FibreTigre, from random nickname to architect storyteller

FibreTigre comes out of a large glazed hall of a building in the 20th arrondissement of Paris, a discreet smile on her lips and two piercing and benevolent eyes. Graying beard, square glasses, one hand in the pocket of his beige pants, the other reaches out for a “check”. ” This is the current studio of Game Of Roles “, he explains quickly, pointing to a closed green door, before climbing a staircase to the first floor and entering a new room.

Many computer screens are on. The towers purr discreetly, to the rhythm of the video editing. Here sofas, there a large library which houses the figurines of the great pop-culture licenses. This is where the employees of Gozulting, a company that produces esports events and the Twitch streaming platform, work. Among the projects filmed by the company, Game Of Rolesthe most followed role-playing game in France, created, scripted and animated by FibreTigre, as game master.

The storyteller sits at a large meeting table on which sits a Lego replica of a Star Destroyer ship from Star Wars. FibreTigre is there to talk about his story but, modest, he will spend more time telling his stories, those that allow him to live. His first and last name, he will not communicate them.

From building engineer to historical engineer

At the turn of the millennium, FibreTigre was a thousand miles from its current activities. ” I did a building engineering school. It was my grandfather’s field of study, it’s really not more complicated than that. It gave me a taste for maths and then I did a job in offices, a classic thing, not very interesting “, he remembers. At the time, he already loved science fiction, spent a little time on his Xbox, the Windows console… don’t look for a complex origin to his nickname, warns the screenwriter: ” FibreTigre, at the base, it was a nickname randomly chosen by my Xbox video game console because I had to create one. As you needed friends to play online, I posted funny little stories on the forums by signing FibreTigre and in fact it worked very well. The nickname took off and today, it’s a company that turns. »

In parallel with its first work, FibreTigre develops interactive fiction, on the internet or in experimental board games. ” I think I was the first author in France and then there were four or five of us for ten years. Today, it’s a pretty interesting school, it’s a bit like experimental cinema compared to video games and suddenly, it gives me a good vision, a sense of the game », Details the storyteller. Far from being limited to role-playing games, interactive fiction includes any story in which the viewer can influence the very course of the story. It can therefore be a video game, an application, a website, in multiple formats.

For FibreTigre, it was in 2011 that things accelerated, he multiplied small projects then co-created the video game out there, launched in 2014 on smartphones. The principle ? Drawings, a story in space and choices to be made in order to progress. The intelligence of the game makes it a critical and public success, so much so that it will have sequels and a publication as a gamebook.

The next major step will be Game Of Roles in 2017. This role-playing game is filmed and broadcast on the Twitch streaming platform: FibreTigre plays the role of screenwriter and game master, who tells the story to the players and presents them with choices to make while improvising; it definitely imposes the character in the environment. ” Unfortunately, it’s a project that works well, today there are 20 people just for the show. I say ‘unfortunately’, I’m very happy with it, but I have other projects on which I invested almost as much time and which don’t work as well “, he laughs. Game Of Roles attracts up to 20,000 spectators simultaneously.

Project bulimia

Today, his profession, which is quite rare, has found a name: FibreTigre is defined as ” narrative designer », a narrative designer. ” It can be, for example, to design dialogues or a story structure. With new interactive environments, video games in particular, the articulation of interactivity, how we are going to present choices; this kind of architectural style, it’s called narrative construction “.

In the morning, FibreTigre takes a shower, walks four meters, sits at his desk and works, directly. He reduced the necessary number of meetings as much as possible, to save time. And time, he needs it. ” In a day, I will have five projects at the same time and when I change projects, it gives me a rest from the previous one. I also do projects for fun, I do a bit of everything and especially what I like. » Productions by the shovel. Let us mention in particular Antioch : Scarlet Baya police investigation of the same type asout thereor two life-size games, collaborations with Le Figarothe League for the Protection of Birds (LPO) or even France Info.

To inspire and educate

Besides all this, FibreTigre reads and plays a lot to find sources of inspiration. The last book that marked him? ” The Grand Prix de L’imaginaire 2022, which is called “Our share of the night” by Mariana Enríquez, there is a fundamental concept at the heart of this book which is super simple and totally surprising -and I love it when it’s very simple-, but it’s an idea that you never had one that completely immerses you in the story. »

FibreTigre pecks left and right, but avoids spending too much time on time-consuming video games. Same thing for the series, of which he often watches the first and the last episode, to understand the narrative structure of the story and to enrich himself: ” It’s important to have a good cultural diet, that is to say that I don’t chain myself to ten series a month. I watch movies or play quite a variety of video games but I don’t play 2000 hours. In fact, I don’t have too many hobbies, I don’t play sports… my job being a creative job, I don’t need much on the side. »

The work itself enriches him, when he writes stories anchored in the real world for example. as his project The Beautiful Walk, which works with your step counter to make every meter you walk in the real world feel like you’re walking around the world. For every twenty kilometers you run, you are entitled to a story related to where you are in the game. You are in Vincennes or Munich, it’s quite simple, but when you arrive in other places… I became quite knowledgeable about certain small villages in Iran, where I had to study and invent a story around ! “explains the storyteller.

A titanic work: in ten years, he has composed more than 800 stories to travel half the world. So he still has ten more years, and as many stories to develop in real places. Even in writing fiction, he has fun inserting references, like names of Sumerian gods, names of famous people, to encourage players to find the hidden references.

However, this exceptional production of narrative fiction is not widely recognized in France. The very French vision of a legitimate and illegitimate culture slows down the progress of the sector. ” Basically, when you’re a writer, you write books at Gallimard, if you’re a little less good, you’ll go to a less prestigious publishing house, if you’re (still) a little less good, you’ll be a journalist, if you’re a little less good, you’ll do web journalism, if you’re a little less good, you’ll be an editor in a startup, and if you’re really bad, no one wants you, you can work in video games, there is no problem (…) me, I don’t really have any talent », caricature FibreTigre, half fig, half grape. We allow ourselves to doubt it.

► Read also : Pierre Henriquet alias “@astropierre”, science super-popularizer