Realtime Art Manifesto: A Response

Endless Forest - by Tale of Tales

Hello! 

In my critical gaming class, we recently discussed your manifesto from 2006, called the Realtime Art Manifesto. I was wondering if your perspectives have shifted since this was written, especially in terms of restricting the experience of the game to a single audience. Since the writing of this manifesto, do you think that these ideals have grown in the independent game design community or has the there been a trend that destroys these ideals?

Hello Nicole, 

Our thinking has evolved since then, of course. We have learned a lot. And have released several games since then. But I think we still believe in the main points of the manifesto. We still feel that videogame technology has the potential to serve as a medium for a form of art that is both incredibly wonderful and desperately needed. 

I do think we have given up on expecting massive changes across the entire games industry any time soon. The industry has become a lot more fragmented since then, too. Maybe it doesn't make sense any more to think of it as a single whole. I do see a strand in videogames moving towards our ideals. But this is happening much more slowly that I would like. 

Our focus now is on establishing a small but important enclave as it were, where beauty and surprise can happen. Most people in this enclave are independent developers, but they are a minority. Big pixels and trivial fun still reign supreme in the independent games community. But that doesn't matter. Popularity and artistic merit do often not go hand in hand. This shouldn't mean that we should abandon artistic merit! 

If you're interested in our thinking, you might like to read other things linked from here:

http://tale-of-tales.com/tales 

Thank you for enjoying our games.
Michael Samyn