This is a transcription & translation of episode 57 of the Sunset Sway podcast, originally released on June 14 2024. The host is Ye Zitao 叶梓涛 and guest is Yan Qin 焉沁. Inline annotations in square brackets are mine. Any errors in transcription or translation are mine too.

Introduction from the original page:
This is an episode I recorded with the artist Yan Qin at the beginning of the year. Listening to it again six months later and comparing it to my memory, I discovered so much new information. We kept circling around the concept of 'experimental games,' repeatedly touching on avant-garde experiments in other arts - full of confusion and wild ideas. Looking back now, it's somewhat complex, but remains interesting. -- Ye Zitao

Guest: Yan Qin, also known as 'Soda Water' 盐汽水; formerly worked in film, later shifted toward synesthetic art centered on contemporary music and sound. Yan Qin's creative media include, but are not limited to, installation, material painting, video, and theater. Yan Qin also writes and publishes research on the history of technology within the context of world cultural heritage, with a focus on how art extends into broader human contexts.

[introduction, Tracy Fullerton, Jenova Chen, Night Journey, Bill Viola]

YZ: Hello everyone, welcome to Sunset Sway. Today I invited a friend, Yan Qin, to chat with us on the podcast. I want to first talk about how this came about. Recently I was browsing Wechat Moments and I saw Yan Qin posted an article about Tracy Fullerton, probably translated a long time ago. An interview with Tracy Fullerton. Maybe everyone knows now, she's been teaching in the game department at the USC School of Cinematic Arts, she's a director there. A very famous student of hers was Jenova Chen, who later created works like Journey and Sky.

She really created the first experimental game. She took many experimental works from video artist Bill Viola and made them into a walking-plus-interaction game called Night Journey, which still today looks very stylish. When I saw Yan Qin posted this article, she said she'd been paying attention to the year 2007-08 when Tracy was working on Night Journey. That was the time when interactive media art began to develop from the ivory tower. She thought, this is academic game media inheriting the genes of video art and evolving.

At that time, I was very curious that some art practitioners in my circle of friends would pay attention to such early experimental games. In my opinion, independent games people today actually very rarely go and dig these things up. So I had a brief chat with Yan Qin afterwards, and I discovered that she started paying attention to games ten years ago, and she thinks about games in a longer-term context.

Coincidentally, recently I also gave a presentation at Sichuan Fine Arts Institute, which was about the relationship between experimental electronic games and contemporary art. So we had this podcast, this conversation, to hear Yan Qin's perspective on how we should understand this kind of experimental games.

YQ: Yeah, when I saw that article I was also surprised to find that this game was related to Bill Viola. And you just said that she was Jenova Chen's teacher, right? At that time I watched some online videos of Night Journey, then I wondered, is this related to Journey? It was a bit like Bill Viola's subjective perspective, experiencing an aimless journey, right? I thought this thread was very interesting. For example, Night Journey, it's still connected to video art, but by Jenova Chen's generation, there's almost no direct connection.

But so his teacher's generation happened to be the one I was paying attention to, which was the period of time when early independent games and video artists were connected. Then I saw the later part of this game, which is Bill Viola's, I guess montage?

YZ: Yeah, I can describe it briefly, it's like, when you're walking through the game world, you can hold down the space bar, and you enter a meditative state, a trance meditation. For example, you see pigeons flying, or you see a person walking into a cabin in the forest. These actually come from some of Bill Viola's video works, it uses this kind of meditation or absent-mindedness during walking to connect into his works.

YQ: Right, so at that time I felt like I was making a breakthrough, because I originally studied film, and in the field of film, I was more interested in things like film essays, some poetic films, or Left Bank independent art film in France. Their influence on video art, and Bill Viola is a classic example, he's also an artist who inherited the visual spirit of the early New Wave and the early Left Bank.

And more interesting is that he's an artist who seems to have studied sound for a long time, but maybe not many people know this, because he doesn't directly express this auditory aspect in his work. But I think he's the kind of artist who has a bit of synesthesia, he will understand the rhythm of an image in a musical way and then present it as a visual thing.

So I think this breakthrough feeling came from the fact that an artist like this has a spiritual resonance with teachers who work on game media, or teachers who do academic research. So I feel like this medium does have a genetic continuation, if we look at it from the perspective of the traditional medium of film, this artistic style eventually moves towards the medium of games. I think it was a very enlightening thing for me. I feel like it should develop in this way, because a style like his can't find a place in a Hollywood narrative, or with Hollywood acting.

But his video art itself is relatively declining. From our current perspective, looking back at these kind of 'wandering' images, we're past the time when it received the most attention. But if it's now moving towards a game medium, I think it may be kind of a new blood, a new life that can allow this style to continue.

['wandering', walking simulators, Guy Debord]

YZ: Why do you describe it as a kind of 'wandering'? Because it's related to walking, or because it has some special structure...?

YQ: On the one hand it's walking, and on the other hand it's related to time. He especially emphasizes the texture of time, the quality, I mean during the whole wandering process, you see some specific or trivial things, and the material of these things, the layering of materials, will make you feel the passage of time, or the weight of time.

After the entire work, and this includes Jenova Chen's Journey as well, at the end you feel the artistic conception or atmosphere. After you go through the wandering process, there's an emotion, and the whole emotion, the passage of time... It's this kind of aggregated feeling that gives the work a kind of vitality.

It might not rely on a specific plot structure, it doesn't rely on an obvious dramatic tension, but as a player, as the person substituted into this subjective perspective, in this kind of extended-time, layered, style, you feel things that only this style can have. I mean, it's different from other narrative-based cinema or games.

YZ: I'll also add that in this interview, Tracy talked about a category of games called walking simulators, and generally speaking this is a 'derogatory' term. At that time, 2008 or 2009, a game called Dear Esther appeared. When this game came out, everyone didn't know what they were playing, this game wasn't fun, it's just walking around in a space. They said: this is just a 'walking simulator'.

And then Tracy thought that this is something very important, she thinks that first-person shooter games, where we put the action of aiming at bad guys into video games. There's a huge number of first-person shooter games, but have you ever thought of putting walking, a very basic human behavior, into a game? So she thinks exploration of walking is something worth doing, worth developing. Exploring how strolling, or wandering, can happen in a game. So later she made a game called Walden, which is an adaptation of Thoreau's book. You're by the lake, chopping wood to make a fire, reading Confucius, whatever... That's another thing she made after Night Journey.

Then I remembered that Sunset Sway previously also translated an article. It took this kind of walking simulator, and Guy Debord's psychogeography, a kind of 'strolling' practice, and connected those traditions together. It says that when we walk in a space like a video game, it's like walking in a literary space. In fact, they think of this as a way to deal with walking, literature, thinking, and how these appear in the digital world. So I think it's quite related to the texture of the walking images that you mentioned, or the 'wandering' cinema, connected with the walking simulator.

['experimental games', nomenclature, academia]

YQ: So if we look at Tracy Fullerton's work from the perspective of the entire game industry, is she very unique? Or did she start a style, or is she the continuation of another style?

YZ: From Tracy's perspective, at that time she was probably just starting to explore these kind of experimental games. She wanted to have something like Game Lab, which could continuously experiment with the possibilities of games, and make more interesting exploratory works. She thought that at that time, everyone thought that games were just entertainment products, not a form of expression or art.

At that time, 'experimental games' was a very strange word, but everyone knew experimental film and experimental music. She thought that if we put the word 'experimental' in front of the form of games, she could make other people understand that games can be used for experimentation, and that experimental games can be understood in the way of experimental film, because there was no concept of experimental games at that time. Everyone thought of games as entertainment products, consumer products.

YQ: Right, the history of games as products must go back much earlier than this.

YZ: Right, so I think you can understand that she's trying to plant a seed, especially in the field of American education, game research, game production. Because at that time, making a game about Thoreau, or a game about experimental video, was basically unimaginable.

YQ: Right, but I'm curious, because although there wasn't this phrase 'experimental games' at that time, there was new media art, there was interactive art. So whether or not she called it interactive art, why did she have to call it a game? Because once the word 'game' appears, maybe people have a fixed concept: I have to kill monsters, or I have to score points...

YZ: Yeah, I think this is a fun question. Because for this group of people, games might be more... beneficial, or the field that they're working in... I'm not sure how you understand this question...

YQ: I actually think her use of the word 'game' is quite rebellious. If she said, "I am a professor of interactive media art, I made this thing," that would be the natural thing, but maybe it falls too much into a certain art context...

YZ: But the subtle thing is that their department is called 'Interactive Media', I think...

YQ: So she intentionally called it an 'experimental game'?

YZ: She actually wanted to create a game department, but a game department couldn't exist in the current academic system, it seems like. It has to be placed under interactive media or interactive film. For example, NYU [Game Center], it's also placed under Tisch, in the art department.

YQ: Oh, Tisch. I think Tisch also has a film school.

YZ: Right. They have to find a more respectable, or more traditional -

YQ: More conforming to the education -

YZ: Almost a parasitic relationship. For example, previously, SVA, which is New York School of Visual Arts, they had something called Programming Arts. In reality, most people there are making games. But also some people make installations and other things. So I feel like games are always looking for different places to shelter.

YQ: I think it's good that she calls it a game, because in our... in the current understanding, games feel a bit subcultural. But if you call it an experimental game, I think it's interesting. It might have an academic spirit, a spirit of research, a spirit of exploration, but at the same time it also takes into account the public's sense of participation and understanding. I'd think oh, this is an experimental game, so anyone can play it. But if she says this is interactive media art, then I feel like I have to go to the art museum to experience it. It might feel a bit distant.

YZ: Right, right. And another possibility is that it wants to counter, or wants to expand, the original idea of games as an entertainment product.

YQ: Right, that's very important. Which point do you start from to expand it, broaden its boundaries? Am I expanding the boundaries of games, or am I coming from art and crossing into games? These two things are very different, I think. Especially when the time comes to actually realize the work, are you an artist making an interactive game, or are you a game developer expanding the boundaries with art? These are different, I think these are different.

[synesthesia, 'image music', Scriabin, Wagner]

YZ: Defining it as just a 'game' or just 'interactive art' doesn't fully capture it. So when you said that you'd look at the emergence of experimental games from the perspective of synesthesia, or from an earlier historical perspective - I think you could talk about this. I'm quite curious. You said you made a film before, but then you felt that film has some limitations, and then you chose games as the next point of exploration.

YQ: Yes, actually, this started when we were shooting graduation projects, I wanted to compose music for my own film, and then I searched by myself, figured out some methods of composing music. And then following this 'image music' line of thought, I discovered a... it opened the door to a new world. I realized that actually film soundtracks are not such a specific and narrow concept as we understand them. It's actually just the sound of the image - maybe, if we expand its boundaries a little bit, it's the sound of the image. Now, this sound, and this image, is this a relationship of correspondence, or a relationship of synchronicity? These are very different things. Then I found that in the history of music, many composers were already trying this kind of thing even before cinema existed. For example, Scriabin - or maybe even earlier, Wagner. They had this concept... Well, Wagner had this concept of a 'total work of art', which included theater. That's maybe a bit more complicated... But just talking about Scriabin: he tried to correlate harmony with color. This kind of approach, which in history was often called 'mysticism,' actually predates Kandinsky's theory of synesthesia by quite a bit.

YZ: Isn't it after Kandinsky?

YQ: Scriabin was late 19th century, right? Because he's called the last Romantic composer. Maybe Kandinsky was also very early?

YZ: Right, he's early 20th century.

YQ: Yeah, about the same time. Anyway, like Schoenberg and all those messy... [laughing] it's all around that time, when the war was about to start. Before the first world war.

YZ: Scriabin is 1871, so very early.

YQ: Right, right. So I think this idea of synesthesia might just be a capability that humans naturally possess - it's just that some composers or artists have managed to express it through their work. I think this is not that strange, but the hard thing is taking something synesthetic and unifying it within a pre-defined category. For example, if I'm a composer and I want to write a synesthetic piece of music - that might be difficult for the audience, because they won't necessarily understand what colors your harmonies represent. You'd have to use modern tools, like VJ software, right? Use a visual method, to tell them what I mean by synesthesia. Really there are a lot of examples now, for example later electronic music pioneers like Alva Noto or Ryoichi Kurokawa. They also practitioners of synesthesia. They take sound and fragments of images, or computer-generated images, and connect them together. As a kind of synesthetic practice.

But this, if it's only music, I feel like the meaning is not quite enough, because it can feel like a meaningless music video, just displaying rhythm or timbre visually. But if you put this kind of synesthesia into a game, it can carry a lot of meaning. Maybe your whole game development could emerge from this perspective of synesthesia. I want to make gameplay with synesthesia as the core logic. This method of games as multimedia allows things like synesthesia to show their value. So I think if we trace this lineage back to Scriabin's time, we could say that today's digital tools allow artists or creators to better realize their synesthetic ideas.

Film, on the other hand, is quite limited in this respect. Because film is a visually dominant medium. If we watch a film, even if it's an experimental film, vision is the first sense we take in. Sight makes up 70-80% of what we take in. Sound is auxiliary. Or it's a way to better explain the visual information to the brain. That's the reason film has sound.

YZ: I think there's a lot to what you said just now. Let's go back to synesthesia. You said before you wanted to write a soundtrack for your film, but you realized the soundtrack only has an auxiliary role. So maybe we shouldn't separate, for example, music and film - they should be seen as one total art form, visual and aural... Like you just mentioned, Wagner... This is why people often say that the 'total artwork' of today is video games - video games combine all the previous art forms. It's a kind of popular gamer understanding. But I think it actually holds some truth, especially from the perspective you brought up. Because it's similar to Wagner's thinking: that different forms could resonate together within the framework of theater.

[Kandinsky, Jaron Lanier, Moon Dust, psychedelia]

You mentioned Kandinsky, many of his paintings directly hint at musical composition. Or are named after symphonies, or whatever... And Scriabin, too, he thought that the note F is a specific color, in his view every tone has a specific color... There's a very interesting, and it's also something Sunset Sway previously worked on... a game called Moon Dust, which might be the world's first 'art game.' It's from 1971, made by someone called Jaron Lanier. Jaron Lanier is the inventor of VR. He can play a lot of strange instruments. The game was developed on a Commodore 64 and published by Atari, I think. Anyway, he made this game called Moon Dust. It's the first art game in the world. The player controls an astronaut, who's also named Scriabin. Maybe it's really also the first interactive music album. You control a person, and also indirectly control a bunch of spaceships, and these spaceships in this space collide and generate chords, music. It's something I think a lot of people... for it to appear at that time, it's a really fascinating thing.

Later someone wrote an article digging into the story behind Moon Dust. I also did some research back then, following the kind of lineage you just described, sound-driven games. And you realize games don't need to be visually focused, they can be audio-first. I called it 'audio-driven', where you take sound, and listening, and use that to drive the whole game design. Take that as the core.

To speak in more popular terms, rhythm games are one version of this. But that's probably driven by rhythm, or driven by pitch. And there are other works more focused on rhythm, or timbre. And it's more flexible, in games, or interactive computer media, to give sound a stronger role. Not as limited as it is in film.

And another difference is - and it's quite interesting... For example, we just mentioned Jaron Lanier. He was reflecting on making Moon Dust, he said he wanted to create something psychedelic. And actually, early VR games were often linked to LSD, these kinds of psychedelic drugs. This is also closely connected to synesthesia. People [who take LSD] often hear sounds, and see images. So synesthesia represents a certain conscious feeling. And this feeling gets tied to mystical or psychedelic culture. This connection is really interesting.

[prajñā, text & sound, Her Story, interactive fiction]

YQ: This is connected to... Can I say this? It makes me think of something very esoteric... I read a book about Buddhism... In Buddhism, in Sanskrit, wisdom is called "prajñā". Buddhism says that the first wisdom is textual wisdom. It's not a ranking, but anyway, there's four different kinds. There's textual wisdom and there's sonic wisdom, but there's no visual wisdom. Buddhism places text and sound in a very lofty position. And they believe that when someone is facing death, hearing is the only sense they have. And so monks, to help the soul cross over, you have to chant scriptures, you have to use sound and text to help the person who is about to die to cross over.

So I think maybe this is... this sums up religion, our human experience of life and death. Like, hearing and corresponding text. Because language also has sound, right? It has phonetics. We also study this. So maybe sound and text are closer to people's inner, spiritual way of communicating.

YZ: Are there any games you like that explore this kind of connection? Or that you feel expand an image, like you said before, something that does that kind of...

YQ: There are many, but to be honest, there aren't that many games that are purely audio-driven. But there's a lot of puzzle games, indie games, that break away from the linear storytelling in film. Like Her Story. A multi-layered, non-linear story, you piece together a complete story. Or those interactive drama games that were popular a few years ago, like The Invisible Guardian [《隐形守护者》], I consider those part of games too.

And also that work of Jenova Chen's, that moved me a lot. And there are some older titles, some that I found randomly on Steam. There's one older players should know, called To the Moon. It's almost like a text puzzle game, there's a lot of text reading.

And then sometimes I go on the... IF, interactive fiction, they have a big website. The website has been running for years just on people's donations. Every year they host a big interactive fiction competition. First place, second place, third place. And they post them online so you can go download them and play. I think these game developers are interesting. Maybe they don't know how to paint, or make music, but their logic - they develop a logic of interactive fiction that's... to me, very musical.

[weaving, Dream of the Red Chamber, 'timeline arts']

I don't know it's right to describe it that way, but for me it makes sense. For them, writing a script, or for me, writing a piece of music, or writing a piece of code. These three things feel logically very similar to me. You have to, through weaving, or through an associative, a synesthetic method, to present this structure...

YZ: You mean a synesthesia of text and sound?

YQ: Yeah, text and sound, and also, maybe... I don't know if code counts as text as not. Yes, coding is a kind of weaving.

YZ: Because... Yan Qin wrote a piece about Dream of the Red Chamber. Or I should say, The Story of the Stone. The part of that text about textiles.

YQ: Right, right.

YZ: And at that time, the method people had for weaving, warp and weft. To figure out this structure. This kind of synesthesia. Do you think of this as also synesthesia in a sense?

YQ: Ummm... I think broadly speaking it can count. At that time I was playing with weaving, trying to understand how that works. Suzhou has a traditional technique called kesi, up to now people still pass it on. And by chance I went with my mother and father to see it. Kesi uses warp and weft, every thread of silk acts like a pixel in the image, you can understand it like that. So it's very very complex. And the images are double-sided, because every pixel can be seen from both sides. And this special technique used to be reserved for the imperial court. But everybody says that Cao Xueqin's family was in charge of imperial textile production, so he probably understood this technique. So I thought maybe when he was writing the novel, he might have subconsciously... this kind of synesthesia.... He took this zhanghui novel structure, and this manufacturing structure, and very meticulously matched them together.

At first, I thought that idea was totally wild. But when I laid out the chapters in groups of eighteen, I noticed it really does correspond to each storyline. So I thought maybe this speculation has a certain truth to it. He might have done something extraordinary with structure - without formal tools. So I put something together. Maybe in that era before programming, he did something really amazing.

YZ: And if we look at games from that angle, maybe games today are like a digital loom. It can weave together different media... sound, video, text...

YQ: Right, right, right. I remember I had a writer friend who said that writing itself is very similar to weaving.

YZ: Yeah, because 'text', 'textile'...

YQ: Right, the etymology is the same. You could say that all of these are 'timeline arts'. The flow and structure unfold along a timeline. Music is like this too. Music uses sound and musical notes, but the specific method of weaving, the specific method of composing, is very similar. For example, how do I arrange the different voices, and what sound should appear in what place... It's a very similar thing.

[generative music, chance music, Fluxus]

YZ: So how do you see things like, we briefly mentioned Steve Reich... things like generative or interactive music? Or, for example, I know Brian Eno had an album called Reflection, and he made an app, and it has a lot of, like, color gradients. You can touch the screen and change the music's texture...

YQ: I think this is another product for a newer era... Like, after World War II, after the emergence of atonal music, composers introduced a kind of 'chance music' into their compositions. Or, the avant-garde people, and the Fluxus people we talked about before, they were reacting or rebelling against the logical structure of music itself. They rebelled against that, and it formed a kind of... it seems that we don't control it, the so-called 'chance', it seems that we no longer control it. Let it happen very naturally, let it happen very randomly. But actually, in my opinion, this is only a broader form of control. This broader control is also very similar to games. You, the player, seem to be very free to walk in this world, but this is the world I created, right? It's the relationship between Sun Wukong and Five Finger Mountain... [laughing]

So I think that this kind of accidental music actually essentially hasn't escaped the control-theory [cybernetic] way of thinking. It just looks like the possibilities have increased. It might not be weaving, but it's still a ball of thread. It's just that the thread may be connected in some very unexpected ways. It is no longer woven together according to a deducible logical structure. That's the only difference.

[In Search of Lost Time, 'wandering', structure and freedom]

YZ: You mentioned In Search of Lost Time before.

YQ: Oh, yes, because I thought of, like you mentioned, Night Journey, it's a 'wandering' work, right? Then I thought that the difference between that and other more mainstream games, or movies, is that it seems to be something without structure. It's a wandering thing.

But I think that those particularly great works may have both of these characteristics, it is both a wandering thing and a structured thing. So I'd think of, for example, Bach's music, it has a very strict structure, and every step on the entire timeline seems to be calculated, but the overall feeling, for example, when you listen to the arrangement of the song, it is a flowing thing. You can still wander around in the music. It's not a precise thing like a clock, although some people describe it this way, but I think its music is just creating a very solid structure. How to say it... Like a chessboard, and you can walk on it, but in the process of walking, you still have a certain degree of freedom. Freedom and spatiality.

Like, Hegel said music is flowing architecture. I think that particularly great works are all in this realm. They're obviously artificial. We design the structure and its driving logic. But at the same time, it allows the viewer to wander in it, showing the audience and readers the feelings they can accumulate little by little in the process.

So I think that maybe when artists realize their ambitions, they will actively push the medium - I want to be more free, I want to be more... They expand the boundaries. When I apply this spirit to games, maybe it become a so-called experimental game.

Gombrich said there is no art, only artists. You can also say that there are no games, only game developers [laughing]. It's game developers that decide, "I want this kind of experience, I want the audience to experience this kind of journey in my Five Finger Mountain." This makes me think, this kind of great literary work already gives us a model. Dream of the Red Chamber is like this too. Although it's very precise - I can list out its method of warp and weft - in the whole reading process you are free, you have a very, very detailed feeling of layered time. You can experience countless material details in it. From a subjective perspective, it's very similar to the experience of wandering in VR.

[interactivity, games vs literature and music, jigsaw puzzles, weaving]

YZ: This is why I think the term 'interactive media' a bit ineffective, because it assumes that the media in the past were not interactive, and games are interactive. It's like seeing past media as dead and static, and then games are... some kind of messianic thing. But I think this idea is pretty one-sided. For example, in Shakespeare's theater, the on-stage and off-stage actors, they have a lot of interaction. And as you said just now, when you read Dream of the Red Chamber, you have that space, you can move around, and wander in the space he weaves in your own way, or jump back and forth.

So if we just say that the earlier things are not interactive, and games are interactive, in fact, such a judgment is very arbitrary and lacks... at least it lacks an understanding of the earlier things. So let's put it in a more detailed perspective, for example Her Story we mentioned earlier. Compared to an image, for example, you mentioned Tarkovsky's images, when you watch that, you're definitely wandering within the structure of his image and his temporality. But in Her Story, you have to operate it. Or its interactivity, or the looping part of it, those are set by some coded rules. Do you think this kind of interaction is different from the interaction in Dream of the Red Chamber, in past traditional literary works? Do you think for example that games... because it's a more externalized, more programmed kind of interaction, so it will be more low-level?

YQ: More low-level?

YZ: Not exactly, I mean, for example, when you listen to a piece of music, you can wander around the full texture of the music. This is a very free, so-called free, interaction. But in games, you may have to hit a certain point before it has this interaction, or like in Her Story you have to input a certain word, and it will give you a new image.

I'm quite curious, from the perspective of a non-traditional player like you, and as someone who has opinions on total art, synesthetic art - what kind of art form are games? Or, what do you think is the relationship with other arts? Because I just heard that you compare it with the development of art film. So what kind of art form do you think it is, and what kind of artistic growth or change is it going through?

YQ: Let me think... I feel like you've asked a very big question, but then there are small questions jumping around in the big question [laughing]. Let me first think about how to answer this small question. You just mentioned the non-linear tendency of Her Story, do I think it's too rigid?

YZ: Yeah, compared with Dream of the Red Chamber, isn't it a lot more rigid...?

YQ: This question is very interesting, I feel like we can't compare them like this. Or, a story like Her Story is more like playing chess, or solving a jigsaw puzzle. The further you go, the more you know that it must have an answer. It has an answer, it has a direction, it has a purpose. So the 'fun' or value of this game is just in the process of solving the puzzle. But in the end, you... Although I like this game a lot, I still think that its limitation is, the final answer, the final twist, it's a bit too predictable. This may be a common problem of all games or movies that play with suspense. You can't avoid saying, my punchline has to be extremely impactful, more impactful than anything before. But it's unlikely. They all more or less have the shadow of previous work, you can more or less predict what's going to happen.

So this may be the difference with works like Dream of the Red Chamber. It tells you the answer at the beginning. It tells you the fate of each person in the very beginning, in various poetic ways. So in the process of exploration, your purpose won't be too specific. Readers don't get a task to figure out what happened to Jia Baoyu in the end. There's no task like this. Instead, you have to experience what this person's life is like. In the end, every reader will piece together his own puzzle based on what he reads. So everyone's understanding of Dream of the Red Chamber might be different, which is why this book is still now read by so many people. Similar to Shakespeare: always being read. Maybe all good works have this characteristic. They allow players to create their own maps, or their own puzzles. And this requires that the system you design must be particularly grand. It has to take into account almost all possibilities. Then in that system, you, the player, think you are doing some random action, you've pieced together something of your own. But I don't think this is the most essential difference between film, literature and games. This is actually determined by the level of the developers, that is, the ability of the author. If we talk about media, like you just said, that it's not only games that have interaction. When I read a book, I'm interacting. I'm interacting with the book.

YZ: You're solving a jigsaw puzzle, like you said.

YQ: Right, right. So maybe, the difference between these media is not at all in their material technology. It's not that, if I can write code, then I can create interaction, if I can't write code then there's no interaction. It's that the author projects his world into the medium. That is, whether his world can accommodate this many people to come inside and allow them to piece together their own puzzles in this world. The more people you can accommodate, the stronger the energy of your work, maybe it's more timeless, more classic. That's what I think. So when you talk about the relationship with games and other art forms, I think it's possible that today, especially for experimental games or independent games, these developers have understood what the value of so-called art is, and want to put this value into the medium of games to repeat it. It's really a kind of repetition. This kind of value has always been created in the media of the past, and there have always been good works. No matter which art form it is, there are great, classic achievements. Then current game developers... If someone gets this spirit and puts that into this medium, then I think it's just carrying on this kind of historical value, or heritage, it's just doing a similar kind of thing.

YZ: So do you think, for example, if Dream of the Red Chamber was a game, what kind of game would it be? But I think it's a pure text novel, so it may be a little different from what we've been discussing, the synesthetic weaving games. Or, when we compare games with other art forms, can it be regarded as a new art form that is parallel to the original? It's like so-called 'remediation', like movies absorb or package up previous media. So is this the final and biggest... package? That includes all other media? I think we have two ways of thinking about it. One is to put games side by side with other things, like put games side by side with Dream of the Red Chamber, or games side by side with music. We long for a great work like Dream of the Red Chamber to appear in games. Or, we can also regard games as a kind of weaving together of multiple arts. At this point, games are more like a loom. It might not actually have its own substantial artistic language. It's an electronic loom that strings together different things, different threads. But it doesn't have a single, pure element like text, musical notes or vision. Maybe it's not just one art form.

YQ: Yeah, maybe it's a procedure?

[counterculture, open source software, the Internet]

YZ: We just talked about, for example, Bill Viola, and the development of this stuff in games... Because at that time actually it was quite complicated, because it touches on some things you mentioned before, like the open source movement or the spirit of Internet. The combination of artistic logic with software, with computers, makes it into something with a very diverse culture. What do you think about this? I remember you talked about things like Silicon Valley culture, and California ideology.

YQ: Do you mean games as a special characteristic of that era?

YZ: Yes, you talked then about open source culture... How these things change the medium and the way it operates.

YQ: Actually, when I look back at that era from my current perspective, I feel like the biggest difference between this medium and other previous media is that it greatly magnifies the participants. That is, it allows all the players or audiences to be seen, they can be seen... Before this, in other media, the audience is just a receiver. The artist might not care too much about who the audience is. But in the case of games, everyone might leave their own mark in this process. They may even, as I said just now, each of you will piece together their own map, puzzle. Maybe this kind of open source approach, if you want to think about it in an ideological way, also has a kind of democratic consciousness in it - all participants are artists. All players are developers, developers who don't write code. This is maybe also related to a certain Internet atmosphere at the time. I'm not an expert in the history of the Internet, but my impression is that there was a turning point. The Internet was once a relatively closed system, and then suddenly there was a revolutionary change, and it became something that everyone seemed to be able to participate in.

YZ: Right, I suddenly think of... That kind of hippie-style... some hippie counter-culture movements in the spirit of Bob Dylan... Including LSD like we talked about before, or those early Internet pioneers. They're definitely pursuing the idea that computing that can liberate people, or connect everyone to each other, and bring about a better world. This kind of ideal, those values, drove the development of the open source movement and similar things. So I think it's a more open or democratic medium, because it perhaps respects the imprint, the transformation, that each individual can leave on it. Like you mentioned open source...

YQ: Yes, if you think about it ideologically, I think that's right. But I also remember seeing it somewhere that said games are more like playing an instrument.

[musical instruments, generative music, 'play', 'organ']

YZ: Right, right, right. Because games are... 'play' - like playing the piano, playing a game. Many of the early people who were involved in synthesizers and computer music also thought that, for example, the browsers we use now on our mobile phones... they already have the built-in ability to produce sine waves. From a computing perspective, it can actually create any kind of musical instrument in the world. By layering these sine waves, you can create a whole variety of musical instruments. For example, there was a trumpet game that was very popular a while ago. It's a very difficult instrument to control. For example, you can play Jasmine Flower or something like that, you play and play and then you go off-key. It's really fun. Because the instrument is controlled with a mouse, and you can't be very precise, but it produces an interesting situation, very comical.

I was very fascinated by this idea, so I also made some strange sound games myself. Treating them as strange instruments. They're a bit like Brian Eno's generative logic. You can drop a ball into a space, and according to the X-axis of the ball's jump each time, that sets the frequency of the sound that comes out. It becomes a very strange and different instrument. Then you can create many sounds, interacting with the physics and the rules of the world, which produces a lot of strange instruments.

YQ: So I could understand it as a kind of visual, generative music?

YZ: You can... Yes, but it can also not be visual. What's important is how you produce music, and what the logic and rules are for producing it. It's like an instrument. It's shaped by airflow, and you play it by pressing the keys. And your body is transformed by the instrument. You become accustomed to the instrument. So, I think using musical instruments as a metaphor to think about games is a good way to think about it. Because it's... the instrument becomes your organ. Your 'organ'. The study of musical instruments is called -

YQ: 'Organology'.

YZ: Right, right, right. And a game is also, as you play it, it gradually becomes your organ. And then you can use it to create something. At that time... Because you were making sound toys before, right? Actually, Nam June Paik also made something like that.

YQ: I only found out about that later... [laughing]

[art history, the avant-garde, rebellion, short-form video, mass creativity]

YZ: It's interesting. We're now at a point long after those pioneering artists and creators of that time. And now we're looking back at the things they've made. Just like when I looked at the Tale of Tales team I mentioned earlier, they all entered the games industry, worked for a decade, and then left. This creates a strange sense of dislocation. So, for example, these so-called avant-garde, or experimental art forms, what do they leave behind? Or are they bankrupt in this era? That's the question we're asking: if we dig up these experimental games now, what meaning do they still have today?

I was talking to Ge Yulu before, and he's avant-garde, right? But when he sees these clapping videos on Douyin, he thinks these are way more avant-garde than he is. I can only guess that this word ['avant-garde'] is more like a reflexive operation in contemporary art history, not something truly penetrating.

YQ: I think it is, yeah. Because the context in which this term, or these movements, these concepts, were born, is too different from our current one. This posture, this break, is not just a break with art, but also a break with politics, or class. But our era has experienced so much, and many historical events have occurred since then, far more destructive than those. The world we live in is now much flatter than it was then, at least on the surface, a much flatter era. The avant-garde, as it's called in art history, I think has only historical value in our contemporary world. But do we still have an avant-garde? I think we do, but maybe we can't use that term to describe it, because that term immediately reminds me of something in the context of art history.

I think from my perspective now, its rebelliousness is still very limited. It's rebelling against some excessive formalities, or against aristocratic art. It's a bit like the rebellion of a good student. A good student rebelling against the teacher. Like John Cage, who was a good student of Schoenberg, well, probably once was a good student. And I think this kind of rebellion is not that thorough, or it's relatively limited, its energy is relatively limited. In today's society, true rebellion is a grassroots kind of rebellion, a rebellion from the bottom up. For example, in short-form videos like Douyin or Kuaishou, I sometimes watch them and feel amazed by the imagination and creativity of these grassroots creators. I feel like it goes way beyond my previous stereotype that artists are the ones with the most creativity. These mass creators already overturned this idea a long time ago. Not just short videos, even Japanese cartoons and science fiction films from the 1990s, and also later stuff like Blade Runner. I feel like the social and political implications, including the literary and artistic qualities, already exceed many, many of the concepts in the literary and artistic works in our traditional narrative. So I think that the creativity of the masses, in this moment is already part of universal education, it appears to be a more democratic era. Maybe this avant-garde nature is a rebellion against capitalism, I don't know. It's a rebellion against narrow-minded concepts, maybe it's a broader idea of an avant-garde. It's no longer an academic avant-garde. Maybe it takes entertainment, or the enlightenment of the public... That every individual will be visible... it's that kind of rebellion. Maybe it's something like that.

[game art curation, Duchamp, assimilation, Fluxus, commercialization]

YZ: What you're saying inspires me a bit. It reminds me that the core motivation behind my design comes partly from this. For example, if we talk about so-called interactive media, metaverse art, or game art, when contemporary artists discuss these topics, I think they should first look at games. This has been happening in games for a long time, and the people making these games basically don't care whether they're creating avant-garde art. They just want to do it, and then they do it. But from an art historical perspective, what they've done is actually quite remarkable, or it's a thread that's worth paying attention to. That's why I can't accept, for example, when I see some people like Hans Ulrich-Obrist putting on exhibitions of game art, they don't pay attention to independent games and experimental games, the spontaneous, grassroots, or bottom-up games that you mentioned. Those people have a deep love for this culture and a deep love for exploring games. Those aspects of games aren't presented and displayed within the narrative of art history. From this perspective, I wonder if this kind of art curation is too narrow, too aristocratic, too organized from the perspective of contemporary art's own narrative.

YQ: It's also quite ironic. Contemporary art itself emerges from a rebellious and avant-garde posture, for example Duchamp's ready-made installations, and so on. He wanted to be anti-art, but in the end, anti-art became part of the context of high art. It's a bit like, to put it bluntly, a rock musician becoming a rock star. When rebellion itself gets assimilated as a kind of capital, then there's definitely no avant-garde there.

YZ: Yes, so I feel that... For example, returning to the work I was trying to do before, I wanted to bring together this group of people in so-called contemporary art history, the people who rebel against the 'good student' system, and their works, together with the things developing from grassroots experimental and independent games. They should be put together in a... They should be collaborators, working together to advance something new. Experimental or independent game creation should be seen more holistically, not as a small subculture of gaming culture doing some niche, weird things. Rather they're doing, like we said before, a new kind of digital weaving art, or interactive art experiments, or computer art. Bringing together into one thread all these grassroots explorations.

Earlier there was an article that researched the history, from Fluxus games, Yoko Ono, all the way up to the development of independent games. They suggested that people working on independent and experimental games now are the Fluxus movement of today. But they're not conscious that they're the Fluxus movement. Their approach is the Fluxus approach. But they don't need to disrupt the structures of art distribution and the art system, because they naturally exist through paid transactions like Steam.

So, for example, if we look back now at something like Tracy Fullerton, you can see it as a connection point between these two worlds, at the point between Bill Viola and experimental games. But later developments have taken a more grassroots approach. I think this is very subtle. We can't completely forget the connection between them, because if we completely forget our connection, we'll just dismiss it as a niche, purely grassroots thing. For example, Tracy's work reminds us that others are doing similar things. Experimental games should be seen as a path forward in the development of interactivity and playability in visual art.

YQ: But I feel this kind of academic analysis also has risks. It's double-edged, maybe. We might accidentally assimilate them into the system, and they would just become something like the avant-garde of the past. After it gets assimilated, it needs capital, the packaging of capital, right? And then it slowly becomes less grassroots. So this is something that confuses me. Yes, this confuses me, because I haven't figured out a conclusion. Because I feel like everything will eventually... Unless our world has already developed into a completely flat world, with only peer-to-peer communication, with resources no longer controlled by a small minority. Unless we reach that stage, then all creative art forms, if they're not assimilated, may find it difficult to survive. Just like there's so many works on Steam, maybe there are some truly great avant-garde works, but if they're not commercialized, not played by more people, then ten or twenty years from now, maybe no-one will even know this thing existed. So this is something that I find very conflicting.

YZ: Right. I think it's about reforming the state of things. Like a pendulum. When it leans too far to one side, you have to push it that way, but you might overcorrect, and then you might have to push it back again.

[museums, circulation, 'transinviduation', popular media, art economics]

You mentioned this before, you said that the new media art currently exhibited in art museums has a kind of... artistic energy. I mean like, playing a game versus viewing a work in an exhibition. I think the mindset, and the transforming effect on people are very different. As we just said, if they really share the same origin, or really are doing the same thing, but their contexts are different, then the mindset will also be different.

YQ: Yes, but this difference in mindset, I'm not sure what kind of difference it is. Or is it that you have more respect for the things you see in a museum? Or that the museum has a physical space, so there's more fun activities, like socializing, dramatic performances, et cetera? For example, if you bring a VR project or an interactive work and install it in a museum space, everyone can come and participate offline. This is definitely a different experience than playing it on a phone or a computer. Is the experience you're talking about the difference in media, or is it the result of our class-based society? When I go to a museum, I have to be very serious, I have to have a mindset like I'm on a pilgrimage.

YZ: I think you mentioned a question before, that is, is this new media art still effective today? Or, do you think this interactive new media art can influence people? Or how should it influence people?

YQ: I think it influences a small range of people, I mean like for example Tracy Fullerton's work, it's within the academy, and it's influenced by, for example, niche contemporary artists like Bill Viola - from the perspective of society as a whole they're niche artists - and then it takes those and translates them into a language that a mass audience can understand. I think there definitely has to be an intermediary person. Like, if you want interactive media in a museum to directly have some impact on, say, a passing auntie, or a janitor... Maybe it could, everyone's different. But this kind of influence won't be very large scale; it won't be a revolutionary, driving influence. If you want a driving influence, you still need some intermediary people to do it. You need to do a top-down kind of circulation, some kind of popularization, maybe.

YZ: This might also be related to the reactionary stance of many curators today. They've seen the intellectual or middle-class style of consumption in the museums, what these habits have produced... In practice, many museum visitors are estranged from the works. They have no way - to speak plainly, you're very rarely moved by a work, you very rarely really love a work. A lot of the time you look and think, this is very interesting, but "very interesting" means that you don't have any...

YQ: Emotional reaction.

YZ: Yeah, it hasn't changed you.

YQ: It hasn't changed you.

YZ: I think it's a kind of, for example, Stiegler would call it transindividuation - you are mutually changed by this thing. But I feel like if it exists in the form of a game, this effect is more... a bit more intimate.

Because when you play a game at home, or on your phone, you're not specially going to some place to do it. You're at home, facing the screen, maybe you spend a few hours engaging with it. This kind of mode of propagation, or this kind of mindset, it allows it to more deeply develop a relationship with you. This relationship could be... For example, you can find a large number of players who really love this game, who are passionate about what the media is conveying. But I rarely see someone being particularly moved by a contemporary artist's work, to really love that work. That seems pretty rare. But many young players might be moved by a particular work and determinedly say: I want to make games for the rest of my life. I want to be someone who creates games like this that bring joy or something.

YQ: I think this, for a popular artistic medium - if I crudely label games as a popular medium -

YZ: A mass medium.

YQ: Right, this kind of medium, its natural advantage is you can experience this in a relatively private space, in a relatively private time, a bit like reading a book, or watching a movie at home. But in an art gallery, it's more like attending a banquet or a gala. There's always some social status involved. You can't be a pure experiencer. Of course, maybe some artists make projects like this, that make the audience participate as pure experiencers. But this also involves the question of art collection. Maybe no one will collect such works, or very few will. If an art industry is detached from the collection system, it's very hard to sustain. In most situations, we still need money to sustain it. And works tied to the collection system are socially segmented. There's no way they can really aimed at the general public. Artworks increasingly seem to made to be seen by those who will buy them, rather than to move people. The purpose is completely different.

[physical things vs electronic things, Aaajiao, the future, Europe vs China, mechanical automata and cinema, objective conditions of history]

YZ: So do you believe... Like, when you made sound toys before, that was a purely physical, analog, object, right? Do you believe that something that exists electronically, including new media art, technological art, this lineage... Because I was flipping through a small booklet by Devolution...

YQ: Devolution...

YZ: Yeah, it's a studio in Xiamen - they made a small art book. And it included an interview with Aaajiao, an artist. I'd played his game Deep Simulator before. His interview left a deep impression on me. He said he moved to Berlin and discovered that people in Berlin aren't really interested in electronic things. And he said he doesn't like the notion of the metaverse, because we tend to see electronic things as a future or a way out. Because our physicality has been suppressed too long; we lack a bodily space, so maybe we... In his view, we somewhat pitifully hope digital things or the metaverse can rescue us, or... that it's the future.

But if, say, you live in a comfortable home, you have friends to interact with offline every day, and a backyard with plants you can tend, a better community situation... Then the electronic, digital part is just one small part. It's not that important; it's not the so-called future. He thinks that the electronic art, so-called metaverse stuff that we talked about today, that it's just a kind of compensation. The electronic future is a placebo. He says it doesn't constitute a real possibility because we're not even familiar with our most familiar body parts; how can we try to make a virtual space replace our body as a realization of freedom? That was one of Aaajiao's reflections, but I feel this myself thinking about theater: for them, a live performance, a real interaction between actor and audience, is more... That's why we also start to look back from video games to tabletop or social games, or physical games. Or pay attention to the bodily aspect of electronic games.

So, like when we said before that something is a great work, or it has great potential, are we overemphasizing its future possibility?

YQ: If we're just talking about the medium, I'm really not thinking from the perspective of whether it's future or past. For instance, Aaajiao's point is very much from the perspective of a contemporary artist. But my understanding is: why do Germans, or Europeans, not care much about electronic media? It's because they're not third-world countries. In China, a place like this, electronic media is cheap. There's a very cheap assembly line.

YZ: It's reproducible.

YQ: Right. And our population is so large. It's determined by the country's material ['hardware'] conditions. Electronic stuff is a way for developing countries to provide entertainment to everyone more quickly. But in Germany, or the UK, places like that... You want to give over a billion people a garden to entertain themselves - it's not imaginable.

So I look at it from a realistic angle. For example, why did cinema develop? If you look back a hundred years before the development of cinema, Europe had a very strong tradition of mechanical toys. When I was in London, I saw the Science Museum, and it shocked me - I hadn't realized that, even before the invention of cinema, before this kind of electrical entertainment media, there already existed these grand, ambitious things.

YZ: Automatons?

YQ: Right, mechanical things. But why does no-one know this? Because of the war. In wartime, most of those things were burned. So, in war, when the economy and politics are in turmoil, things that are bodily, material - of course they can't be preserved. That's why, in our current era, it's hard to say. Maybe we're at a crossroads. I don't know if there will be some great transformation. But once there is a transformation, even that German's backyard might not be preserved, might be gone, you know? [laughing]

YZ: Everybody needs something electronic...

YQ: Right, right. If we were at war right now, if I was in the trenches and only had a mobile phone, you know, if I imagine I was a soldier in the trenches, I'd probably still end up playing Tetris or something [laughing]. So it's something very practical, it's determined by objective conditions. So I don't think electronics or video games are necessarily 'the future.' But I just think this kind of medium, in the overall course of history, will have ups and downs. For example, maybe in fifty years, everyone will return to handcrafts. It's possible. But within these fifty years, we can make some great works in electronic media. So, I don't see this question from a linear perspective.

[the avant-garde, Handy Geng, 'responding to the present', circulation]

YZ: But it's undeniable that computers bring many new possibilities. Not just in democratized circulation, that aspect. Like you expressed before, you think the avant-garde spirit no longer really belongs to the present; when you mention it today it feels very old-school, very academic. It feels kind of outdated. So, at least for you, what choices would you make, or what kind of action, or creative direction would be a better way to respond to the present era?

YQ: I think 'outdated', this word, its sense is itself outdated. But I don't think this spirit will just disappear. I always thought, for example the short video creators we talked about, there's a lot of people that have this spirit. For example, I really like Handy Geng [laughing]. I think the things he makes are amazing. And also very subversive, to me they're very subversive. He definitely doesn't know what 'avant-garde' is - I'm guessing, maybe he does know, I'm assuming he doesn't. But these things he makes - a barbecue skewer piano, or a rotating disco ball rigged up in a bathroom. To me, these things are his instinctive response to the present. If I take him as an artist, then his response feels very direct.

When I make things myself, I don't usually start out with the explicit goal of responding to the present. But I do believe that if something truly reflects the present, it will inevitably become popular, it will be accepted by a lot of people. I'm setting aside the 'artistic value' or whatever value. I just think, if something truly reflects its time, then of course it will spread rapidly. So from the perspective of circulation, I can judge whether something is responding to the present. Not from any other perspective. But there's another way of thinking: for example if I want to be an influencer, get a huge following, promote products online - because this is also about circulation. In that sense, if I were doing media studies, I could say: people like Li Jiaqi are the artists of the present - the most avant-garde artists of the present. Being able to sell lipstick at that scale. From this perspective I think this is truly responding to the present. Maybe it doesn't have to be within the context of art to be responding to the present.

YZ: I'm thinking back to what we were talking about earlier, this push-and-pull contradiction. Whether you should pull experimental games, these kinds of self-made, grassroots creations, into the academic, already established cultural tradition.

Like you said - like if I was someone who wants to go study at an overseas art school, receive an education in the history of avant-garde experimental art, why would I even go? I can just make things like Handy Geng does. In today's narrative, this tradition feels fragmented, or its spirit seems ineffective, or 'outdated', or something. But we can just keep doing it DIY instead. Because when we were talking about the experiments of the so-called avant-garde, today it would feel pretentious. Like you draw a circle around yourself, then say "Look, I broke it." But for somebody outside, they just think "What are you doing? Isn't everybody already living like this?"

So when I go back to older indie games, like Tracy Fullerton's, the perspective of that time, to talk about how games can break conventions. Compared to what's happening now with experimental games, indie games, maybe it seems outdated, or a bit unnecessary.

[studying art, Duchamp, stock trading, Hugo, mechanical automata and cinema, inheritance]

YQ: So to sum up your question, can I put it this way: is it even necessary today to study art? [laughing]

YZ: [laughing] You could also see it from that angle.

YQ: Right? Is there any need to study art at all? This is actually a very sharp question. Because after studying for a while, I've also constantly asked myself about the necessity of this thing. Now I think of it like this: if we use science as a metaphor, is there any point in learning higher mathematics? Or calculus? For most people. So I think... I don't think that if I study higher mathematics, or study art, I become an artist. I don't think that if I study these things I'll become Hua Luogeng. You can't approach learning with this kind of a goal. The point of studying art, is you're in a temporary environment where you don't have to worry about immediate practical or short-term returns. You learn some new perspectives, some things that happened in history. It's just a process of broadening your outlook, your experiences. But if you say, "I'm going to go learn this stuff, I can be Duchamp," and project that into a concrete identity in the present, I think you're fooling yourself a bit.

YZ: Maybe it's more like an implicit value system. It's not that you study in order to become Duchamp, but this system, this tradition, it tells you it values people like Duchamp. So if you want to receive recognition in that tradition, then you have to rebel within this tradition.

From what you said, I think you mean that when you learn, you're learning how to do what you want to do, it's not accepting their tradition and its value judgments.

YQ: Right, right. And I even think after studying art, you don't necessarily have to become an artist. You could do something else. But you can take this spirit or mindset, and apply it to trading stocks, for example. I think that's also fine. Maybe that's what the artists of that time truly intended to express. Maybe they were limited by their historical context, they couldn't say something like that. But I think, if you study fine art and then go trade stocks, that might be a true artistic action. An action in line with the spirit of art.

YZ: [laughing] Right, right. And if you keep doing things within contemporary art, on the contrary...

YQ: Right, that's what Duchamp would oppose. Something like that. It's a bit paradoxical. But if we consider the concrete cost of studying art, it's very high, so you still have to repeatedly weigh up whether it's worth it or not [laughing].

YZ: Overall, after this do you have anything you feel like you want to add somewhere else, to supplement? I mean, if you thought of something before that you wanted to add but haven't said, you can say it, and later we can edit it in earlier...

YQ: I think that's all. I feel like we talked a lot today. Oh, I think I mentioned, there's a movie called Hugo. I recommend everyone to watch it, because this movie, I saw the Douban reviews are very low. A lot of people said the director is being pretentious, showing off how much he knows about art history, film history. But actually I think it's because maybe Chinese audiences don't really understand the cultural heritage of Europe before the two world wars. The movie actually reflects a very important node in the history from mechanical automata to the invention of cinema. It chose a very obscure angle to tell this story. It actually has a lot of historical value. And this is related to what we discussed today, because it's also about how different media inherit the DNA of predecessors and then develop into a new form. So I recommend this movie to everyone.

YZ: I see. I feel like it has a kind of... Not exactly a 'sense of the times', but just... Thinking about 'inheritance', I noticed we've been talking around this point. How video games today face the past, before them, in this long, rich history of contemporary art, music art, synesthetic art, this prehistory. It [video games] is able to see these things, and - I don't know if accepts them - but it's able to see them, but at the same time also sublate them. Help itself better develop.

OK. Thank you so much, Yan Qin.

YQ: Thank you. Thanks Sunset Sway.