Bird's Eye View

Papermint on The World of Gaming

Papermint Poetry

We caught up with Dr Barbara Lippe (known as Babsi), Art Director & Consultant of Papermint, a fascinating indie games company, who have created an all-new animated virtual world which combines advanced casual gaming and social networking. Babsi and Chief Technical Officer, Claudia will be hosting a live game development session at the festival on Saturday 6th March as part of Birds Eye View Film Festival 2010’s Innovation strand.

CC: What first attracted you to the World of gaming?

Babsi: I wanted to see my characters filled with life. I have been drawing characters since I could think, but at one point I realised that the creative possibilities in our economy - the ways of earning a living with characters - is quite limited. I could imagine developing characters for comic books, animation, toys…and GAMES of course. But these industries don’t really exist in Austria. Europe is a cultural conglomerate, based on the written word and skeptical towards pictures for many centuries, so it was not the best place for  people like me who have grown up with the visual language of Japanese pop culture. I was a frantic Zelda maniac, and watched all the 70s anime shown on Austrian national TV. Of course, as a kid, I never reflected upon the fact that these things are from a completely different cultural heritage. It was an inverse culture shock for me when I was adult enough to understand that I had better become a serious graphic designer doing typography. So I just moved to Tokyo and worked at a character design studio to refine my “useless” craft. When I got the call from Lev, an old old friend, to create the graphics for his new game, I was more then ready to finally put my characters on the stage of a proper game! Papermint enabled me to fill my drawings with life - a rare opportunity.

Can you tell us the story of how Papermint began?

I studied MultiMedia Art with papermint’s founder, the Games Designer and visionary, Lev, in Salzburg. That time I knew Lev was a feature film director. It was much later, in Vienna, when he revealed to me that games might be the better medium for him to express what he wanted to. I hadjust returned from Tokyo and started on my PhD Thesis on games&girls&Japan (”Game Boys for Play Girls!”) when he asked me to do the graphics for a private game project of his. He was a friend, and I love games and character design, so of course I helped and it went from there!

Papermint Happy Social Life

Papermint is interesting in that it combines advanced casual gaming and social networking. How did this come about?

Because language is a much more complex “game” than any high-score
based action game could ever be we made Papermint more “casual” by
adding more real game elements as some Papermint players were too
shy to communicate via this social network.

It’s really fun that you can create your own character to take on adventures (including playing games, throwing parties and even having paper babies!) Can you tell me a bit more about what inspired this virtual World’s quirky art design?

My personal taste (partly developed during my time in Tokyo) shaped the look and feel of Papermint. I like 2D and somehow disliked a lot if the 3d stuff out there at the time when we started Papermint, so if we wanted to proceed together as a team creating an MMO we would have to find a stylistic solution: So why not make our MMO a visually unique, illustrated 2Dish world, but with 3D navigation and gameplay possibilities. Why not make Papermint a CUTE virtual world?

Papermint is an illustrated world where every shape and every colour has a game design meaning. So everything has to be brash and understandable and basic. We decided intentionally to use the charms and the significance of 2D in a spatially navigable world. 2D is flat and this fact does not make it difficult to come up with a paper metaphor. Paper has the big advantage that is is real (you can print your Papermint character, cut it, fold it, put it onto your desk - in that way Papermint is much more real than any digital hi-def-hi-rez 3D world), but also fantasy (paper is able to do things a creature made from flesh and blood is unable to do) - this is great for a lot of slapstick humour - just imagine paper people folding themselves to somewhere, turning into boats and planes and paper balls, getting wet in the rain or catching fire!

Would it be true to say that the game is a brilliant form of escapism. How important is that do you think to its success?

I do not connect Papermint to the term escapism so much. Papermint is not more escapism for me than any other hobby or activity you do with total indulgence. It is true, the activities in Papermint could be labelled “living another life in another world”, but in the end it is also just sitting in front your computer interacting with so many other people, doing the same, that it is hardly a solitary, escapist or unworldy thing to do. Social networks today take a big share of an average person’s free time, Papermint is one of them. Some minigames in Papermint are called “getting children” or “exploring the ocean as a paper boat”, but I do not think that makes Papermint more escapist than watching a movie or listening to a music album or dancing in a club.

Papermint Paper boats

Can you tell us really briefly what we can expect at the event at the
Birds Eye View Film Festival on the 6th March?

Claudia, our CTO and me will present the virtual world Papermint live
to the audience and tell our story: how 3 friends can create a virtual
world - a project that is typically done by team of at least 50 with
budget reaching millions. We will share our experience of how a small independent team can work on a creative project of this immense scope and explain details onvirtual worlds, web 2.0 and art and design in games.

Catch Babsi and Claudia at Papermint: Game Development Live in the BFI Studio on Saturday March the 6th as part of the Innovation strand of the Birds Eye View Film Festival 2010. Find out more and buy tickets here. Find out more about Papermint at www.papermint.com