Perennial IGF nominee Tale of Tales is back this year with Luxuria Superbia, a sensual, experimental touch game designed to twin the joy of sex to the joy of gameplay.
The game is nominated this year for a Nuovo award, the award "dedicated to honoring abstract, short-form, and unconventional game development which 'advances the medium and the way we think about games.'"
You could say that is Tale of Tales' mission, but this game has a different tone and a different feel than many of the studio's previous projects. Gamasutra spoke to Auriea Harvey and Michael Samyn (who answered the below questions collectively) as part of our ongoing Road to the IGF series to find out more.
But there's also a link to aesthetics. We are very much fans of old art. We adore Renaissance and Baroque paintings, sculpture, architecture, and music especially. That kind of art is very sensual, even when it is addressing deep religious themes.
We miss this connection between deep beauty and sensuality in modern times. It feels like we've all embraced the Kantian concept of the sublime to divorce aesthetics from simple pleasure. But we feel the two are one. And we should not place a big distinction between our love for a beautiful person and the experience of beauty when listening to music, for instance. Those experiences are connected and even enhance each other.
What's your background in making games?
We have used computers to make works of art and design our entire adult lives. First individually -- Auriea in New York, Michael in Belgium -- and since 1999 together. We designed websites and created net.art. But we always made a point of not distinguishing between those two too much: we wanted our designs to be beautiful and meaningful and we wanted our art to be accessible and entertaining, so a lot of our first web-based 3D projects resemble the games we are making now in funny ways. The few video games we had played back then did inspire us, especially in our desire to create immersive spaces and interact with virtual creatures. It was with that sensibility that we started making video games in 2003. We felt they were a wonderful medium for creating worlds and situations to just spend some time in. We still feel the same, really, despite learning a lot about the form and the industry.What development tools did you use to build Luxuria Superbia?
Blender was used for the 3D models, Pixelmator for most of the 2D graphics. The game was created in Unity -- originally programmed in the visual environment of Antares Universe and then transcribed for performance to JavaScript. The music was put together in Logic Pro, recorded, in part, from a giant computer-driven street organ in the studio of Walter Hus.How much time have you spent working on the game?
Luxuria Superbia took about a year to make, though the bulk of the game was created in only three months. The rest of the time was spent on fine-tuning and playtesting. But Luxuria Superbia was preceded by a research and prototyping project called Cncntrc that took another 18 months. We will be showing a prototype called The Cosmos and The Cave that came out of that project at the Experimental Gameplay Workshop at the GDC next week.How did you come up with the concept?
The original spark came to us at a GDC roundtable led by Brenda Romero about sex in video games. While most of the discussion addressed the depiction of sex, and concerns about pornography, we became curious about how a game would feel with mechanics inspired by sex instead. Later we realized that sex was in fact also a sort of game, and the parallels between the two stimulated us even more. With this game we did perhaps more research and playtesting than with any other. At certain points it seemed like we were trying to encompass too much in one game. Aspects of transcendence and cosmology were introduced during our research. The links between sensual and spiritual pleasure fascinated us, and demanded further exploration. We hope to do much more with this in the future. Luxuria Superbia is only a first modest product of that research.You've used the phrase "sensual pleasure" in discussing Luxuria Superbia. Can you talk about exploring this subject in a game space, and with game design?
Pleasure, or "fun," seems to be the most prominent, if not the sole, purpose of games to many -- so it's amusing to make a game that explores pleasure as its topic. To some extent we only use sex to help people play the game. Assuming that the players have had sex before, we hope they will quickly understand how to play Luxuria Superbia.