“I mean, I’ve made games in one day, and they were OK,” he laughed. Rickenbach said he was surprised how long they worked on it. Making the original film took about a year from start to finish, and it took two years after that to complete the game. “When we discussed what we wanted to do as a game based on this film, we had kind of a similar direction-to apply not a traditional game genre on it, but just to really take the film as what it is,” Rickenbach said. He liked Rickenbach’s other games, and the two saw eye-to-eye on Plug & Play. It worked: Around 50% of people who’ve bought the game so far played it to the end, according to the developers’ data.įrei is interested in game design, but he searched for six months for someone who could help him with this project. And he thought, correctly, that players would be more engaged with, and more likely to finish, something interactive. “That kind of was something that had an impression on me, and I started to think of how I could tell a story in a way that people could take advantage of the interactive possibilities,” he said. That was partially because fewer than 10 percent of the people who clicked “play” on his previous short film, Not About Us, watched it to the end. He knew he wanted to develop Plug & Play into a game before he even began animating the film. I’m really good at drawing straight lines I had to figure out a way to get away from that.” But on a laptop touch pad “it was impossible to draw a straight line,” he said, and it made his work more free-flowing, if cruder as well. “When you’re an architect you draw straight lines mainly, and that was a problem what I started to draw for animation,” he explained. But he chose that unconventional input method for a very practical reason. His work in general is suffused with fingers, and he’s fascinated by them. “I’m aware that it sometimes can confuse people, and I like that,” Frei confessed.įrei drew the original film, which was met with accolades back in 2012, entirely using a single finger on a laptop touchpad. Kill Screen’s convinced that Plug & Play is about “the hopelessness of digital communication,” but the perv in me finds it hard to get past all the penetration. It’s vulgar, but in a weirdly sort of touching way. A finger, plugged into a light switch, goes flaccid or erect when you tap the button. The plug people chat circles around one another, arguing over who loves whom. There’s no story, only shifting facets of light and darkness and sex. The pieces, in this case, are crude-looking black-and-white drawings of plug people, wall sockets, fingers and hands, and lightswitches, all being flicked, prodded, inserted, retracted and extended over the course of a six-minute short film that Frei and Rickenbach transformed into a 10-minute mobile game. I mean, of course that happens, but that’s something that happens when you put pieces together.” “It’s like fitting the pieces together in the right way, and it’s not so much about expressing myself. His background lies partially in architecture. “I approach ‘making’ a little bit more like a designer than an artist sometimes maybe,” Frei said. To them, the light switches, plugs-and-sockets and finger-dicks are utilitarian, although no less fascinating for it. To him and the game’s co-developer, Mario von Rickenbach, it’s more about the work’s visuals-its contrasts and binaries-and its physical, mechanical aspects. The first spark of Plug & Play, drawn in 2011 “It’s really up to the viewer,” he said, and he wasn’t just being coy. When I asked Swiss artist Michael Frei about the seemingly overt sexuality of his 2012 short film/2015 iOS game Plug & Play-it’s full of tiny people with electrical plugs and sockets for heads and elongated, erect fingers-he replied that he doesn’t like to answer questions about the meanings of his work. This week, we spoke with Michael Frei and Mario von Rickenbach about Plug & Play, a short game based on a shorter film. ANIMAL’s feature Game Plan asks game developers to share a bit about their process and some working images from the creation of a recent game.
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