Out Of Index 2025 interview: Atuel

Atuel은 아르헨티나의 아투엘 강, 그리고 그 강에서 삶을 영유하는 사람들에 대한 다큐멘터리이자 게임입니다. 플레이어는 초현실적으로 재구성된 강을 따라가면서 아투엘 강에 대해 이해하게 됩니다.

Atuel is a documentary and a game about Argentina’s Atuel River and the people whose lives depend on it. As players travel along a surreal reimagining of the river, they come to understand the story of the Atuel.

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1. 팀 소개 부탁드립니다.

안녕하세요! 우리는 초현실적 다큐멘터리 게임 Atuel을 만든 주요 개발자 두 명, 산티아고 프란자니와 파블로 콰르타입니다.

산티아고는 게임의 주요 아트와 개발을 담당했고, 파블로는 제작과 현지화, 그리고 추가 디자인 작업을 맡았어요. 팀에는 지셀 “이요” 로치도 함께했는데, 게임의 QA 테스트를 전부 담당했죠.

게임 음악은 루마니아 출신 전자 음악 듀오 Makunouchi Bento가 작곡했습니다. 게임 개발에 필요한 모든 다큐 자료 조사는 The 12.01 Project가 제공했고, 이들은 정기 회의와 논의를 통해 게임의 기획과 프리프로덕션에도 참여했어요.

산티아고, 파블로, 그리고 이요는 당시 Matajuegos라는 아르헨티나 인디 개발 협동조합 소속이었습니다. 참고로 Matajuegos는 아르헨티나 최초의 게임 개발자 협동조합입니다.

Please introduce yourself and your team to our audience.

Hi! We’re Santiago Franzani and Pablo Quarta, two of the main developers behind the surrealist documentary game, Atuel. 

Santiago was the principal artist and developer of the game, while Pablo was responsible for the production, localization, and additional design work. The development team was also composed of Giselle “Yiyo” Lochi, who did all the QA testing for the game. 

The music of the game was composed by Makunouchi Bento, a duo of electronic musicians from Rumania. All the documentary research that went into the game was provided by The 12.01 Project, who also participated in the conceptualization and pre-production of the game through regular meetings and consultations.

Santiago, Pablo, and Yiyo were part of Matajuegos during the development of Atuel. Matajuegos was an Argentinian indie dev collective, and the country’s very first game workers’ cooperative.

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2. 플레이 가능한 다큐멘터리라는 아이디어는 어떻게 떠올렸나요?

우리는 The 12.01 Project라는 국제 다큐멘터리 제작팀에게 제안을 받았어요. 이 팀은 아르헨티나 쿠요 지역의 아투엘 강(Atuel River)을 따라 이동하며 촬영한 다큐멘터리 영화의 후반작업을 진행 중이었죠. 아투엘 강의 발원지인 안데스 산맥부터 팜파스 지대에서 말라버리는 지점까지, 550km를 모두 따라가며 촬영을 했어요.

이들은 생물학자, 역사학자, 기술자, 활동가, 토착 공동체 등 수많은 사람들을 인터뷰했고, 드론으로 정말 멋진 풍경들을 담아왔죠. 이 다큐멘터리는 기후 위기가 강과 주변 지역에 어떤 영향을 미쳤는지에 대해 이야기하고 있고, 특히 가뭄으로 인해 수세대 동안 이 지역에서 살아온 지역사회와 농업, 목축업이 심각한 타격을 받는다는 점에 집중했어요요. 아투엘 강이 흐르는 곳은 진짜 어마어마한 사막이라서, 관개용 수원이 사라지면 수백 년 동안 일궈 온 농지가 순식간에 메마르고 황량한 땅으로 돌아가버립니다.

이 프로젝트 팀은 영국문화원의 International Changemakers Bursaries 펀딩을 받아, 영화와 함께할 비디오게임 제작까지 지원받게 되었고, 그래서 우리에게 함께하자고 연락을 준 거였어요.

How did you first come up with the idea for making a playable documentary?

We were approached by The 12.01 Project, a group of international documentarians who were working on the post-production of a documentary movie about the Atuel River in the Cuyo region of Argentina. They had travelled across the length of the Atuel, all 550km of it, from where it’s born up in the Andes mountains to where it dries up in the pampas, and were making a movie about this trip. They had interviewed a lot of specialists—biologists, historians, engineers, activists, indigenous communities—and recorded some beautiful footage of the river and its landscapes using drones. The documentary spoke about the effects of the climate crisis on the river and on the surrounding region, with a particular focus on the distress that drought was causing on the local communities as well as on the agricultural and livestock industries and the people who have lived off of them for generations. You have to understand that the Atuel flows through an immense desert, and without its waters for irrigation, all the agricultural land that has been cultivated through hundreds of years will just return to being barren, hostile, and dry.

The 12.01 Project had won funds from the International Changemakers Bursaries of the British Council to produce a videogame to accompany the documentary movie they were making, which is why they approached us. 

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3. 게임의 규칙을 통해 메시지를 전달하는 방식은 여러 가지가 있죠. Atuel은 워킹 시뮬레이터 형식을 택한 것 같은데, 이런 방향을 어떻게 결정했나요?

우리의 접근에는 두 가지 핵심적인 이유가 있었어요.

첫 번째는, 그냥 다큐 영화가 이미 하는 말을 반복하고 싶지 않았다는 점이에요.

영화는 전형적인 시네마틱 포토리얼리즘으로 만들어지고 있었죠. 거대한 풍경을 담은 고화질 드론 촬영, 인터뷰 대상의 얼굴 클로즈업, 현재에 기반한 설명식 나레이션까지.

그래서 우리는 정반대의 방식으로 가자고 했어요. 영화가 하지 않는 방식으로, 게임만이 보여줄 수 있는 관점을 가져오자고요.

영화가 아투엘 강의 “현실”이라면, 우리는 게임을 아투엘 강의 “꿈”으로 만들고 싶었어요.

그걸 구현하기 위해, 영화에서 이미 녹음된 인터뷰를 바탕으로, 직관과 해석, 감정을 중심에 둔 짧고 초현실적인 워킹 시뮬레이터를 만들기로 했죠.

우리는 이 생태계 자체가 주인공이 되는 게임을 만들고 싶었어요. 플레이어가 생태계의 서로 다른 존재들을 직접 경험하면서, 삶이 서로 어떻게 촘촘하게 연결되어 있는지 느끼게 하는 게임. 강이란 단순히 물이 흐르는 길이 아니라 “생명의 근원”이라는 사실을 보여주고 싶었어요.

두 번째 이유는, 예산도 매우 제한적이었고, 우리가 바라본 주요 타깃이 “게이머가 아닌” 라틴아메리카 일반 대중이기 때문이에요.

이들은 보통 게임을 잘 안 하거나, 복잡하고 시간 많이 드는 게임을 부담스러워합니다. 그래서 플레이 타임은 15~30분 정도로 짧아야 했고, 조작도 아주 간단해야 했어요. 카메라 조작도 빼고, 난이도도 최대한 낮추고, 대부분의 사람들이 긍정적인 경험을 하고 편하게 끝낼 수 있도록요.

이런 요소들이 제한처럼 보일 수 있지만, 사실은 더 집중력 있고 임팩트 있는 경험을 만들 기회였어요. 길게 늘릴 필요가 없으니 모든 순간을 의미 있게 만들 수 있었죠.

Developers have tried various ways to convey their intended messages through the rules of a game. In this case, Atuel seems to have adopted the approach of embedding a story within a walking simulator. How did you decide on this development direction?

There were two principal considerations that informed our approach:

The first was that we didn’t simply want to repeat what the documentary movie was already doing and saying. 

The movie that the documentary team was making worked within the aesthetics of cinematic photorealism. It had magnificent, high-definition drone footage of vast landscapes; it had close-ups of the people interviewed; and it had expository, linear narration that was very much grounded in the present. 

So, what we told the team was that we wanted to do something that had a completely opposite approach. We wanted to complement their work by bringing in the perspectives and aesthetics it was missing, and by doing something that only a game could do. 

If the documentary was the waking reality of the Atuel River, we wanted this game to be the dream of the Atuel.

The form that we wanted this to take, was that of a short, surrealist walking simulator that reutilized the interviews that had already been recorded for the movie to create a reflexive, meditative experience that operated through intuition, interpretation, and emotion.

We wanted to make a game where the protagonist would be the ecosystem. Players would inhabit its different elements in order to get a feeling for the complex interconnections of life that it weaves together. We wanted to make a game that was ecocentric and showed that a river is not just a causeway of water, but a source of life.

The second consideration was that the budget we had to make the game was fairly limited, and that we wanted this game’s audience to be the general Latin-American public, not gamers.

This is an audience that often doesn’t play games, much less complicated ones that require hours or days of their time. This meant that the game had to be short, no more than 15 to 30 minutes, and that the gameplay had to be fairly simple, since we also didn’t have a lot of development time to iterate on complex mechanics. We decided the game was going to revolve principally around movement, without camera control, and was going to have very little friction, allowing most of our players to complete it and have a positive experience.

It’s easy to look at these factors as limitations, but we saw that they also offered us an opportunity to create a focused and impactful experience. Since the game was going to be short and simple, we didn’t have to pull any punches to stretch it out, and we could focus on making every moment of it significant.

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4. Atuel에서는 플레이어의 행동이 세계를 직접 바꾸지 않는 것처럼 보이는데, 이런 디자인을 통해 전하고 싶은 메시지가 있나요?

로버트 양이 우리 게임에 대해 이렇게 말한 적이 있어요. “이 게임은 점점 더 복잡해지지 않는다. 워킹 시뮬레이터라는 형식의 절제가 바로 이 미니멀리즘을 정당화한다. 이건 STEM식 시스템 기반 게임이 아니다. 이 게임은 강이 갖지 못한 ‘행동력’을 플레이어가 직접 체험하는 것이다. 강은 지형을 따라갈 수밖에 없다. 플레이어도 마찬가지다. 인간이 강의 흐름을 바꿔버리면, 강은 선택권이 없다.”

우리는 플레이어가 인간처럼 세계를 바꿀 수 있는 힘을 갖지 않도록 설계했어요. 대신 강의 생태계처럼, 흐르고 형태를 바꾸는 간접적이고 제한된 힘만을 갖죠.

물론 플레이어가 아무것도 바꾸지 않는 건 아닙니다. 빙하에서 녹은 물을 흘려보내 강을 키우고, 산불을 꺼서 여우를 살리고, 협곡의 나무들이 빛나며 노래하게 하죠. 하지만 그렇다 해도, 기후 위기라는 현실을 게임 안에서 해결할 수는 없어요.

이건 의도한 바예요. 게임 디자이너라면 보통 “플레이어가 문제를 해결하게 해야지!”라는 생각을 먼저 하게 되죠. 하지만 그런 방식은 너무 쉽게 “영웅이 나타나면 문제는 해결된다”라는 환상을 만들어버립니다.

기후 위기는 어떤 한 명의 천재가 멋지게 해결해줄 문제가 아니에요. 우리는 모두가 함께 오랜 시간에 걸쳐 삶의 방식을 바꿔가며 싸워야 할 문제예요.

그래서 우리는 플레이어에게 익숙하고 편한 “세이비어(구원자)” 역할을 주는 대신, 더 어려운 일을 요청합니다.  듣고, 느끼고, 해석하고, 생각해 달라고요.

플레이어는 잘 모르는 지역의 역사와, 그곳 사람들에게 땅이 어떤 의미를 가져왔는지 듣게 되고, 그들의 미래가 얼마나 위태로운지 생각하게 됩니다. 그리고 결국 그것이 우리의 미래와 연결되어 있음을 느끼죠.

우리가 하고 싶은 메시지는 사실 우리가 말하는 것보다 플레이어들이 훨씬 더 잘 이해하고 표현해요. 그래서 그 해석은 플레이어에게 맡기고 싶어요.

Player’s actions in Atuel ultimately don’t produce direct changes in the game world. What message does this style of experience design aim to convey?

Robert Yang, reflecting on the game, says, “[Atuel] doesn't get more mechanically complicated. Here the restraint of the walking sim format justifies the minimalism. This isn't a STEM-y systems thing in the vein of “Earth: A Primer” because it's about embodying all the agency that rivers do NOT have -- they must follow the terrain, much like a player in a walking sim. If level designers divert the player, or humans divert the river, then you have no choice, even though you are alive.”

What Yang highlights in his reflection is something that we were thinking about actively during development. The agency presented to the player in the game is not that of humans, who can make direct changes in the world, but that of the river’s ecosystem, which is limited and indirect. Its principal actions are that of flowing and changing form.

Having said that, and going back to your original question, we want to push back bit on the statement that the player’s actions don’t produce any direct changes in the game world—the player brings the meltwater of the glaciers down the mountainside to grow the size of the river, they put out a forest fire to save the life of a fox and bring them back to their home, they make the trees in the canyon glow and sing—but it is true that the player’s actions inside the game can’t solve the climate crisis that they are faced with.

This is intentional. As a game designer, when faced with the challenge of making a game about the climate crisis, it is normal for one of our first instincts to be, “How can we make the player solve this problem?” There are many reasons why we resisted this instinct, but the the principal one was that we didn’t want to play into the fantasy that solving such a complex, historical, and global issue is just a matter of skill—that if only someone talented and thoughtful enough comes along, we could have the climate crisis sorted out in a short time. Decoupling human society from the practices and technologies that are driving environmental collapse, while very possible, will take an enormous effort that will challenge a lot of our ways of living and thinking. In that work, there are myriads of difficult challenges, complications, and details that we will need to resolve together. There won’t be any miracles, and no one person will be able to do it alone.

Rather than asking players to take on the very familiar and comfortable position of ‘savior’, what we want them to do in Atuel is something that is perhaps more challenging; we want them to listen and interpret and reflect. We want them to listen to the history of a place they likely don’t know and have no reason to care about, a history that is about the connection between people and the land they live on, and reflect on its future, which is dire, and on their own future, to which it is inextricably linked. We don’t offer this challenge to them in a linear, rational way, but rather in an evocative one. The interviews that the players listen to in the game are scattered, both in time and subject matter, and so are the vignettes they play through. Their meaning isn’t evidently clear. It is up to the players to associate these elements and interpret them in a way that is meaningful to them. Fortunately, most players manage to do so.

“What message does this design aim to convey?” I am not sure it is our place to say; players are much more insightful and adept than we are at describing what Atuel manages to convey, and we think that this is a question best suited to them.

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5. Atuel은 게임이면서 동시에 다큐멘터리이기도 하죠. 개발 과정이 기존 게임 제작과는 많이 달랐을 것 같은데, 어떤 점이 달랐나요?

초기 기획 단계는 다큐 제작팀과의 대화를 통해 시작됐어요. 그들이 준 인터뷰 자료와 풍부한 조사 내용을 바탕으로 했죠. 특히 강이 흐르는 지역의 지형과 인터뷰 내용을 꼼꼼하게 살폈어요.

인터뷰는 총 3시간 분량이었고, 우리는 그중 14개 클립을 선택했어요. 길이로는 10분 정도인데, 이 클립들이 게임의 이야기 구조와 시각적 은유, 플레이 장면의 흐름을 모두 결정했습니다.

또 우리는 강의 지형을 분석하기 위해 영상, 사진, 위성 자료, 지도 등을 꼼꼼히 살폈어요. 아르헨티나는 지리적 다양성이 엄청나거든요. 그래서 산, 사막, 계곡, 협곡 같은 가장 특징적인 지형을 선택했고, 호수나 암석 지형, 댐 같은 주요 랜드마크도 모델링했죠. 그리고 각 구역마다 플레이어가 변신해볼 수 있는 토종 동식물을 선정했어요.

우리는 대부분의 프리프로덕션 작업을 아주 정교한 인터랙티브 지도 안에서 진행했어요. 이 지도로 전체 게임 규모, 각 생물군계의 크기, 인터뷰 재생 위치, 플레이어 시점 변환 지점 등 모든 걸 미리 확인할 수 있었죠. 미리 완성도 높게 그려둔 덕분에 예산과 시간의 제약 속에서도 효율적인 개발이 가능했어요.

이 과정에 대해서는 GDC 2024 발표에서 아주 자세하게 소개했어요. 온라인으로 무료 시청이 가능하고, 발표 자료에는 스피커 노트도 전부 들어 있습니다.

This is a game, but it’s also a documentary. I imagine that making Atuel was somewhat different from making other games. In what ways was the development process different?

The initial conceptualization process of the game was born out of our conversations with the documentary team and from all the research material they shared with us. In particular, we paid a lot of attention to the interviews they conducted with different specialists and to the topography of the land that the river runs through.

The documentarians had conducted about 3 hours of interviews, from which we selected 14 clips that amount to just about 10 minutes of audio. These structured the narrative of the game, from the central conflict to the visual metaphors and vignettes that appear during the player’s journey.

For the layout of the game, we studied the terrain that the river runs through, looking at videos, photos, satellite data, and maps. We ended up selecting the landscapes and biomes that were most evocative of the region. The geography of Argentina is very varied, so these ended up being mountains, deserts, valleys, and canyons. We also chose some iconic landmarks—lakes, rock formations, dams—to model in the game to give players a real sense of place. From each of these areas, we also selected native animals and plants to represent and for the player to inhabit in different moments.

A lot of our pre-production happened within a detailed, interactive map. This map diagrammed the entire game, showing how large each biome was going to be, where each of the special vignettes would occur, what perspective the player would inhabit in each section, and—most importantly—where each one of the interviews would play. This was incredibly helpful in giving us a full sense of the game, its scope, and our production process before we started modelling the terrain and developing the gameplay, since we had a limited budget and little time for iteration. Changing things around on the map was very quick and easy, and dropping the map into Unity allowed us to create a simulation of the player and of the entire audio design of the game. This permitted us to test the timing of the whole experience in a very cheap and effective way.

We talk extensively about this development process in our talk at GDC 2024, which is available to watch online for free. You can also find the entire presentation here, which includes the whole speech in the speaker notes.

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6. “플레이 가능한 다큐”를 만든다고 했을 때, 영상 다큐와는 어떻게 달라야 하는지 고민했을 것 같아요. 게임 다큐만이 가지는 장점이 무엇이라고 생각하나요?

1번 답에서 조금 언급했지만, 간단히 말하면 우리는 게임이라는 형식이 가진 “놀이성”을 최대한 활용하고 싶었어요.

플레이어가 비인간적인 존재로 변신해서 그 관점을 직접 체험할 수 있다는 점, 시간과 시점을 자유롭게 넘나드는 파편화된 서사를 플레이어 스스로 조립하게 한다는 점, 그런 점들이 모두 “몰입을 통한 해석”을 만들어내죠.

하지만 사실 이런 놀이는 “게임이기 때문”이라기보다는, Atuel이 갖춘 초현실주의적 미학 덕분인 면이 커요. 꿈처럼 유연하고 해석이 열려 있는 공간이 만들어지니까요. 이런 실험적인 다큐 형식은 영상에서도 적용 가능하긴 합니다.

그래서 솔직히 말하면, 어느 매체가 더 뛰어나다고 말하긴 어려워요. 다큐 게임이 특별히 우월해서라기보다는, 형태가 다른 거죠.

물론 시스템 기반으로 현실 사회를 직접 시뮬레이션하고 플레이어의 행동이 즉각적 영향을 주는 방식의 게임이라면, 다른 다큐 형식보다 확실히 뛰어난 설명력을 보여줄 수도 있어요. Molleindustria의 작품들이 그런 방식이죠. Atuel은 그와는 조금 다른 방향이에요.

During the development of Atuel, which pursues a “Playable Documentary” approach, I imagine you must have asked yourself: “How should this game differ from a traditional video documentary?” Compared to a video documentary, what do you think are the advantages of a documentary game?

We spoke a bit towards the differences that we were specifically hoping to achieve through the development of Atuel in our response to Question 1.

In short, we wanted Atuel to take full advantage of the affordances of ‘playfulness’ that a game brings to the documentary genre. One part of this was allowing the player to shapeshift between different perspectives and adopt the protagonism of non-human elements. Another was creating a scattered narrative that skips across time and across narrators and requires players to assemble it together on their own. We wanted Atuel to be suggestive and evocative, a game that pulls you into a meditative mood and an interpretative form of play.

The truth, however, is that this playfulness and this game of associative interpretation comes more from the surrealist aesthetics of Atuel than from it being a game. These dreamlike aesthetics create a very fluid and moldable playspace, and other experimental documentarians who use surrealist aesthetics are achieving similar effects in both short and long-form video documentaries. We believe surrealism is in and of itself a very ‘playful’ aesthetic and that it really heightens the possibilities of play in a game by expanding the narrative and gameplay possibilities of the work beyond the strictly rational or realistic. A photorealist and rationalist documentary game with a traditional, expository narrative would not only not be as playful as Atuel is, it wouldn’t even be as playful as a Patricio Guzman documentary movie is, despite it being a game.

In this sense it’s hard to make generalizations on the “advantages” of one medium over another. Games permit a particular kind of interactivity that can be different to that of other mediums, and they can ask players to embody agency in seemingly more direct ways, but it’s hard to speak of these affordances as being better or worse than those of other mediums.

A documentary game that was more systems-forwards, like those of Molleindustria, and made explicit the workings of real world-systems by having players explore and tinker with their components and relations, allowing them to experience the consequences of their meddling, might have a better argument than Atuel for making good use of the unique qualities of games in a way that other documentary formats cannot.

[인터뷰: 박선용, 번역: 전재우]