Dhruv Jani and Sushant Chakraborty are the founders of Studio Oleomingus. They are nominated for the 3rd Humble New Talent Award. With their games they attempt to study colonial power structures and the histories that they occlude and how interactive fiction might be used to pollute a single reductive record of the past or of a people.

A MAZE.: How would you describe yourself?
Studio Oleomingus: We are an open collaborative arts practice studio based in Chala, India. And usually run by Dhruv and Sushant. We work at the intersection of post colonial writing and interactive fiction, using video game spaces as sites of discourse, resistance and record.

A MAZE.: Are you a wild heart? If yes, what makes you think you’re a wild heart?
Studio Oleomingus: …

A MAZE.: Why did you start making games or playful media works?
Studio Oleomingus: We believe that there is a grave and urgent need for a method to record a generous and inclusive history, that can accomodate voices from those at the margins of our communities. And we believe that games are an ideal, if irreverent, medium to do so. And it is to indulge in this alternate form of storytelling and historiography that we started making games.

A MAZE.: Who (or what) is your biggest inspiration?
Studio Oleomingus: Since we work within the domain of post colonial literary fiction, most of our references and inspirations are authors and playwrights and theorists. Here are a few that have shaped our work : Sukumar Ray, Italo Calvino, Agha SahidAli, Arun Kholatkar, Girish Karnad, Jorge Luis Borges, Ranjit Guha and Manuel DeLanda.

Screenshot of In the Pause Between the Ringing

A MAZE.: Where can we find this in your work?
Studio Oleomingus: The various conceits and allusions in our stories make an overt homage to our influences. Characters from the plays of Girish Karnad walk freely into our worlds, and the stories of Borges are reenacted by people of our invention. Marco Polo's fantastical inventions in Calvino's invisible cities, become a template for Connington's record of Kayamgadh. And many other such appropriations are carefully engineered, until stories that nest with stories become concentric and our fictions become self fulfilling loops of a revivalist post-modern history of Colonial India.

A MAZE.: What message(s) are you sending out with your works?
Studio Oleomingus: There are some stories buried deep within the fissures of cast and gender, or occluded by authority that can only be told if the violence of their recollection is somehow accommodated in the method of their telling. We believe that interactive fiction and other forms of play offer such a method of recollection. A method of generous record that we are trying to evoke through our work. A hope that video games can become sites of powerful democratic discourse, and an anti-Colonial archive for places of entangled heritage.

A MAZE.: Is there a repeating pattern in all of your works the players may experience?
Studio Oleomingus: A singular conceit that repeats across all our work - is the presence of a fictitious Gujarati author called : Mir UmarHassan; from whose munificent of incomplete works, we adapt or translate into stories for our games. A conceit that we call Redacting Authorship, and one that we use to de-legitimise the historical and authorial veracity of the stories being told from within the shadow of Colonial rule.

A MAZE.: What influences your work more: Past (history), present (contemporary) or future (scifi) and what are your sources?
Studio Oleomingus: While our work responds to the past and exists entirely within concerns of how we remember our various histories, it also seeks to recollect these narratives from a gaping void left behind by centuries of Colonial rule. And speculating within this void using linguistic leaps we inevitably dabble in Magical Realist fiction of what history we ought to recall. A speculative political historiography that just as often addresses contemporary hurt as it ponders historical erasure.

A MAZE.: What does responsibility towards your players mean to you as an artist?
Studio Oleomingus: With each game we enter into a negotiation with our players, a common pact if you will, that for the duration of the game we will together seek myriad and uncomfortable truths about difficult histories, within the ambit of rules commonly agreed upon at the start. It is a compact that we take very seriously.

A MAZE.: What impact is the current pandemic having on you and your work?
Studio Oleomingus: A lot of our stories are attempts to ponder the various structures of authority, and how they shape our collective memories.The impact of a terrifying event like this Pandemic provides a violent but crucial window into just such power hierarchies as governments strain to impose curfews and support failing communities, and people animated by fear indulge in the irrational - and a normal way of existence is placed under severe scrutiny. We see this pandemic, then as a chance to ponder and perhaps correct long standing historic wrongs in how our societies are built. A way to ponder the relationships between bodies, distance, privilege, communities and pathogens.

A MAZE.: If there is something wrong in the field of games / playful media, what would you fix first?
Studio Oleomingus: Of the many dubious practices that abound the world of games, a rampant appropriation of cultural artifacts - is perhaps the most toxic. Games, especially those laden with expansionist or heroic narrative arcs are very comfortable looting, icons and histories, places and people and myths from cultures completely alien to the creators. And in the process perpetuating decadent colonial narratives of an exotified orient and its many indolent wonders - places or people that then inevitably end up being occupied or civilised - often by a player in the guise of a savior. It is this rampant appropriation that we would fix, perhaps in the process opening up room for a variety of plural and radically different voices.

A MAZE.: What are the three games someone who never played a game before should play? Why those?
Studio Oleomingus: 80 Days, Carcassonne & Passage.

A MAZE.: How do you relax and find balance?
Studio Oleomingus: …

A MAZE.: What are the main challenges for artists in your country to sustain themselves?
Studio Oleomingus: Funding is a perennial challenge in a country with meager support for the arts and even less for radical mediums like the interactive arts and video games. Without a dedicated community of people who engage with games as viable cultural artifacts and are willing to curate, write or respond to various games as a coherent medium - it is difficult to convince people of the inherent value of games as a singular method of art. Most support for our work, and work akin to ours comes from a handful of generous arts practice and grant giving organisations - but generous though their contribution is, funding and support for games has to exponentially increase to attract serious voices from the various fissures of our society that can best exploit the irreverence of the medium to challenge established narratives and mores - and perhaps turn games in a serious medium of political authorship and discourse, at a time when there is severe governmental redaction of dissent in other mediums.

A MAZE.: How do you see interactive arts in 10 years from now? In 2030! Tell us your vision.
Studio Oleomingus: The inherent volatility of our times makes fools of those who dare predict, but if we were to venture a guess, we would say interactive arts will be made redundant in a decade by a dissolution of what we consider interactivity into the normal forms of existence. The ritual of starting a game, attending an exhibit, logging into a device, shifting from our temporal reality into a virtual domain will cease to be a dramatic act and will simply become the norm as we slip into and out of game worlds as part of our regular lives.

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Dhruv Jani and Sushant Chakraborty