Unreliable Narrator

Introducing our new columnist, Her Story creator Sam Barlow

Hello! I’m Sam. I make videogames, most recently the literal videogames Her Story and Telling Lies. With the latter I showed terrible foresight by committing to a game name that would later become one of the more excruciating memes of the 21st century. No, papa.

For this first column I thought I’d take on the persona of True Detective’s Rust Cohle, and observe that time is a flat circle. It’s often assumed that game stories are on a curve that arcs ever upwards, their complexity increasing along with CPU power. But such a graph excludes many forgotten attempts to do bold things with our medium. As an illustration, and a fun get-to-know-you icebreaker, let’s kick off this column with a brief tour of attempts to push the envelope for interactive stories by embracing the literary, back in the 1980s – that magical era in which Martin Amis wrote a book about Space Invaders.

First stop is Mindwheel, a 1984 curio from future US poet laureate Robert Pinsky and developer Synapse. Dubbed an ‘electronic novel,’ like many attempts to fuse literary ambition with games it leans into dreamlike scenarios. But coming from the mind of a poet, it works for the most part. Prefiguring Double Fine’s Psychonauts by 20 years, the premise is that you are – via a technogubbin courtesy of a Dr Virgil – exploring the minds of four dead individuals: a rock star, a poet, a dictator and a scientist. You progress by filling in the missing words of thematic sonnets, and the sights and sounds are memorable (horny insects, destitute baseball players). I have a soft spot for Synapse’s ambitious text games; of all the forgotten text games, perhaps the most forgotten.

From there we move to 1986’s Amnesia, not to be confused with the more famous game about running from nameless horrors. Electronic Arts released this text adventure, written by author Thomas M Disch, that foregrounds the ultimate videogame cliché, the amnesiac protagonist – here waking naked in a hotel. Its oil-and-water design awkwardly combines a fully mapped-out digital version of Manhattan and punishing hunger and stamina gameplay with nuggets of Disch’s story. The latter is full of heady noir-ish turns and concepts still unexplored in mainstream videogames (marriage; male nudity; pharmaceutical conspiracies in Texas).

Next is A Mind Forever Voyaging, released in 1985. Another ‘open-world’ urban simulator, Infocom and Steve Meretzky’s game is one of the greats. It has a frame story that lampshades its time-travelling simulation as an in-fiction simulation (hi, Assassin’s Creed!) and is an example of a game engaging with contemporary politics, directly critiquing Reagan’s policies. Focused on the impact of a government plan on a simulated future Rockville, USA, your goals are completed by walking the open town and recording (with simulated eyes!) activities and events. This leads to a wonderful twist halfway through when the player realises that they can independently record and relay events to call attention to disturbing trends, a mechanic that predicts the modern citizen journalist.

On to Portal (not that one), released in 1986. (At this point you may be thinking that taking a name from a forgotten ’80s literary game is a surefire way to have a hit in later decades, and you’d be right.) From Activision and writer Rob Swigart, this is a game I dug up when making Her Story. It is a murder mystery on a planetary scale – an astronaut returns to Earth to find everybody gone. What happened? To find out you must use an antiquated database (in 1986, fictionally antiquated; in 2020, actually antiquated). The game tells a story through nuggets of text served up as you bring the database back online, helped by an AI named Homer. Like most of the ‘archaeological’ story games that would follow ( BioShock, Gone Home et al) you have the impression of discovering things out of order and in a disorderly state, but there is a gated arc that leads you towards the ultimate revelation. The game emerged from Swigart’s observation that computers could do three things: word processing, spreadsheets and databases. He felt that databases offered up the most interesting way to tell a story. This is of course a terrible idea and could never work.

It’s bracing to revisit these games and see that their characters, themes and formats still feel fresh. Let’s build on their example, and use this decade to prove their supposition that an audience exists for grown-up videogame stories. The alternative is to embrace cultural amnesia and repeat the cycle, not merely playing the old cliché but living it.

I have a soft spot for Synapse’s ambitious text games; of all the forgotten text games, perhaps the most forgotten

Sam Barlow is the founder of NYC-based Drowning A Mermaid Productions. He can be found on Twitter at @mrsambarlow