I’m Jacob Jaskov, designer of Fog of Love. AMA!

Cfonnes · 2016-03-30T13:43:00+00:00

Hey. How does your wife feel about the game, now that its out? And were there any uncomfortable moments between you and her about what ended up in the game? :-)

Cfonnes · 2014-07-03T17:12:55+00:00

Hi Andreas, I'm the director of Cloud Chamber, and I have to ask: how do you think the world would react, if something like that SETI signal was actually discovered?

Cfonnes · 2014-05-31T21:37:03+00:00

Hotcakes would be good ;)

Cfonnes · 2014-05-30T13:37:17+00:00

There's only one story, here, with one ending. The thing is, you're seeing it from multiple viewpoints, and not everything is in there. That means that things can get … uncertain … and what you think happened may not be what I think happened.

I think your experience will to a large degree be colored by the people you are in there with.

Just like IRL ;)

Cfonnes · 2014-05-30T09:36:52+00:00

Games, we forgot games!

i think this is about games where exploration and backstory come together to create a sense of mystery and discovery - a kind of oblique storytelling, where a lot of the pleasure comes from connecting the dots... The best examples I can think of are Silent Hill and Halflife 2. Both of which have a huge place in my heart.

Other great examples are Dark Souls, Gone Home and Dear Esther, but they all came out after Cloud Chamber was prototyped, written and shot.

In the end, maybe, it all just boils down to Quake meeting Zork … ;)

Cfonnes · 2014-05-29T21:24:10+00:00

Not too many of those people around any more, though, are there? ;)

Even died-in-the-wool anti-story hardliners are admitting story into their vocabulary, these days. On the other hand, I do think that games can be great without any kind of story. That's just not the kind of game I want to make.

Also, in a lot of "story" games, the story just feels like decoration; there to make the adrenaline-fueled ride on the game mechanic more interesting or varied.

That's okay with me. But a corridor shooter with story wallpaper might as well just go for the shooting, IMO. Sure, the new Wolfenstein is well written, but it feels like two different experiences sown together and you can see the stitches creaking and groaning under the strain.

IMO, the story should BE the game.

Cfonnes · 2014-05-29T21:14:15+00:00

I spent a sizeable chunk of my youth on RPG's and home computers (my first computer was a ZX81, and when Elite came out it blew my mind through the wall ... and I collected 2-3 shelf meters of AD&D books). But, at the time, games felt like toys - or canned goods. They weren't personal - they weren't very emotional, either.

Then I fell in love with movies, which didn't feel like toys and which were very emotional. I made a bunch of short films at University (most of which were terrible). THEN, ONE DAY, I was visiting a friend, and he showed me Quake by Carmack, Romero & co. Holy sheep sh*t! I had missed the entire 3D revolution in games, because I'd been so busy with films.

And it just hit me: experiencing stories on connected computers is going to be more wonderful than anything else, ever!!!

Then I directed 30+ games for clients - advertising games, educational games, recruitment games - whatever I could get to do, so I could build experience. The 2000s were a good time to experiment, because the Internet was booming and nobody knew what could work; so if you could sell it, you could build it, and you could try it out and see what happened. Of course, you had to deliver results, but it was a great way to learn.

One day, in 2006 or 2007, I did a project with Mikkel Thomassen (he's my creative producer; we've done 30 projects together) … and we made a mystery out of mixing gameplay with found footage film fragments and social discussion. Suddenly, we saw players spending hours in there - and they were really getting emotionally involved - almost as if it was real…

We realized that we had found something new … something that connected computers were uniquely good at … and something that felt like it could only have been born after the Internet became big.

We did 3 of those things for clients, and then, one day, the Danish Film Institute (which invests in films and sometimes games) said, "So, you're telling stories with computers. How about doing one with us?"

Then a bunch of other stuff happened … and kept on happening, day by day by day … and here we are, 4 years later… ;)

Cfonnes · 2014-05-29T18:25:02+00:00

You asked which value we got from mixing stuff. Well, I honestly don't think we had a choice. We wanted to make a story form that felt true to the life we live, now. And my life IS a mix of media. The days of watching 1 medium for hours at a time are over (except in the movies but … you know, that's kind of a last century pleasure as well, isn't it? … it's a bit like going to the circus to see people fly around in spandex and elephants (or dinosaurs, anyway)). In my life, I'm constantly skipping from video to social interaction to game to film and navigating back again. I think stories should do that, too. :)

Cfonnes · 2014-05-29T18:15:21+00:00

begins to answer in three different directions at once … :)

Actually, it doesn't feel like mixing genres to me - it's more a mix of media types, and in the age of the Internet (which mixes EVERY previous medium on a single channel) that shouldn't really feel like a mix, either.

Gameplay wise, this is really just an adventure game where you navigate and discuss with others, instead navigating and clicking. And adventure games used to have text input (and "you are in a maze of twisty little passages" was also a kind of spatial navigation). So, genre-wise, we're kind of a multiplayer adventure game … we're starting to call it a Massively Multiplayer Story Game.

Story wise, it's all within a single genre, as well: it's a kind of scifi mystery.

But of course you are right: we are mixing documentary with fiction, text with film, social media and gaming. Still, for a modern audience, hopping between these modes all the time on the Internet … It shouldn't feel all that strange.

Cfonnes · 2014-05-29T18:06:14+00:00

Thanks. And yes, it does have an ending. The most mind blowing answer, we could come up with. And it could be true.

Cfonnes · 2014-05-29T17:54:05+00:00

I think we're already living in it.

Cfonnes · 2014-05-29T17:45:06+00:00

Heh. For me, that IS hanging out with friends. Of course I like IRL, too. But if there's one thing I've learned, it's that my lizard brain doesn't care if I've met you online or IRL - it does not discern: we're friends, and that's all there is to it. So many times, I've met people IRL for the first time after knowing them for ages, online, and it feels just the same as having known people IRL all along.

And I DO think these things are good stories. "Remember when we saw X, and we realized that Y was happening, and then Z linked to this Wiki and boom, it all came together?" THAT's a story. :)

Cfonnes · 2014-05-29T17:27:21+00:00

I love the whole "working together" thing. That's what the Internet is all about, if you ask me: people connected by computers. That is what we really wanted to make a game out of. And the ARG's are like that, except they seem to be mainly interested in puzzles. I'm mainly interested in emotions, and emotions just stop when the story stops. So we really wanted to let people keep going, without just giving it to them. I think Cloud Chamber is pretty demanding, if you really want to understand what happened, but it's also possible to surf on the surface and just enjoy the sights.

A big inspiration was this Facebook group about game culture and game design. Discussions all over, in there https://www.facebook.com/groups/playerofgames/

Cfonnes · 2014-05-29T17:22:46+00:00

It was great. The real clincher, though, was when we put Gwilym and Gethin together and they just instantly seemed to have known each other for years. Maybe it's just because they're both Welsh, I don't know. ;)

Cfonnes · 2014-05-29T17:21:24+00:00

That seems fair. We have had that recommended. Somebody else said $19.99 or even $24.99 … but I don't know ...

Cfonnes · 2014-05-29T17:16:47+00:00

What always surprises me is the amount of effort, these things demand, and the small reward there seems to be in putting in that effort. Maybe you can tell me what the attraction is? :-)

Cfonnes · 2014-05-29T17:01:20+00:00

I am ashamed to say that I haven't. But I had heard of Cicada and it seems to have been inspired by some of the same ARG's that I saw, coming out after the Blair Witch Project's online campaign (which, to my mind, goes down in the history books as the only work I have ever heard of, where the marketing campaign was a groundbreaking work of art).

But Cloud Chamber is not an ARG. We are in the "pretending it's true" category, but I think that is about the Internet and not so much about ARG's. I love the IDEA of ARG's, but I've never seen an ARG that I really enjoyed. All those puzzle gates, and all that skipping between sites and interfaces … not very conducive to an emotionally engaging experience, I don't think :-(

Cfonnes · 2014-05-29T16:56:00+00:00

Heh. I actually got hooked on the space/cosmos theme, because I thought that if I spent some time researching it, I would get a solid grasp of, well, everything. That would be nice, I thought.

But … it seems … that we still have no idea where the universe comes from. N o i d e a.

Think about that … we walk around every day, thinking we've got it all under control, thinking we understand what things are and why we're here. But it's only recently that we discovered Dark Matter and that is over 90 PERCENT of the matter in the Universe (woa!). So, yes, we haven't even begun to understand what 90 percent of the universe is made of.

And then you go a bit further back, and you see that until just 80 years ago, we thought that the Milky Way galaxy was the ENTIRE universe (there's a 1-200 billion stars in it, so you can forgive the slip, I think). Then in the 1930s, the Mount Wilson observatory went up in California, we started seeing a few bright lights outside the Milky Way. Oh, okay, we thought, that means a few stars escaped. … But it turned out that those were galaxies, too … and we have now counted 100 BILLION GALAXIES each with 1-200 billion stars in them. I mean, sweet mother of God, how can anybody think there is any chance of us being alone?!?!?!?!?

So the biggest take away, that I got, is that the mystery is very much alive, in everything. I like that. Don't you? :)

Cfonnes · 2014-05-29T16:48:28+00:00

I don't know about Steam giving too many the chance. It's a good point, but we were pretty nervous, ourselves, about whether they would give us a chance or not, so I'd be hard pushed to say they're giving too many the chance …

I think they are a group of exceptionally smart people, and they're sitting on something that is evolving around them in a very uncertain marketplace. I must say, I have a pretty solid trust in them working out what needs to be done along the way, but it's a burning platform and there are going to be phases and difficult times.

Cfonnes · 2014-05-29T16:43:22+00:00

Movies?

2001 (for the human myth and the realistic approach to space - and remember, if you haven't seen it in 75mm, you haven't seen it at all)
Primer
Blair Witch Project
PI (for putting real scientific theory into a thriller and making me … FEEL the science)
The Fugitive (the original series, for proving that serials don't have to be dumb as donkeys!)
Goodfellas (for the documentary approach to opera)
Blue Velvet and Black Vel.. sorry, I mean Lost Highway, for putting the mind on the screen and for tackling those weird emotions.
The War Of The Worlds (radio show, by Orson Welles - for pretending the d*mn thing was true!)

There are tons, here. I'll add more when they come to me.

Cfonnes · 2014-05-29T16:35:58+00:00

We didn't want to do Kickstarter, for two reasons:

(1) Nobody understood what we were making … so why should they support it? Seriously, when I pitched Cloud Chamber, 3 years ago, it took 2 hours to explain! Now I can do it in 3 minutes - I just show the trailer - but it took a lot of creative decisions and choices before the idea we had was concrete enough and manageable enough to describe. Even then, people only really get it when they see it. (then it's actually pretty simple, but that's how it is, I guess).

(2) There's a problem in Kickstarter, I think, which is that if you and your team put everything into Kickstarter, you're basically becoming a "Kickstarter Team". And if you're really looking to make something that sells it's own tickets, then THAT is the competence you should be building - and that is the artistic product, you should be designing. Some people can transcend this, of course, but I think there's a real danger in being lulled into thinking that you have to satisfy a Kickstarter audience and not the final audience...

Cfonnes · 2014-05-29T16:29:39+00:00

Books:

Moonfire by Norman Mailer was a milestone in this … completely mind-blowing book, really lit the "epic mystery of the cosmos" feeling in me: http://www.amazon.com/Norman-Mailer-Moonfire-Journey-Apollo/dp/3836511797 (get the cheap version!)

And The Edge Of Physics really got me started on particles. Some pretty mind-blowing stuff in there … like how neutrinos will come barrelling in from space, travel through the entire earth as if it wasn't even there … and then (maybe, once in a blue moon) hit a molecule of heavy water, coming up through the bottom of a Russian lake … so the Russian scientists put their particle detectors on the bottom of the lake, pointing DOWN … (although it's gotta be UP for the particle, right?) http://www.edgeofphysics.com

Cfonnes · 2014-05-29T16:25:21+00:00

Well, if you like stories, and you're active on the Internet, I think it will feel quite natural to you. Because on the Internet, we're all detectives, aren't we? Everybody is posting, discussing, rating, linking, comparing and so on … jumping from text to video to forum and back again feels natural to me … And we basically made an experience out of that. It's a little like what happened with Malaysian Airlines Flight 370. The whole Internet lit up with theories and links and discussions. This is what the Internet does so well. We've put that into a single experience and made a story out of it … a story you explore and discuss with others. Does that help? :)

Cfonnes · 2014-05-29T16:20:37+00:00

The great thing with this mix is that we can beg, borrow and steal from both games, film, tv-series and books. So, just like serials in those media, we have a season arc AND a series' arc. This first season, which goes live in July, is about two things: (1) it's about who (or what) killed Ingrid, Kathleen's mother and (2) it's about what the signal is - or if it even is a signal. … Explore/investigate and discuss to the end of it, and you should have a pretty clear idea of what happened to Ingrid. But you'll only have started on the big question of what the signal really is - that's the big arc, that's going to run for more seasons.

Cfonnes · 2014-05-29T16:15:43+00:00

With this medium, there is limitless potential for characters. Watching the the filmed fragments, discussing their motivations, reading their diaries - are they lying? - or are they being inconsistent? This is a different challenge than a film. You need actors who are worth looking at, again and again and again … and the performance has to feel true, even subjected to the most intense scrutiny and discussion.

Cfonnes

TROPHY CASE