, Tom Demajo and
Albert Elwin.
Cosmic Top Secret (DK)
A unique documentary adventure game about family secrets. You play T
who wants to know what her father did for the Danish intelligence during
the cold war.By flicking T through an authentic Cold War flotsam and playful
mechanics, you ask yourself: Who am I? Did I inherit anything important
from my parents that I’m not aware of?You will help T master her fragile paper existence by training
military disciplines like spy flying and code breaking and T will
gradually move closer to the heart of the story and her personal
revelation. The work is a collaboration between Trine Laier, Mads Lyngvig Jespersen, Lise Saxtrup and Bjørn Svin.
A co-op puzzle platformer for two players.
Play as minotaurs trying to escape their maze.
Merge your screens to rearrange the level’s structure and form a new path to the exit.
Land’s End is a Virtual Reality adventure from the creators of Monument
Valley. Set against spectacular landscapes, the player is tasked with
awakening an ancient civilization using the powers of their mind. Land’s
End combines Ustwo Games’ award-winning approach to interactive
storytelling with Samsung Gear VR, creating an incredible virtual
reality experience that you can take anywhere.
A toyish surprise-o-rama without text nor characters, where an object
shapeshifts as the player spins it around, revealing the underlying
story. A game by Pol Clarissou and Armel Gibson.
2 player immersive space survival game that takes place in a future
where the Sun is dying. Custom wearable electronics, a life-size space
pod, and a generative audio-visuals place each player inside a
psychedelic, interactive experience based around the transfer of
information between the two participants. This experimental game is created by Mónica Rikić, Jessica Blanchet, Grayson Earle, Dawn Hang Yue Wong and Peter van Haaften.
The Marchland is the third installment in Dutch artist
Daniël Ernst’s ongoing Diorama series. For Marchland Ernst puts the
viewer inside a toll booth where the unseen passes by. Using motion
controllers the viewer can interact with the beautifully handpainted
environment. Spectres of cars only visible by drops of rain drive
through the toll barrier. Are these apparitions, or has the viewer
become a ghost?
Dr. Langeskov, The Tiger, and The Terribly Cursed Emerald: A Whirlwind Heist (UK/DE) - http://crowscrowscrows.com
A 15 minute heist game by Crows Crows Crows & Directed by William
Pugh (The Stanley Parable). Slip into the soft-soled shoes of the
mastermind responsible for the greatest heist- oh god I can’t do this
any more, i’m joining the strike. good luck writing the game
description.
Wheels of Aurelia is a narrative road trip game set in the roaring
Italian 70s. Half racing game, half interactive fiction, it tells the
story of Lella, a restless woman driving on the roads of the western
coast of Italy, the famous Via Aurelia. A game by Santa Ragione.
One physical space, four big buttons and codes to be cracked! Decipher
the on-screen clues and run around to bash the buttons in the hidden
sequence. You may have to decrypt symbols, unpick circuit diagrams or
rifle through spy photos, but one thing’s for sure: the best
codebreakers work as a team! A game by Alistair Aitcheson.
Lucid Trips is a virtual reality project which takes
place in planetary dreamworlds. Every planet will be an individual
“trip” in the constantly expanding universe of dreams.
All interaction and navigation like walking, jumping, climbing, swimming
and flying is possible through our handwalking character controller.
On the first Dreamplanet Whateverland it´s all about Art Exploration. A vr game by VR Nerds, which includes Nico Uthe, Sara Lisa Vogl and Sebastian Hinz.
GNOG is a puzzle game set across a universe of playfully interactive
monster heads. Explore a myriad of unique interconnected heads and the
worlds they carry within, as you try to decipher each one’s quirks and
advance to the next. Game is created by KO_OP.
My grandmother is probably the most important person ever to me, as she
provided me with the stability and care a child needs growing up.
We all have or have had people helping us become a responsible and
caring person, and this short narrative game is an ode to these people,
and more specifically, to my grandmother. The game is developed by Florian Veltmann.
Genital Jousting: A MAZE. Grand Prize Winning Game (SA/ NO)
A (slightly) adult themed competitive local multiplayer game for up to 8 players.The game is up to 8 dicks playing around in an actual rumpus. Add 8
dildoshaped Joy-s-dicks, friends and alcohol, and it will be a fun event
in itself! Game is created by Evan Greenwood and Martin Kvale.
You will become an agent of the enigmatic ESPR organisation. ESPR was
set up to deal with the outbreak of telekinetic abilities among
‘special’ citizens and consequences of the event. You’ll venture to
exotic locations, including the outer reaches of your mind, as you
attempt to thwart a villain’s quest to obtain a mysterious artefact. Created by Coatsink Software.
Antioch is an online cooperative interactive fiction game. You’ll play as one of two detectives working together to solve a
intriguing crime. The adventure will bring you to the city of Antioch, a
dark metropolis surrounded by moutains and sea. A game by Mi-Clos Studio.
One player is trapped in a virtual room with a ticking time bomb they
must defuse. The other players are the “Experts” who must give the
instructions to defuse the bomb by deciphering the information found in
the bomb defusal manual. But there’s a catch: the experts can’t see the
bomb, so everyone will need to talk it out – fast! A game by Steel Crate Games.