Interview #196 — Cecile Richard

by Mia Nie

Cecile Richard is a graphic designer, zine maker and game designer living in Melbourne whose artistic work often revolves around the themes of memory, connection and belonging.

Cecile’s most well-known works include award-winning short Bitsy games novena, ENDLESS SCROLL, and UNDER A STAR CALLED SUN.

Cecile spoke to Mia about being extremely online, creating your own communities, and place-making in games and art.

Firstly, I’d like to congratulate you on your recent successes. Multiple of your games have won awards: Endless Scroll and Novena won Freeplay Independent Games Awards, Under A Star Called Sun won the Australian Game Developers Award for Best Narrative, and Topography has just been nominated in the same category. How does it feel to be recognised in that field? To be something of a vanguard?

Thank you! I find it interesting that you say ‘vanguard’—I don’t really see myself that way. I feel like I’m just one person in a long line of creators of this kind of game that has always existed; it’s just people didn’t notice them in the way that they do now. But I do believe there is a new wave of people that we haven’t heard from before, just being like, “Hey, I’m going to make a game!” Because it’s that much easier to make! There are so many more tools available to people who aren’t necessarily professional coders. You can have a rudimentary knowledge of HTML and be able to use these tools to make what you want to make. If you want to make something more complicated, that’s up to you, but the baseline is more accessible.

It is nice to be part of that. Being recognised for it feels good. I feel confident about my work and the way people interact with it. Having that recognition is something to be proud of. Obviously, it’s great! I’m not going to be like, ‘It sucks!’ Being known rocks.

I think what’s striking about your work is its tonal intensity; they have this deeply affecting, palpable sense of melancholia and loneliness. What are your thoughts on feelings? How does your work speak to emotional experiences, and how do you think about tone and affect throughout your creative process?

The other day, I wrote this review on Letterboxd that just said, ‘I’m all feelings.’ And that’s how it is. That’s how I work. I’m very preoccupied with getting the tone right for everything I work on. Every time I work on a new thing, I have to figure out what it is I’m feeling and how to convey it, and the best way to do it. I feel compelled to get it right, because it’s important to me that whoever is playing my work understands what I mean. If they don’t understand what I mean, or they understand it differently to me, I want that interpretation to be something I understand. I feel like I’m very preoccupied with being understood in that sense, both emotionally and in terms of my creative intentions. Obviously, I’ll never have full control over that, but I like to make sure that whatever is different from what I think is at least interesting to think about. Otherwise, I feel like I’ve failed at what I’m doing.

I think about the emotional effect on the player as a connection between me—the artist—and the player. I don’t really have anything else, because my games are about being evocative with minimalist art and writing. It has to rely on something strong, and feelings fill that role in what I’m making right now. I don’t really think about it beyond that. It’s always been a natural thing for me. I don’t question the instinct.

Another striking quality about your games is their restraint. You do a lot with so little, but your work has also moved in different directions—Topography, for example, seems more expository and conversational in its delivery. How do you go about acquiring ‘new tricks’ and developing your work in new directions? Is it an active priority for you as an artist?

To me, Topography is a response to Endless Scroll. Those two pieces relate to each other—I wanted to elaborate on things I was thinking about, or revisit things in a different way. I was thinking, I want to revisit this thing, but better. When I made Endless Scroll, I had a more naïve way of going about telling a story about memories and relationships. I felt like I wanted to comfort myself, or the player. It’s optimistic and melodramatic in a way that I’d find embarrassing if I cared. Topography is more confrontational—not cynical, but matter-of-fact or bittersweet. I wanted to think about what it means to think about the past.

I’m not necessarily obsessed with getting better at whatever I’m making in that anime guy training kind of way, but I do have a natural tendency to look for new things to try out. My brain doesn’t want to tie itself to any one thing, it wants to move onto the next cool thing. So maybe it’s adjacent to the feeling of the anime guy training after all. One thing I do want to get better at is writing, and I can definitely picture myself as an anime guy for that one—like the moment in Masaaki Yuasa’s Ping Pong: The Animation where a character who has been coasting on his natural abilities realises that he has to take the sport seriously to get better. In writing, I feel that I’m compensating for the fact that English is not my first language.

Your work is also concerned with digital media—it feels very contemporary and relevant to the current digital moment. What are your thoughts on what it means to be ‘logged on’, and how does it refract the human themes you’re creatively interested in?

I like that you made that connection; I don’t know that I’ve even thought about it. [But] I am extremely online. That’s just how I am, and how I’ve been for at least the last ten years. These are themes that I keep returning to. I often describe myself as someone who makes work about connection and memory, the way that people relate to each other. So this just has to do with me being an extremely online person, having grown up in online spaces, and having to navigate a world where you have to read between the lines of textual clues and learn to communicate without the help of someone’s physical presence.

There is a sense of longing that comes from that. But at the same time I still think that being online is the best thing that has happened to me. I wouldn’t be making interesting work if it weren’t for those friendships and experiences. When I made Topography, I made a point of including this stanza from David Berman’s poem ‘Self Portrait at 28’:

‘All this new technology
will eventually give us new feelings
that will never completely displace the old ones
leaving everyone feeling quite nervous
and split in two.’

I think about that a lot: the strange feeling of alienation and connection that comes with the internet as a thing in itself. I’m obsessed with it.

When we first met, I knew you primarily as a graphic designer and fellow comics artist, but I know that you haven’t really been working with comics or illustration for a while. Could you talk about why you’ve moved on from those media, at least for now? How did your relationship to the form of drawing change?

Growing up, I was always the kid who was good at drawing. I loved being that kid, I loved people going, ‘Wow, you’re so good! Wow!’ But then I got older and met kids who were actually good at drawing. I saw what actual genius looked like. It made me go, ‘What the fuck! Did people lie to me? What the fuck am I doing? What’s the point?’ That disappointment [in myself] was a lot. I lost the capacity to find any joy and satisfaction from the act of drawing. That feeling became a question: what else I could do with my ‘average skills’ (scare quotes by interviewer). What else do I have? The answer I arrived at was that I’m pretty fucking good at putting stuff together. That is my favourite thing about graphic design, putting different elements together and making the whole thing look good. To me, that’s what design, comics and games are about. And it’s the thing I studied, so I actually know what I’m doing!

The reason I had to ‘officially’ quit illustration was because I needed—and still need—to rethink my relationship with drawing and creating art. I mentioned Ping Pong earlier, which is a story about skill and genius and hard work. I think I’m coming to terms with the fact that I was never a genius and [that I have to] make peace with the gap between my capacities and what I want to make. I’m still holding onto some of that pride. It takes a while to get over it, but I believe that I will. I decided to do something else and come back to it when I’m ready for it. When I do, I think it’s going to be great. But it’s not happening just yet.

You’ve said in the past that you consider games to be an extension of your prior comics work. What are the differences between working with games and comics, and how have their specificities informed the realisation of your ideas?

The main difference is that games involve less drawing. Even when it does involve drawing, it’s more about backgrounds and asset pieces. You can move the elements around and place them where you want to. Visually and technically, it’s a lot less set in stone than comics, where you have to really be sure of what you’re doing. I started making my own music for my games as well, which has been fun. It’s a pain in the ass to find royalty-free music that fits with the tone I want, so it’s more of a practical choice than a creative one. I don’t know anything about music, I just listen to a lot of it. I feel like a monkey with a typewriter.

I’m still thankful for my comics work. Comics, like games, are about combining different elements together, and balancing those different elements. They are also about breaking text down into smaller parts. You play around with tempo, like poetry. That’s an important thing I learned from comics. But more than form, my lessons from comics were about themes and methods. It made me a lot more comfortable exploring themes that are personal to me. It was a time where I was unsure of even how to express those themes, and whether other people were okay with reading them. It turns out they are.

A lot of your work is about ideas of ‘place’ in very expansive ways, particularly places of belonging and unbelonging—liminal places, if you will. You also have a transnational identity, which features very prominently in Continental Drift, a game about remembering all the places that you’ve lived in across different countries and continents. How do you think about national identity, and how do your experiences of transnationality relate to your work?

Since I moved here, I pretty much never think about nationality anymore, unless it’s to make fun of the fact that I’m actually French. Or when I speak Japanese in a restaurant, little things like that. I also have quite an inconspicuously Australian accent, so I generally don’t get clocked as not being from here unless I get carded at Liquorland.

As for Continental Drift, that’s probably my most personal piece. I sometimes feel embarrassed about how earnest and straightforward it is. It feels vulnerable to have it out there. But I prefer to have it out there than not. In that game, the protagonist—who I called ‘you’ but is actually ‘me’—moves to Melbourne and thinks, ‘Oh this is where I belong, because this is where I chose to go.’ It’s about going somewhere with intent instead of being washed around by life’s circumstances. Continental Drift is my farewell piece to those themes. I don’t write much about transnational identity anymore. I’ve always associated those themes with the concept of ‘home’, and I was obsessed with that concept when I was making comics. But I feel that I’ve found it now, and I don’t need to talk about it anymore. You’ve served me well. Goodbye.

You’ve been involved with various festivals in the last year, having recently run a workshop on narrative games at the Emerging Writers Festival and co-created the Freeplay Zone for the Freeplay Independent Games Festival. Could you speak about what the experience has been like for you to move into the position of being a mentor or organiser? Has it changed how you think about yourself as a creator?

I’m still figuring that out! I didn’t expect any of it to happen. I also don’t know if people actually see me as a mentor or organiser. Everything’s online, so no one’s pointing at me like the Lord Farquaad meme and announcing ORGANISER. Having the workshops being online makes it more of an invisible role, so I have no idea what people think about me. I don’t know if I care.

Speaking seriously, I want to be responsible enough to be seen as a person of relative influence. It hasn’t really changed what I’m doing as a creator, except that I’m busier doing things other than creating art. It is still an act of creation in its own right; it’s just another thing that I’m doing.

Speaking of the Freeplay Zone, I’m very interested in how this part of your work connects to everything else you do. The Freeplay Zone is an online digital space you co-created with Jae Stuart, a virtual room for people to hang out and talk to each other during the Parallels and Freeplay Independent Games Festival. Participants create an avatar for themselves and walk around in a virtual recreation of the Capitol Theatre, like Club Penguin or Habbo Hotel. Can you talk about the connection between creating work about virtual sociality, and creating an honest-to-god virtual social space?

I always say this: I’m obsessed with places. So it makes total sense that I would start creating my own. With the Freeplay Zone, there was so much of a sense of longing for physical places. It was made during the first lockdown. There’s a strong sense of nostalgia, an interest in what makes a place a place. That philosophical question went into the making of the Zone, into an aesthetic piece and a concept. It’s quite an interesting thing. Lots of people are enthusiastic about it when it’s happening, but when you’re done it can feel thankless. It’s always nice to hear from people that it was the highlight of their year, or that they have good memories from it.

My work on the Zone relates to my creative work as well, which deals with the same questions. Jae reached out to me, and I brought my own stuff into it. That’s how I see it. It’s just funny that I ended up making this. It makes sense; I’m kind of the perfect person to be making it. It was meant to be! I like that it became a practical version of everything that I’ve been thinking about in my narrative work. It became an example of my ideals, even if it wasn’t intentional.

Organising and fostering social spaces seems important to you; I know that you’ve put work into co-creating and managing a community discord channel this year. Could you speak on that experience, and the importance of digital spaces?

Even before the pandemic, I had a lot of thoughts on the state of the games community in Melbourne, and what it means to foster a caring community that provides for its members. When the Zone stuff happened, it became apparent that there were lots of people out there in the community who were interested in connecting to their peers in a real sense, not just going to events and posturing. I made most of my friends online. It means a lot to me to have an online space to be yourself, chill out with people, muck around and make jokes. There’s been lots of attempts to make professional versions of those spaces in the past year, but I find them boring. What are you going to do, have brunch over Zoom with your co-workers? I’m sure it’s enriching in some way, but it’s not what’s meaningful to me about being online. I have my own desires in terms of what I want from online spaces.

Who inspires you?

Imagine if I said: you! [laughs] But it’s true that most people who inspire me are my friends. I’m fortunate to have many smart and interesting friends whose work I respect. Besides that, I don’t think about inspiration much, or people who inspired me. I’m allergic to cults of personality. It’s 2021, we’re all going through it; I don’t need to force someone to inspire me. Let’s just chill.

Do you have any advice for emerging narrative game devs?

Advice is hard. You always end up sounding kind of a dickhead. Also, what if I change my mind? But anyway: I think what’s most important for me is the importance of finding peers whose work you like, and who are there to support you. This is related to the previous questions about community. If you’re surrounded by interesting people who genuinely care about what you do, then you’re bound to make more interesting work as a result.

My other, cooler advice is: take it easy, but take it.

What have you been reading/watching/playing/listening to?

I think people often try to appear sophisticated when they talk about what media they’re consuming. Nah man, I’m just watching The Sopranos and playing Minecraft! The cubes really do it for me!

What are you working on at the moment? What’s next?

I’m wrapped up with Zone work, the Discord community, and all the other things I’ve been a part of. I’m [now] absorbing a lot of other people's work, taking in other people’s art in a way that’s like research. I’m also revamping the Zone right now, making it so that it’s not only active during the Freeplay festival and can be a general digital space to hang out for the community. Otherwise, I’ve been taking a break this year. It’s been exhausting! It’s fine if I’m less prolific for a period. I’ll think about what to make next when I’m less busy. I need a holiday. What’s next for me is a tropical escape!

How do you practice ‘self-care’, and do you incorporate it into your creative process?

I don’t believe in self-care, and least not in the New-Age-y, wellness-oriented, weirdo girlboss way. I don’t look at my calendar and think, ‘It’s time for my self-care day!’ That said, I think there’s a certain amount of caution you should take when you’re making creative work, leaving space to step away from what you’re making entirely and get back to it. That’s a very simple type of self-care that doesn’t involve face masks and massages and wine. I like vacuuming the apartment as well. It’s fun to live in a clean house.

What does being Asian-Australian mean to you?

This question is funny to me because I’m… not. I don’t think of myself as Asian-Australian. But as I said, I haven’t thought about my racial identity much since I moved here. I blend in here better than I ever did in Europe, whatever that means. I feel more comfortable and laid back as a result. I’m French and Japanese, but I’m also one of the many people who come here and start a new life, so I’m no one special. That’s it! I’ve got enough on my plate!