The Indie Game Magazine August 2014 | Issue 40 | Page 9

INTERVIEWS

CLOUD CHAMBER
Cloud-tested, Science-approved
by Vinny Parisi

I’m a pretty sociable person. (Honest!) I like
spending time with other people, “hanging out,” as
the kids say, and all that jazz. But when it comes to
gaming, I’m primarily a single-player kinda guy. I’ll
play some online deathmatches, for sure, but when
story is involved, I want to be laser focused and not
distracted by other gamers. (Plus, Dark Souls gave
me trust issues…) So it was a tall task for Investigate
North Creative Director Christian Fonnesbech to
convince me that Cloud Chamber was a game that
could appeal to even my single-player sensibilities.
To his credit, he may have succeeded. Our discussion
covers everything from the development process, to
actually playing this new genre of game, and most
interestingly, the personal journey Christian went
through along the way.
Indie Game Magazine: The indie game
community is already lauded for being an
experimental and unique space. But even still, the
idea for Cloud Chamber is pretty out there. What
was the inspiration for the game’s social angle?
Christian Fonnesbech: Do you really think
discussing things online is “out there”? I think it feels
like life… ;)
No, I do understand what you are saying – this
is a different way of thinking about what a game
is. But making discussions into gameplay is a small
step away from the way we use social media all the
time. William Gibson was wrong: The Internet did
not turn out to be a huge, three dimensional, virtual
reality space. What the Internet turned out to be
was a huge social networking system – a networking

system that was also able deliver all previous media
types to the participants.
And stories have always been about
understanding life. That’s what stories are for: They
give us ideas, let us understand emotions, and show
us how life can be. So to me, asking players to discuss
their way through a story seems like a complete
thing. Because discussions are more and more how
we tackle the world, how we get our news, how we
meet the loves of our lives – and so on.
I’ve had an ideal for a long time: The story should
BE the game. I’m tired of corridor shooters with story
wallpaper – and I’m tired of flipping between puzzle
and story, puzzle and story. The story should be the
game … and after 35+ projects, my creative producer
(Mikkel Thomassen) and I realized that discussions
were the key to this. If the players were discussing
what happened, then the story BECAME the game.
IGM: For those who still might not quite
understand how you “play” Cloud Chamber, can you
break it down for me? How will players experience
this modern day “science noir?”
Christian: It’s easy: You fly from media file to
media file and discuss what it means with other
players. It’s like navigating a 3D Wikileaks and
discussing the media files that have been left in
there with the others who are in there with you.
In the fiction, somebody has uploaded 150 media
files about a mysterious event to a database called
“Crowdscape”. You’re going in there to find out
what happened. Inside, the Crowdscape system

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