Enric Llagostera is the creator of the alt.ctrl game Cook Your Way, where immigration authorities evaluate applicants according to their efficiency and potential to contribute to the new country’s society. Cook Your Way is nominated for the A MAZE. Awards 2020. Enjoy the interview.

A MAZE.: How would you describe yourself?
Enric Llagostera: I’m a game maker and researcher from Brazil. I have been living, working and studying in Canada since 2017. I work with alternative controllers, subversive play, and game design as a critical practice.

A MAZE.: Are you a wild heart? If yes, what makes you think you’re a wild heart?
Enric Llagostera: Not sure if I am wild, but I do feel restless most of the time.

A MAZE.: Why did you start making games or playful media works?
Enric Llagostera: When I started making them, I always enjoyed the ways players take the games in all sorts of directions, their reactions. I feel like to some extent I’m playing with them as well.

A MAZE.: Who (or what) is your biggest inspiration? Think beyond games too - musicians, writers, filmmakers, artists, scientists, …
Enric Llagostera: Storytelling, theatre, political economy, DIY, migration, conversations with my peers. I am inspired by humour, a certain level of mischief and trickster ways. The game making and critical work of (in no particular order) Jess Marcotte, Dietrich Squinkifer, Sabine Harrer, Kara Stone, and Pedro Paiva. The amazing tools, games and writing by Mark Wonnacott and Increpare. Music is always a big influence as well, in particular samba lately.

A MAZE.: Where can we find this in your work?
Enric Llagostera: I think a mix of this shows up in the ways that the stories or settings in the games I make combine with humor / tone, how it sometimes has a small contradiction between them. Also in the choice of themes (contrasts, extrapolations, DIY), use of tools and kind of lo-fi visual art of most of the games is also very informed by these influences. Some degree of improvisation and jerry-rigging is integral to it.

A MAZE.: What message(s) are you sending out with your works?
Enric Llagostera: I like the idea of focusing on contradictions, political tension, as well as experimenting with construction, processes, and different materials to play with. The messages of the games are related to that as well: how do systems condition life, the ways we exist, relate to people, and play in capitalism? So, I guess the message(s) are other questions.

A MAZE.: Is there a repeating pattern in all of your works the players may experience?
Enric Llagostera: I think there is usually a sense of engaging with conditions of life / existing in the present and its alternatives.

A MAZE.: What influences your work more: Past (history), present (contemporary) or future (scifi) and what are your sources?
Enric Llagostera: I am more inspired by the present, especially how it is not one, but many. It is hard to navigate all the stories from friends, people I know, our places, social media, press, but I value the constant effort to try to connect these experiences. The many presents cannot be noticed in isolation, there is always a historical and localized approach in engaging with it.

A MAZE.: What does responsibility towards your players mean to you as an artist?
Enric Llagostera: Striving to create a negotiated consent around playing the game, looking for a shared good condition for it. I often focus on play that has some elements of discomfort and deal with difficult topics, so a sense of commonality and recognition of that is needed. I try to make games that are frank to players.

A MAZE.: What impact is the current pandemic having on you and your work?
Enric Llagostera: I am personally in a safe(r) situation. Brazil, on the other hand, is in an extremely dangerous situation, with a genocidal president and elite pushing for profits and deepening the police state while people try to organize and protect themselves. Little testing has been going on. It has been hard being away from there during this time.

A MAZE.: If there is something wrong in the field of games / playful media, what would you fix first?
Enric Llagostera: Not sure what would be the first one, but the ways in which they are profoundly integrated into capitalism and the current racism and sexism in them (among other exclusionary systems), how games / playful media obfuscate the labor and relations of all involved in creating and maintaining them. So, probably I would start by unionizing game workers, across software, hardware, arts, research and service labor, so we build power to fight this variety of connected struggles.

A MAZE.: What are the three games someone who never played a game before should play? Why those?
Enric Llagostera: “Night In The Woods” (for its mix of storytelling, humor, heartfelt characters, history, relationality), “no destination” series by Mark Wonnacott (the shifting ambients, evocations), and maybe Tetris but with a shared controller (as in LeMieux’s Octopad) for the challenge of cooperating over an absurd task.

A MAZE.: How do you relax and find balance?
Enric Llagostera: My answer is very focused on the present moment, I think: my wife and I cook together, chat, watch films; I enjoy reading a lot; I chat with friends and family back in Brazil; I draw and care for some of our house plants; We go walking around the back alleys near where we live.

A MAZE.: What are the main challenges for artists in your country to sustain themselves?
Enric Llagostera: Inequality of access and visibility, especially racism and sexism. Lack of funding, difficulty in circulating works in a sustainable way. We are far from having stable or reliable working conditions. There is lots of emphasis on entrepreneurial value-building, not so much in creating ways for people to counter exploitation and build structures to support each other.

A MAZE.: How do you see interactive arts in 10 years from now? In 2030! Tell us your vision.
Enric Llagostera: It will be many things: more extreme, in its ubiquity, market-focus and time-consuming ways; more diverse as well, I think. Differences in access will have shifted, there will be more disputes. There will be more folks making games: creating them will be a more everyday activity, and there will be more struggles around the conditions of this. Unions will be more common and stronger, hopefully spread around the globe.

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Enric Llagostera