Rethinking collaboration models

You know the feeling when you have a song stuck in your head? You have to sing it, you have to listen to it. Well, I tend to obsess like that about approximately everything. For example, I recently watched a great video on quantum computing and, even though I didn’t want to, I had to try and build a simulator. I would rather be making games, working on my actual job, or keeping a good sleep schedule; I just can’t help myself.

Over the years, journaling helped me a lot with over-obsessing, and I hope this newsletter will help me even more!

Weird Games

This week I watched a great video on weird games (part1, part2). The video itself is in French, with some parts in English, but subtitles, written by the author, are available in both languages.

In the intro, someone says “I’m pessimistic about the industry, but optimistic about the medium” and this resonated quite a lot with me. I do believe we have to create new ways of financing video game production and new collaboration models, maybe taking inspiration from what communities are building in some “third places”.

A place to grow food and be creative

By third places, or “tiers lieu” in French, I mean community spaces to work, share and collaborate. In France, a lot of them are built around farming, co-working, creating art, or making objects. I would love to combine something like that with making games. A place where people can come, even stay multiple days, eat local food from the farm, and build games. The closest initiative I found, minus the farming, is in Sweden: https://www.spelkollektivet.com/.

Third places are also built to be more resilient: everyone can help everywhere and risks are split between each person in the collective and each activity. You can have farmers selling different kinds of vegetables, or game developers building different experiences, and everything evens out in the end.

And finally, as a lot of third places are open to the public, it’s a nice opportunity to teach game development or playtest games!

Thanks for reading! I hope you enjoyed 🙂
Feel free to respond and tell me what you thought of this first issue!

Have a great week,
Thibaud