screaming infants

I'm making some weird shit. When storyboarding I am thinking: This is so obscene. Then I laugh. Loudly. Ha ha. God, I'm so quirky and weird. No one has ever done this in a game, it's crazy man, it's just crazy. The first prototype of the game, will be the player pulling out an old woman's teeth.

Still from early prototype (Ida Hartmann & Dreamfeel)

When I started making comics on a serious level many years ago, my peers said: Stop escaping reality.  Don't hide your pain with surrealism. Okay okay, so I'll try to tap into my post partum era. FINE.

Post-postpartum
Every Tuesday the past year I've been attenting a postpartum restorative exercise class. I'm the only one there who has an almost three year old, who's also in daycare. The other mothers all have their infants with them on their mat. Crying, pooping, breastfeeding while I try to focus on doing the stretches and breathing.

And maybe being surrounded by cute screaming infants is not the best way to get out of a yearlong post partum reaction, even though it's a confidence booster to be best in class. 

A couple of weeks ago, I suddenly found myself overwhelmed by the presence of all the babies. Out of the blue I was disturbed by it. The ultra slow pace of the movements was now unbearable. I even felt a stint of rage by it. I finally found myself in the mirror, my own angry face looking back at me: I am no longer postpartum, the enraged face expressed. 

But what am I then? 

A Beautiful Transformation
(Editor's note: I try to write this blogpost in a café, where a baby is "talking" very loudly and banging stuff into a table. Everywhere I go I seem to be surrounded by loud babies. Maybe it's meant to be -"this game is based on true screaming babies")

When I became a mother, I also became an animal for the first time in my life. The process started from the second my daughter was conceived. Before this, I had been a brain'n'thoughts kinda person. Not rational, per se, more like worries and mind clutter. And too much, some might even say. 

Now, I found myself being all body. My thoughts disappeared like small soap bubles, pffff, they were gone so violently fast. Something was growing inside me, it was all I could feel and sense now. Not in an idyllic way, where I sit peacefully on a flower field, knitting a wool sweater and brading my hair with hay, no, more couch style, mama couch, feeling life grow inside of me in front of television programmes about buying and redecorating homes. For nine months it was the only thing that I really cared about. All other things seems like a distraction from what I truly wanted: To see how much a stranger's house cost. 

(Editor's note: An infant has arrived to the café. It's already screaming like crazy. The distraction is frustrating; but this also feels like a way too long story for me to be able to write in this manner. Maybe I have to split it up in more chapters. I don't know. Maybe I don't even have to write it). 

OMFG.

"Bla bla bla, AND NOW YOU HAVE TO PULL AN OLD WOMAN's TEETH. Makes sense, huh?"

To be continued....

more

There is a game, and the name of the game is,
an already lost thought,
i only collect memories,
of a near future, then
a shift,

today i write sentences to grasp, something and someone who's not there,
my mind is constantly foggy,
the child is sick.
again.
but for the first time i experience the opposite feeling of 

prison,

i want to do stuff now
be someone, see people
im so so hungry, for the first time in years,
im so hungry
hungry

the child clings to me, she wants all of me, she says, while pulling my clothes,
im right here, i say, desperate, but it's not enough for her, she wants MORE,
more 

is everything
there is
everything,

the game has a name, it has drawings,
something sweet, something blue, something new,
i borrow my ideas from the dishwasher and sacred jeans,
from the stupid fears of being alive in a climate crisis, on the edge of a war, a child that probably will surpass 2100 and live to see the end,
computer games can seem so irrelevant, so irresistible,

i wake up, there is a day, there was the night,
light to dark to light again,
i continue.

poetry from a hole

One of my main issues when writing and drawing (comics, games, etc), is the balance between poetry and reality: How direct in the mediation of feelings should I be? I don't want to say too much, be too obvious and cliché, yet I don't want to be too cryptic and weird, so people won't understand a thing. 

I had the same struggle when I wrote Stilstand; I tried to minimize the use of language and let the visual and game mechanics speak for themselves, which made the few words used extremely impactful. But then comes a new problem: The words. Are they powerful enough, does this one word show exactly what I wanted to show, etc.

And then you can just continue twirling forever in a circular motion, going back and forth between poetry and directiveness until you deleted every word and then nothing in the writing makes sense, and then you find yourself in a pitch black hole, where letters are fading in and out, and you hear an omnious sound, a deep growl from within, a ... stop.

Becoming a poet lol

Now, in the beginning fase of storyboarding and prototyping, I make two versions: A direct one and a poetic one. For example, in describing pregnancy: 

Direct: I didn't know it would feel like this.
Poetic: A sprout. Then, a fever.

Personally, I really like the poetic notions, yet I am not a poet. I have no idea what I am doing. Somehow it feels more safe to be direct. The single sentence can be very impactful. With Stilstand it was definitely these honest reflections that hit the hardest. 

In the case of Mamimal (work title still), my new game about motherhood, I really want to open the door to it all. Yet motherhood is so abstract and other-worldly sometimes, that I want to reflect that too.

Poetic visuals?

Where Stilstand portrayed a real apartment in a real Copenhagen, Mamimal will be in an abstract universe. Inspired by for example Kids the lumpy female character will be in "the white room" of nothingness, where everything can happen. She moves around, becomes pregnant, gives birth, experiences the loneliness of motherhood, connects with nature, etc.

ida hartmann, artwork 'Mamimal' 2024

Parallel to the mamimal character, you will also enter the room of Mother Earth, who lives in a decadent apartment. 

ida hartmann, artwork 'Mamimal' 2025

Hopefully the visuals and the gameplay (mostly drag and drop, pull, reveal) will reflect the abstract feelings, and create a poetic room, where the few sentences will reach something in the player. 

Maybe if the visuals are very surreal and poetic, the language doesn't have to be too?

Or... 

Maybe it doesn't matter? 

Games can be magical, you know - when audio, animations, visuals, gameplay and writing comes together, it can say all the words I didn't know how to say. 

Maybe my real real issues is existing somewhere else:
What it is I want to say with this game? 
 

oh shit.

developer blog?

For weeks I've been fantasizing about writing a developer blog. Mostly because I need someone to talk to. For the first time I’m in charge of a game developing process, working mostly alone, and while it might seem somewhat cool and independent (“Girl, I didn't know you could get down like that”) for some, for me it’s like…

so what do I…
hmmm…
what do I do now? WHAT?!

The developer blog will be my neurotic watercooler talk, that I previously have trapped colleagues in until their eyes became clear and distant (yet inspired by divine artistry? hard to tell).

In the beginning
… Was the word: Motherhood. Before I even thought about having children myself, I thought about making a game about motherhood. In games you often follow an exterior motive, a grandiose plot, a journey to the end of the world and beyond, but what happens if game design and interactive storytelling can reflect an inner journey, a bodily experience, something that’s abstract, surreal and painful?

And I thought: Where are the mothers in games? Are they all dead or evil? Where’s their softness, anxiety and wisdom? Their swollen, lumpy bodies, their broken hearts, their watery eyes and milky tits?

As a true method actor
- getting deep into character, or like a super dedicated anthropologist, I was fortunate enough to begin my own journey into motherhood. I found out I was pregnant while my husband was singing opera in a competition in Moscow. I couldn’t reach him, which of course meant that he had been kidnapped by Russian agents to be an opera slave in the Kremlin. I called the hotel several times, but they couldn’t understand me, which only confirmed my worst thought: I would never see him again.

It was like an opera tragedy in itself. I cried and cried like never before. My body was covered in a thin layer of sweat, and my whole life unfolded in seconds. I am not able to do this alone, I thought. I am not cut out for this at all. What’s going to happen to me??!  

After 2 hours of frantic panicking, my phone rang. He was calling from Helsinki Airport, where he had taken an earlier flight home.  I’m pregnant! I yelled while crying loudly, feeling relieved, but somehow the feelings stuck.

It wasn’t like in the movies at all. I thought it would be so romantic and calm, like the last scene in Notting Hill (spoiler alert): A spring day, a park bench. Julia Roberts is laying in a floral dress, showing her beautiful baby bump, with her head peacefully on Hugh Grant’s lap, while he reads the newspaper with one hand and caresses her with the other. Instead I was already transforming into a panicky sweat-monster, no floral dresses, no park benches, no newspapers, just pure bodily horror, constant crying and mindless drowsiness. 

Making game, making baby, tomato, tomato, potato, potato.
For the time being I struggle a lot with structuring the game process. I am continuously torn between my own motherhood (daughter is now 2,5 years old) and the creative process. Since I became a mother, I haven’t been properly able to draw and write the same way I used to. Like, no way near. It’s just gone. Or is it? I certainly hope not.

When I made Stilstand, pre-motherhood, I was constantly in the process of creating the game. For weeks and months, it was all I thought about. Even my dreams were about it. Now, she is all I think about.

A while back I read an article about “When Women Artists Choose Mothering Over Making Work” in the NY Times, which debates whether it’s possible to be an artist and a mother at the same time, which only fueled my worries.

I can’t stop thinking if men have the same problem? Haven’t really read a lot of artists who are also fathers, struggling with these issues and not being able to work. And yet I really try to not succumb to any structural victimization of my own artistic labour, I mean, I am free, aren’t I?

And is it all a question about structure? Getting a routine of working, insisting. I look to other writer’s who are also mothers, how they write when the kids have been put to sleep, or in the early mornings before they wake. The few hours available for work are so very precious, and I am afraid to miss the window.

The tickle

Anyway, I’m still figuring this out. Some days I want to stop being an artist, because it has lost its natural process. Every week I'm at status quo, it feels. Most days I’d rather just sleep or do the laundry. But when I do get there, in that brief, artistic moment, where everything flows and you feel that little, special tickle, oooh i’m on to something, let me go deeper, in the stomach, I just want to stay and see what happens there.

So I continue, even though I’ve never worked slower. I want to see what a game about motherhood can be like. I want to experience it while experiencing being a mother. I want to create something that can explain this wild feeling of being in contact with the deep nature of all things. Computer games seem so fleeting in this sense. Yet I strive to make the two worlds meet. Let’s hope it turns out for the good.

To be continued.
(This took me a whole work day to write.)

byebye
Ida

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

drawing from pregnancy,
ida hartmann, 2022