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I'd love to make a videogame by using the river that flows where i live.

Change "videogame" with "song" and that's something Lullatone, aka the musical duo Shawn James and Yoshimi Seymour, actually did! For the song like pebbles in a stream in their latest album Shapes & Time, they had a guitar recording play underwater and they re-recorded it with a microphone placed nearby in a plastic bag. Of course the bag ended up ripping, of course the microphone got flooded in the process, and of course, it's not a disaster, just the silly story of a playful idea that ended up coloring the song in a particular way.

Making games the "usual" way can feel like a sanitized process at times. Maybe i'd go on a short field trip to a place that's relevant for the project i'm working on, such as that time when i went to a thrift store to get ideas of props for an old lady's house, but other than that every step of the process can happen on the computer: gathering reference pictures or videos, drawing sketches and concept arts, writing design documents and flowcharts and whatnot, making definitive 2D or 3D assets complete with textures, materials and animations, programming the gameplay, making the music, and much more. I have already made a lot of objects, buildings and characters in my short career as a game artist and yet i have never really *touched* anyone of them; i've created them with virtual tools in a virtual space so they they fill up another virtual space.

And that's something i'd generally be pretty fine with! I have clumsy hands that often won't collaborate when i want to do something very precise such as sewing or building things. Practicing a craft takes time, materials are expensive and they take up space in the flat, and you always have to tidy up and clean the place when it's done. Creating things on the computer, especially after the years of practice i've already invested in it, just sounds more convenient.
Yet, these days i've been finding myself longing for a bit less convenience, wanting to ground my practice a bit more in the real world. I've started taking notes for projects on a tiny flimsy notebook that fits in my pocket instead of my phone's Notes app; i attended a screen printing workshop a few months ago and that was a very fun, inspiring experience (which i haven't found the time to replicate yet); my latest game and my next one are pen & paper RPGs, the kind that can be printed instead of only being read on a screen; i have in fact been printing and (laboriously) sewing RPGs zines & booklets found online, as well as making a few notebooks for friends and family; and i'm considering starting a pottery class, *if* i can find one near me soon.
Those are small things really, but they're adding up, and they feel like part of a bigger process, a time in my life when i want to make stuff more directly with my hands and then use my hands to touch the stuff i've made.

Lullatone's Shapes & Time is filled with more stories like the one i told you about earlier. For the song a tape of a tape of a tape, they recorded on the same set of two tapes over and over again, adding new instruments to the mix while progressively turning the oldest sounds to mush; they recorded sounds going out of a sand-filled speaker for like grains of sand in your hand; and my favourite story has to be the one about just spending time, in which the song was recorded with a phone that accidentally also captured the tick-tock of a clock that was in the room. This album wasn't made in the digital vacuum of a software suite, it was primarily made in the world and with the world.

My next game is not quite finished yet, but i am slowly making progress on it. It is a game about the real world, which setting is the real world (and more precisely the player's immediate surroundings). I've been writing it on my laptop -still because of convenience, but every now and then i take a break from writing and leave my chair and move in the world around me to think about concepts and try out ideas. Accidents happen that never would have happened if this was a videogame, and they steer the project in new, exciting directions every time. The constraints of the real world make it a game that's certainly less convenient to imagine, and to play, than a similar game in a fantasy setting, but i hope that it will be all the more interesting for it? That's something only time will tell i guess. And once it's done, i can't wait to keep exploring that path and make more games and stuff in the world and with the world!