In They Seem to Be Very Good Friends, Raphaëll Maïwen highlights the absurdity of the binary
The Queer Games Bundle is a collection of nearly 600 items by LGBTQ+ creators and teams, nearly 400 of which are independent video games, all sold for just $60. I’m talking with creators from the bundle about their games and their making habits. Visit the bundle and consider buying it.
They Seem to Be Very Good Friends is a funny, challenging puzzle game where you move people tokens together and they become, you know, together. The mechanics are straightforward but the game’s commentary on gender expectations and friendships is pretty deep, dotted with memes of Tumblr posts about intimate male friendships and so on.
How long have you been making games?
Professionally, I’ve been making games for 3 years now, but I’ve been making them as a hobby for much longer: I started at around 5 years old by making action games with PowerPoint.
What tools do you like to use?
The tool I’m the most comfortable using and with which I feel I can implement most of my ideas is Unity. I still love and cherish PowerPoint, as well as PuzzleScript, RPG Maker, JavaScript and more.
What themes or genres do you like to explore?
I love to make games about love, and Britney Spears. Most of them have a comedic tone, and lately a lot of my work has been absurd and pointless games.
What are your favorite and least favorite aspects of making games?
My favorite aspect is connecting with people: seeing folks, especially my friends, play my games and laugh. I like that in itself, but I also like the iterative process of creating something, watching people interact with it, taking notes and then improving and tweaking what you had. Also, since my work often has a message with it, it sparks interesting conversations that I enjoy.
My least favorite aspect is most things art-related. I’m not good at it and I don’t enjoy it in the slightest, so it’s unlikely I’ll improve anytime soon. But I’m aware of it, so I design my games around that weakness.
“I’m honestly not too concerned about having a coherent body of work. I consider myself an experimental game maker.”
Is there a game that has affected you recently?
I’m currently getting into tabletop rpgs. From that medium, the game Thirsty Sword Lesbians really caught my attention. I love rpgs that focus on players’ interactions rather than fights, and it was empowering to have a ttrpg that was so queer-focused!
They Seem to Be Very Good Friends is a funny puzzle game about assuming, in both directions, if people are together or not. What inspired you?
This game was a commission for an online exhibition by Galerie Galerie about intimacy, so for months I was thinking about what intimacy means to me, how to gamify it without being tasteless, and so on.
I stumbled upon an anecdote online about a bisexual guy who once slept in the same bed as his straight male friend, which made him realize men can share close, platonic intimate relationships. It was wholesome, but at the same time, it’s sad we still live in a world where this kind of story is noteworthy? There are so many constraining rules to intimacy in our society and lots of double standards (women can share physical intimacy and not be questioned about their sexuality, men cannot, men and women can’t simply be platonic friends without people questioning their relationship status…). I thought something like “these rules are so puzzling… wait”. And so I made those weird social rules a puzzle game.
Also, I was playing a lot of Baba is You at the time, so I think that’s why this kind of block-pushing gameplay came to my mind.
How did you decide to start with the pink-blue couples as the default?
In my game, they have the simplest pairing rule (which was a way to represent heteronormativity), so it made sense progression-wise to first introduce the players to that mechanic and iterate over it over a couple of levels.
Eventually, you can pair blue couples together, but not pink — what is the symbolism of that?
The way I see the pairings in They Seem to Be Very Good Friends is that standing next to each other is more or less hanging out, or being friends. Being on the same tile represents being close, or intimate. Pink and blue characters match as soon as they stand next to each other, because that’s how we view friendships between men and women (yes the game is very binary, because the rules it makes fun of are too).
Blue characters don’t match if they simply stand next to each other, because we do believe men are capable of friendship — however, if they sit on the same tile, they turn into a couple (represented by a pride flag), because we don’t believe men can share intimacy without being together.
Finally, the pink characters can’t match under any circumstances, because women can show incredible demonstrations of intimacy and love, and they’ll still always be labeled as friends (hence the game title) — be it fictional characters or real people.
“[F]or months I was thinking about what intimacy means to me, how to gamify it without being tasteless, and so on.”
The memes between puzzles are funny, why did you decide to include them?
Thanks! I love curating memes, and I’m glad when this work is appreciated.
Over my playtests, I figured it happened too rarely that players understood the commentary of the game. That’s partly due to the original version of the game having a bad levels progression and players not really understanding the rules of the game. It also contained short texts between each level, but I wasn’t too proud of them; so I replaced them with the memes that you see in the final version, which helped get the point across to most players!
How does this game fit into your quite varied portfolio of puzzles and curiosities?
I’m honestly not too concerned about having a coherent body of work. I consider myself an experimental game maker (and that’s why I’m quite pleased that you call some of my creations “curiosities” by the way), so to me it makes sense to always try something new! It was my first time making a puzzle game, among other things, so to me it achieved my goal of getting out of my comfort zone yet again.
