Strange excitement

The other night when I got off work, after spending my day in a chair typing code for my game and spending my time on obsessive pursuits, like "searching for all the photos of Miami available on Google", I found myself in a strange kind of excitement – physical, nervous, mental, even sexual. I know this state that happens to me from time to time, this long mental orgasm, this exaltation without cause or purpose, this torrent of thoughts, fantasies, visions and stories, memories, that overwhelms me.

I was walking through the streets, it was dark and the smallest building porch, the smallest illuminated window, the most miserable garden and the most kitschy illuminated sign delighted me like a whole new world to discover, like promises of infinitely numerous adventures – as if every street and alley, as if every street and alley, every doorway, every corner was waiting for me to explore, to make it my own, as if the whole city and its inhabitants were waiting for me to start stories, as if the whole of life was one big playground to play in.

It must be the GTA Vice City effect or the video game effect in general, I've already talked about it and it's something I'm working on a lot at the moment. I play a lot, by the way, Vice City, The Path, Minecraft, games that are very different from each other, but each one teaches me something about gameplay, about what a game is, about why you play, for what purpose, for what benefit in your life.

I believe that video games and the attention, the curiosity they demand, have a positive effect on real life – far from locking us into a virtual world, they make us more curious and attentive, we start to adopt in real life the "explorer" state of mind we have when we play. It happened to me, while walking in the evening, and while emerging in an unknown district, to feel this exaltation which one also has while discovering new places in a video game. This impression of having a space in front of you to discover and exploit, this impression that you are here and now and that anything can happen, that you are there to make things happen. Who can claim to experience this on a daily basis, naturally? It's the opposite, most of us live on autopilot and don't even see the streets anymore as we move from one point to another, always the same, during our days.

I dream of a new generation of video games that relearn how to live, how to see the world, how to reinvest in it, how to make it a place of adventure rather than the infinite repetition of the same.

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Talking about this with Eric recently, I joked that if he got into 3D, he would just have to create a kind of infinite forest where we could hide from the modern world and take a breather to think collectively about the counter-offensive - mental, spiritual, that is. The idea did not displease him.

Yes, I believe that we are no longer in the era of leaflets and propaganda papers, nor of meetings or any of the other procedures of the revolutionaries (and the powers that be) in the twentieth century. The official world in which we live, as well as the history we have learned, our values, our ways of life, our collective enemies and fears, our priorities, our way of living and dying, is a narrative, a fiction and an aesthetic elaborated by someone or by no one, but a myth in which we live – and it's normal, Man needs it.

Tomorrow's video games, God willing, will be, among other things, counter-narratives, not only of other worlds, but of counter-worlds with infinitely many functions and purposes.

As I had already written one day, the only true Contemporary Art, according to the very criteria of contemporary art (multidisciplinarity and multimedia, ludic aspect, participation of the public, references to the common contemporary culture, etc), is the video game.

To him therefore to recover also all the functions formerly devolved to all the arts.

We will no longer die to save a cathedral, a painting, or to defend a play, we will no longer go to war to imitate the hero of a novel, we will no longer look for answers to our intimate questions in a novel, we will no longer go to the movies to live adventures by proxy. We will really live them; in front of a screen too, but really. And we will find answers about ourselves.

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I'm working on a game myself at the moment, an entirely text-based game – instead of images, we have text that describes the places and events that follow one another, and the player types in text to act, for example "go north, open cabinet, search cabinet, take book", etc. I'd like to succeed in programming a real little Matrix, with as many random elements as possible, with characters free to move, with the need to eat, to sleep, with the weather changing, with the possibility if you want to go to the north, to open a cabinet, to search a cabinet, to take a book, etc.

I would like to succeed in programming a real little Matrix, with a maximum of random elements, with characters free to move around, with the need to eat, to sleep, with a changing weather, with the possibility, if you want, to do nothing else but walk around and live, and to establish relationships with the world and its occupants. But also to have adventures if you want. I think I'll be able to do that. This will be my first work as a demiurge.