Background
In 2025, Simon Bachelier and I co-hosted a panel talk, “Beyond Interactivity,” at the Game Arts International Assembly in Barcelona, Spain. Before the panel, we had many discussions about alternative forms of interaction between games and audiences in game exhibitions. Still, I didn’t fully grasp his idea of the “interaction between players and watchers” until I attended two shows in his ongoing project Playformance by Sous le Néon. I realized my understanding had been too shallow: sometimes countless words do less than seeing something once.
Learning that Simon is also the Director of Operations at the commercial indie game publisher Firesquid, I couldn’t help but be curious about how he manages to keep these two tracks running in parallel. In early 2026, I interviewed him for Indienova. During our conversation, we discussed his artistic and business practices and the ways they intersect. I also gained insight into a different perspective on failure and winning—one that embraces vulnerability in public—as well as the new idea that every creative work, not just games, benefits from a form of playtesting.
Interview
Rashel (R): Can you talk about how you started the Playformance project? How did the idea of bringing games, narrative, and artistic performance together first emerge?
Simon (S): Back in 2011 to 2015, I was working with a previous collective called One Life Remains, which was doing experimental games. We had a lot of thoughts and design questions around the idea of: Hey, what if we create a game that is meant to be played on stage, in front of an audience? What would it be? How can you design a game specifically to create a show, or a form of spectacular experience? That was the first sparkle of thinking about what it meant to play a game in front of an audience.
After I left the collective, around 2015–2016, I worked on my own projects and came up with this idea that, okay—video games can be watched. They can be seen on stage. There were definitely things that had already been done in the past. But what if we take games that already exist and try to do something with them on stage? Not just a “let’s play.” Not just talking about the game. Because there were conferences where researchers talked about games while someone was playing it. It was cool, but it wasn’t really the idea. The real question was: What if we use a game to share something with an audience?
What if I ask a group of people who are willing to go on stage to play a game—a game that marked them, whether in a good or bad way, a game that really left an impact on them? And through that game, they could share something intimate or personal with the audience. I started this as an exhibition project in 2016. After that, I programmed it every year at IndieCade Europe’s festival. Each year, we invited 6-8 people. Each had about 15-20 minutes. I did that for four years, until COVID happened. Then I stopped the project.
Later, I had the chance to meet Nicolas Ligeon in France, who was working in the field of theater. When I pitched him this idea of having a game played on stage, he immediately saw the concept. He said, Okay, we need to do that and try something—because I can bring a comedian, you can bring people from the game world, and let’s experiment on stage and push the research.
So we started experimenting in 2021, and we’ve continued up to today. We’ve made more than fifty experiments—fifty playformances—with different people. And we refined the concept to the point of establishing a Playformance Manifesto to define what it is, what it’s not, and why. The manifesto was a way to really nail things down and define the perimeter—because you can do a lot of things with games on stage, but that doesn’t mean it’s a playformance. At the very least, there has to be storytelling through the act of playing.
R: Does Sous le Néon mean “under the neon lights”?
S: Under the neon lights, yeah. Absolutely.
R: It sounds very much like a media art festival to me. Is that a collective, or what exactly is it?
S: Yes, it’s a collective. We were four at the beginning, and now we are three co-founders, with a bunch of other game developers or artists. The meaning of this collective initiative was to work on and study what we call the “other practices of video games.” What interests us is not so much creating games. It’s more about thinking about and showcasing other or alternative practices of video games.
Basically, what does it mean to watch a video game? What kind of weird practices do some players develop around games, and how can we showcase them? What would an exhibition look like about, for instance, taking pictures in video games, or journaling in video games? Those types of things are topics that interest us in general. And performance, of course, is one of the main topics we’ve been working on and thinking about: how can you bring a video game on stage and use the act of play for storytelling? That’s one of our main fields of research.
Playformance, Image Source：Sous le Néon.
R: Can you talk about the relationship between Playformance/Sous le Néon and IndieCade Europe?
S: Yeah, of course. So the link between Playformance and IndieCade Europe is that I was the former director of IndieCade Europe. In the program every year, we usually had two or three hours dedicated to performance, and we invited guests to come and try playformance during the event. That was from 2016 to 2019. After that, the festival disappeared because of COVID.
It was only later, when I had the chance to meet my colleague Nicolas Ligeon from the theater world, that we really owned Playformance as a new collective. Sous le Néon was formed in 2021, and that’s the moment when we revisited this concept of Playformance in order to redefine it and give it more research and experimentation. At IndieCade Europe, it was more like light experimentation. I was inviting people, giving them instructions, but they were quite free. With Sous le Néon, we really pushed things further. When we were experimenting, after every Playformance we would ask ourselves, “Is this really fitting what we had in mind, or is it not—and why is it not?”
We were trying to shape the concept in order to eventually write this manifesto. So the only real link between IndieCade Europe and Sous le Néon is that I started exploring this concept back then—maybe even a bit before—but during IndieCade Europe, we already had playformances. After that, with the new collective, Sous le Néon, we pushed the research much further, thanks especially to the work of my colleagues Nicolas and Diane. I think you saw Diane Landais in Barcelona—she was doing the Celeste playformance. And thanks to them… three brains are better than one. Together, we were able to truly shape the concept.
R: Speaking of performance—in the Playformance Manifesto, you talk about exposing the body and embracing vulnerability. That feels very personal to me. I’ve seen the playformances, so I completely agree with that. But as a curator, I’m sometimes very afraid of the unexpected. I wonder how you see the differences between playformances, and also the different emotions that emerge. Every time someone performs, there seems to be a different version. How do you feel about that? Do you want to control it, or do you prefer to let it happen—more like an improvised form of acting?
S: I think it’s part of what performance is in general. Anything that is performative means there is something new every time. Whether it’s singing a song or playing a game live, there’s always this spontaneous thing that can happen. Sometimes it can even fail. We had a playformance night in Nantes, in France, last Saturday, and one of our playformers literally failed. He wasThey were playing Braid, doing the last level while talking about their story—and then he was constantly failing at the game. HisTheir whole performance was supposed to go to the end in order to deliver the conclusion. But because he wasthey were stuck in the middle of it, there was this feeling of total despair on stage. He wasThey were like, “I’m sorry, I’m just going to be quiet and try to beat this stage.” And hethey kept failing. After maybe eight minutes of trying, hethey said, “Okay, at some point, you need to give up.” And the performance just stopped.
But people really liked it, because it felt real, genuine. It felt like, okay—there is uncertainty. Just like in a circus or in theater, something can go wrong. You don’t go to the circus expecting something to fail—but sometimes, because it’s a performance, it can fail, or impromptu things can happen. And it’s up to the performer to use that moment and create something out of itto say something. In this case, hethey managed to say something different from what hethey originally wanted to say, but it ended up being about the need to accept failure and things like that. It was quite on point—which was funny—because it wasn’t planned like this.
Coming back to vulnerability, to what happens on stage, I think it’s because you expose yourself. My colleague often talks about theater like this: when a comedian goes on stage, it’s part of a ritual. They are sacrificing themselves to the audience. The person is offering their body, their interpretation, their performance, in order to create something. So you, as an individual, disappear in order to become something else on stage.
And I think performances are a bit like that as well. It’s a symbolic space that we are sharing. But in order to enable a participant to enter it, you somehow have to sacrifice your own stage and accept your vulnerability—not just as an individual, but as a performer. That’s also what’s interesting in performance: anything can happen. You’re playing a game, so there are moments that can be punishing, moments you can win or lose. It’s not just a text you read—you’re playing a system, and things can happen.
R: I love the way you describe performance as a form of sacrifice. It makes me think about the concept of “curator,” which comes from the Egyptian priests who took care of the ritual archives. That feels very interesting to me. One role is about taking care of what remains, while the other, the performer, is the one who is sacrificing.
S: Yeah. I mean, it’s not something I invented. I think a lot of people working in theory—especially around theater and political theater—consider performance as a form of sacrifice or ritual. Even artists from performance art, like Marina Abramović or Yoko Ono, have worked extensively with participation. Sometimes the performer can even become an object, or a part of the participant’s experience. I think there’s a strong similarity with theater, and in the same way, games offer that as well. Once again, games are a performative medium: they ask you to play them, and once you do, you become part of them.
R: That’s true—Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece is a classic example of sacrifice in performance.
S:
Cut Piece, yeah. Exactly.
R: I also wonder—do playformers have a script to follow, or do only some of them work with a script?
S: Because we’re in a form of storytelling, there’s often a beginning and an end. It starts with something and it reaches a point, like a final moment or conclusion. Usually, some playformers have a script written from beginning to end, but others just have an idea and rely more on improvisation. We don’t have a strict methodology around this, but everyone has at least a red line to follow. They know where they want to go, or what they hope to reach.
Because it’s a form of storytelling, it’s not just, “Hey, let’s play something and see what happens”—except if your performance is specifically about improvisation, accident, or failure, in which case that can make sense. Usually the playformer has something to share or to say, so they come up with an idea, and they want to reach it through the experience of playing the game in front of the audience.
But it can also be improvisation. For example, Diane’s playformance with Celeste starts from a clear idea. She has three main steps that involve playing with the audience. At the same time, there’s a lot of improvisation, because the players can play very well—or not very well. But at the same time, she knows where she’s going. There is a beginning, and there is a structure. Everything in the middle, though, shapes differently in every performance, because she has to react to what happens in the moment.
Diane Landais’ playformance unfolds in three steps using a shared keyboard constraint. First, the audience controls the only left key and is invited to press it whenever they feel it’s useful, which often results in chaotic and unsynchronized play. Then, she plays while the audience presses and holds the key continuously—never releasing it. At the end, Diane debriefs the meaning behind these arrangements. She uses the performance to show that being a good ally is not about intervening whenever you want, but about understanding when support is needed—and when constant, unquestioned help can become another form of pressure. Image Source: Almendra & Sous le Néon, 2023.
R: I saw the recent Playformance you shared on Instagram. One of the playformers was playing Flock, doing a water painting, and talking at the same time.
S: It was a pretty unique one. Very experimental. The playformer Delphine Fourneau is an illustrator and art director. Basically, she wanted to play a game and create a performance about process, and about finding peace in things that are sometimes complicated and stressful.
For her, the performance itself was very stressful. Even the idea of playing and doing something in front of an audience was stressful. Through the performance, she was trying to find a quiet moment in the middle of that stress—while doing all these things at once. And she did. After about five minutes, she became calmer. She was drawing, moving things around. Sometimes she needed both hands to perform, so she used a wristband to pull the joystick of the gamepad and keep the character navigating.
Because Flock is not a game where you can lose by falling off a cliff or something like that, it worked very well. The flock kept moving while she was still painting, then she would come back to the controller and play a bit more. It was interesting.
Illustrator Delphine Fourneau's Playformance with Flock. Photographer: Alan Goud
R: Any other experimental examples?
S: I mean, there’s a lot about failure. We had a comedian playing Darkest Dungeon II. The game is very hard, and the whole point was that he was playing the final boss in the hardest mode. The performance was something a bit funny—almost like stand-up comedy. He was playing while talking about the notion of failure. Every time he did the performance, you never knew if he was going to win or not, because it’s the final point. He could die after ten minutes. One move can kill the whole squad. Sometimes he managed to succeed.
But what’s funny is that when he failed, it was almost more interesting. There’s this tension, and people are like, okay, you just lost this character—are you going to die or not? When he loses, people become very empathetic with the performer on stage. You’re really part of the thing. And the whole point is also about how, at the end of the day, we’re always celebrating winning—the notion of winning. There is a winner, but we don’t talk about the losers.
What does winning actually mean? Who really deserves to win? Is it the person who comes first, or maybe the person who comes second or third, but had way more constraints—maybe they didn’t sleep last night, maybe they had a hard life, maybe they didn’t have the same education as someone else. Who deserves the most to win? Is the winner really the winner in that situation?
And the notion of failure is like—someone who keeps failing but keeps trying. Is that not the real winner somehow? That’s really the point of this performance: failure is not an indicator of whether you deserve to fail or not. Sometimes failure just means you tried, and you tried very hard. Maybe that makes you even more deserving than someone else. And it plays very well with this performance because the game is very hard. It’s punishing—one bad move, or just bad luck, and it’s over.
He was also making funny comments about things in general and about himself. The emotions slowly escalate. You’re like, okay, is he going to win? Is he going to lose? You’re laughing, but it’s not that light. We’ve had a lot of various playformances. I could talk for a long time about all of them.
R: What are your selection criteria for Playformance? What does the process look like? Do participants submit only a statement and instructions, or do they also provide screenshots or video recordings?
S: Until recently, when people came to us, they would usually pitch an idea after having seen a playformance. We always say that until you’ve seen at least one or two, you don’t really understand what it is. A lot of people think, “Oh yeah, it’s just playing a game,” but it’s not really a let’s play, and it’s not just someone playing a game on stage.
Usually, people pitch us their ideas and we ask them to present a prototype. We have a meeting to talk about what they expect. It doesn’t have to be fully developed, but we need to understand whether it fits our expectations. More recently, because many people wanted to try without committing to a long format—20 or 30 minutes can be quite intense when you’re not used to it—we made an open mic session. Every three months, when we host a playformance evening, we open a form about a month in advance. People can apply for a 10-minute slot by describing their idea and the game they want to use.
For this short format, we’re less strict. The goal is to let people experiment. If it doesn’t work or turns out not to be a playformance, that’s fine—it’s only ten minutes in an evening event. If it works really well, we often invite them to develop a longer version or refine it further. When we feel a performance—or a performer—needs to be pushed further, we propose working together more closely. And because we present playformances in different places, at least in France, we try to find a way to include them in a future lineup. That’s basically how we work at the moment.
An open mic session of Playformance, Photo from Simon Bachelier
R: And here we move into the second part of the interview, which is a completely different topic. Since you’re also an experienced producer in the game industry, how do you maintain the balance between being a commercial producer and being an artistic event curator?
S: I think the bridge between the two activities requires more or less the same type of skills. It’s about organizing, planning, budgeting, etc. So, both are fed by the same skill set. But in terms of the actual activities, they’re really not the same. Being a producer in a commercial context isn’t directly related to what I do in events. I can work on games that are not the same genre, not the same teams, not the same people I collaborate with when I curate or organize events. It’s really a different field. Of course, the connection is that they’re all video games, but it’s like saying you work in music: producing music is not the same as organizing a live show, and it’s similar here.
I often say in French that I have a day job and a night job. The day job is being a producer or a publisher—which is very commercially focused. Business is important because if you don’t make enough money, you can’t pay the team, you can’t run a studio, you can’t sustain anything. It’s very commercial-driven. When I do event organization, curating, or performance-related work, it’s much more experimental and artistic. Most of the time it’s not really commercial, and because it’s experimental, there’s no real business-model sustainability. I’d love to live from it, but it doesn’t generate enough money, and it’s not a field that can easily be driven by money.
That’s the main difference. But I'm not saying I'm doing my job and then I'm doing what I love on the side. I really enjoy both. One is clearly a commercial job, and the other is more about experimenting and researching. They’re quite complementary. They fit together, but there’s no direct connection. For example, when I produce a strategy game for Firesquid, it’s completely different from working on the next Playformance lineup in Berlin or somewhere else. The teams are different, the expectations are different, and the scope is very distinct. So yeah—same skills, very different ways of applying them.
R: So what is the same skillset that these two professions share?
S: Managing people, defining things, and making sure communication is clear as well, especially around expectations. When you create a game, you need to make sure that what you describe on the store page, or to the players, actually matches what’s in the game, so everyone knows what you’re going to deliver. I think it’s the same when you sell a performance or an exhibition to a museum or a theater. You need to make sure they really understand what it is. Otherwise, when you deliver things different to their expectation, it becomes a problem.
So clear communication is needed all the way through—and it’s the same for the team working on the project. Whether you’re producing an event, an exhibition, or anything else, communication has to be on point, and you need to adapt when necessary.
R: Can you give us a brief introduction to Firesquid, including your publishing focus?
S: Yeah. Firesquid is an independent game publisher based in Sweden, but the team is fully remote. We focus mainly on strategy games that try to revisit their genre. We really like games that aim to be innovative—not just reproducing classic strategy formulas, but opening up new interactions or new rules. We often say that we’re developer-focused, because everyone on the team comes from a game development background, so we have the developers’ eyes. That’s also why we have very regular meetings with the teams we publish—to see how things are going and to offer support.
If there’s anything we can do at any stage of development to help developers succeed or reach what they want to achieve, we try to provide it. It’s not just about funding, QA, or localization. We try to support them in any way we can—either through our internal studio or by connecting them with other experts when needed.
Firesquid's website
R: Firesquid has publishing services, but at the same time also produces its own games. Do you work closely with the development teams outside of your company?
S: No—except for the games developed internally in our studio. For those, I do a bit of line producing. But in general, each external studio manages its own production. I mostly monitor things to make sure everything is going well, which is more the typical collaboration between a publisher and a studio. For the studios we sign, we don’t directly handle production for them. I can step in if they really need support, but that’s more the exception than the rule.
R: From my understanding, if you produce for other studios, it sounds a bit like a curator’s job—because every time you collaborate with different artists, it’s harder to estimate or control the quality.
S: Yeah, you’re totally right about that. Basically, we are not hands-on with production. I’m not going to tell them how to make their game. What we do instead is provide feedback and make sure things are on track. With every project we sign, we have weekly meetings. I talk with the team to see how things are going—if there are any issues, whether we need more time, if something needs to be adapted, or if we should do a playtest.
So I have a very clear overview of the project through regular production updates. At the same time, I’m not here to control or manage how they produce the game. I’m not the studio’s producer. But as a publisher, I do need to make sure the vision is respected, that we’re following what we agreed on, and that if something changes, we talk about it—because you can’t just do anything you want without discussing it with your partner or collaborator. We are a partner as a publisher.
R: Do you have a genre preference when signing a game?
S: I think we are mainly focused on the strategy genre, but we don’t limit ourselves to one specific subgenre. We don’t say, “We only do city builders” or “only real-time strategy.” We’re quite open and broad at the moment. That’s why we have an RTS, we have real-time tactics like XenoPurge. We try to work with different games. For 2026, we do have a more specific focus. Most of the games we’re working on for 2026 are turn-based tactics, but that doesn’t mean we’ll only do that going forward.
The three games we’ve announced so far are all turn-based and also a bit dark and mature. We have Vultures: Scavengers of Death, which is a roguelite turn-based tactics game. We have Prelude: Dark Pain, which is kind of a mix between Darkest Dungeon and Fire Emblem or Final Fantasy Tactics. And then Ex Sanguis, which is our internal studio project—a hardcore turn-based tactical RPG as well.
But if someone comes up with a cool RTS game, we could be interested. If it’s a deck-building game, we might be interested too. In the end, what we really look at is: does the game bring something new? Is it experimenting with the genre in some way? And if yes, is it something we can help with—in terms of production and also in terms of reaching the right audience?
R: As someone standing at the intersection of these two domains, do you feel they can actually encourage or inspire each other? Do you benefit from moving between the two?
S: It’s not obvious, because once again, the objectives are not the same, and the audience is not the same either. Producing or publishing games is very different from organizing events. For example, if I had to organize an event or something special for our studio or publishing branch, it would be easy—I’ve done it in the past and it usually works well. But the other way around is less obvious. The good thing is that having a strong network of studios and publishers can help you get support—maybe time, maybe funding, maybe logistical help—for an event. But that connection is very business-oriented. I’m not sure it’s the most interesting one in terms of exploration, experimentation, or even creative health.
It’s not an easy question, because in theory they could be connected, but in practice they don’t connect that easily. As I said, they are complementary for me as an individual, but I’m not sure one really benefits the other directly. I don’t know—does Sous le Néon get something from Firesquid, or does Firesquid get something from Sous le Néon? I don’t really think so, except through the connections that people involved in both could have, but that’s it.
R: Thinking about the games you've produced, do you think any of them could be turned into a playformance?
S: Yeah, probably. I don’t think there’s any real limitation. Some games are definitely easier to showcase on stage than others, but I’m pretty sure any of the games we’ve worked on could be used for a performance in some way.
The thing is that strategy games are often very interface-heavy, and they’re not always the most readable. When you have a broad audience—sometimes people who aren’t even used to games—they need to understand what’s happening on screen. If you’re showing something very complex, with lots of information everywhere, it can still work, but it requires more from the performer. You have to guide the audience’s eyes and help them understand what actually matters.
Take the Darkest Dungeon II performance, for instance. You can see the characters and what’s going on visually, but if you want to fully understand all the numbers, skills, and systems, that’s almost impossible unless you’ve played the game for hundreds or thousands of hours. As a performer, though, you can make it more accessible by explaining, commenting, and narrating what you’re doing—and that really helps. I’m quite confident that some of the games I’ve produced or published could work as playformances. Will it actually happen? I don’t know. But it’s definitely possible.
R: Do you give advice to artists who perform a Playformance? Even when they already have a concept or a script, it can be difficult to translate an idea into an actual Playformance. As a producer-type curator, do you sometimes step in with guidance?
S: Yeah. I think something that feels quite obvious—and we both know this from game development—is: don’t be afraid to perform it in front of a friend, a family member, or anyone, really, as a first audience. A performance needs an audience to exist. Just like a game needs a player, a performance needs people watching it.
At some point, you might have an idea, a script, a game, and you know where you want to go. But you need an audience to understand how it actually feels, and to learn how to react to their feedback while you’re playing. It’s one thing to rehearse on your own. It’s something completely different to do it in front of people. All those tiny reactions—from a breath, to a laugh, to applause, to a “wow,” to a moment of silence—those emotions are things you can react to. Even when they’re subtle, you can use them to push something further: an emotion, a moment, a thought. You’re not only playing with the game anymore—you’re also playing with the audience. It’s like a kind of audience playtest, somehow.
About Simon Bachelier
Simon Bachelier is an independent curator exploring the variety of practices in digital games. One of his main focus in his exhibition work has been to experiment about the spaces between the players and the watchers (among visitors). He has also been experimenting around the link between Theater, Perfomance Arts and Digital Games since 2016 with a format he called Playformance. He has cofounded the French collective Sous les néons in 2021 gathering people from Theater and Indie Games, where they explore the connection between stage play and performing games in front of a live (and on-site) audience.
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