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