TEREZA KOUDELKOVÁ

Planetary Writings

Game Media Studio

Your game gives agency to the character and is more like a collaboration between it and the player. What does this shift mean to you in terms of experience – is it more about disrupting the player’s ability to act, or a way to foster a relationship between the player and the character?
I wanted the character to express itself in the game and in the gameplay. This actually brings them up to the level of the player – they become equal participants in the process. The player is often treated as a nearly divine entity, while in my game this hierarchy is challenged or completely broken. The character instead guides the player, reclaims its body, and sometimes takes back complete control. The player can only control the game by moving the thumbstick – there is no interaction button. The player performs something and waits for the character; and the character in turn waits patiently for us to figure out the next step. From the perspective of game creation, it would have been way easier to code a button.

You describe the relationship between the player and the avatar as potentially symbiotic. Do you think this relationship can also be conflictual, a clash of two wills sharing one body?
Absolutely. It creates a state similar to triggering a game cut-scene. The player is used to fully interacting with the game world, but is suddenly blocked from entering and watches a cinematic scene unfolding. When a person who wants to fully inhabit the character’s body plays my game, they will have a problem with the character’s actions. Not having a digital body at their disposal and instead having to fight for it with someone else is a kind of unpleasant experience, and that is exactly what I was trying to evoke in this work.

You use traditional art techniques such as ink and watercolor in a digital environment. Is this a way of “humanizing” digital bodies?
It is probably more about humanizing my creative process... I’ve always worked in a more traditional way and I sometimes have difficulty with digital games: everything is somehow intangible and untouchable, you can’t hold things in your hand. Although 3D modeling and animation are fascinating, it is very different from illustration or a board game. I’ve struggled with that in my previous projects, and texturing using non-digital techniques is a way for me to work with this. I am not only humanizing the body but probably everything around it. I am also trying to digitalize the artistic technique itself by layering, blending, and salting, which is harder because the zero value of paper is white, while the zero value of the screen is black; and there’s also the possibility of a manual error. But that touch is actually a central theme for the whole project (and many of my fingerprints are indeed visible – please don’t look for them).

photo: Polina Davydenko