Grain Of Truth
The way we consume stories has changed – now, the process of telling them must follow suit. With his new game, Her Story’s creator is leading a revolution
With his new game Telling Lies, the creator of Her Story leads a storytelling revolution
Sam Barlow is honest to a fault. Talking with him about his work, in fact, is eerily like playing one of his games. We watch him on our screen, speaking into his webcam: he recounts the design pillars he set out for Her Story, then rewinds to his time on Silent Hill:
Shattered Memories and the cancelled Legacy Of Kain, before freeassociating rapidly between Basic Instinct and Hitchcock and social media and Breath Of The Wild and a 107-minute art film of David Beckham sleeping – and his new game, Telling Lies. It is exhausting but exhilarating to watch his mind work to explain itself. Wide-ranging, non-linear, full of seemingly disparate parts that only make sense when taken together, his story – of how he accidentally placed himself at the front of a new era of interactive film games, the evolution of his work and what he hopes it could contribute to the future of videogame storytelling – is nothing less than perfectly authentic.
Naturally, then, it starts with Barlow’s admission that he had absolutely no idea what he was getting himself into with Her Story. His breakout hit was a detective game that tasked its player with searching a database of interview footage for audiovisual and linguistic clues, and shuffling information in their head in order to solve a murder. It is all shot with real footage of a human actor – otherwise known as a fullmotion videogame. But fresh out of the triple-A space, he didn’t begin his first independent project with the intention of redefining a niche and much-derided genre. He just wanted to make a good detective game. “I pitched this so many times to publishers, and they’d always said no,” he says. “And I felt strongly that the evidence pointed to this being a successful space in every other medium.” He’d enjoyed Infocom’s detective games, and the Phoenix Wright series: “I love the fact that
Phoenix Wright allowed you sometimes to feel like you had made a deduction, or thought outside the box, like maybe one in ten times.” And he had spent enough time acquiescing to publishers’ demands. Konami, for example, had insisted on a “modern innovation” in Silent
Hill: Origins, whereas Barlow and team simply wanted to fix the mess
they had inherited into something resembling a traditional
Silent Hill game. (“Probably the greatest achievement of my life was that team turning that into a mediocre game from what we started with,” he jokes.)
Six months followed in which he set out the four design pillars of Her Story that he hoped would lead to “a structure or gimmick, in the best sense of the word gimmick – that’s the thing that gives me the confidence to get excited about it.” It would be a game about subtext, the kind of story that trusted a player’s intelligence in a way that scared most triple-A publishers; it would be a game that had no 3D exploration, the immersive quality of which Barlow believed was “a prop we all leant on”. The game would also respect the player’s imagination, its ability to fill in the blanks and thus make players feel more involved in a story. “And then the other one was that the player is not the protagonist, which was actually a Post-It note I had – spoilers! – when we made Shattered Memories. I really wanted to explore this assumption that this blank-slate character is you and allows you to express yourself. Often you are the least interesting character.”
Full-motion video was not a conscious part of the plan; Barlow’s research led him to using real footage. He pored over the details of interrogation techniques, academic studies into approaches to homicide investigations, and began watching YouTube footage of real interrogations. “I spent a whole week just watching all of the interviews with Jodi Arias, where they left the cameras rolling and she would be left in the room on her own and would start doing interesting things,” he says. “I enjoyed this combination of how voyeuristic it was, how intimate it was; the fact that you were essentially sat listening to someone tell you their life story up until this point.” He’d enjoyed working with actors to tell a story on past projects, too. “But I wasn’t going to have like, $2 million of mocap budget. So I was like, ‘Ugh, how do I do this?’ And I didn’t want to make a thirdperson exploration game with diaries. I didn’t want to come up with some clever art style that meant I could get away with the fact that I didn’t have people. So when this idea popped into my head, I was like, ‘Oh, this is great, because I get to work with actors and suddenly I get the world’s best hair physics’.” Suddenly, he was making an FMV game.
Not that he’d noticed. “In my head I was making this very weird, specific thing that appealed to me. The fact I was using video, it really came out of that process of me going, this makes complete sense. I’ve looked at all this police footage.” It was only when he showed the finished game at a trade show shortly before release that a journalist pointed out the generic elephant in the room. “They were like, ‘What made you want to tackle the FMV genre?’ And I was like ‘Oh, I guess this is…’ And it became a good thing because most of the early takes on Her Story were like, ‘Hey, it’s an FMV game but it’s not crap’,” he laughs. “Which is, I guess, better than going up against a hundred other really good pixel Roguelikes. But after that, I had to quickly go away and fill myself with knowledge about the genre so I had something interesting to say.” It’s almost too perfect: staunchly non-linear storyteller Barlow, having already created perhaps the most sophisticated FMV game ever, would now have to go back and learn his history.
Barlow was stunned by the genre’s propensity to embrace the kinds of styles, characters and stories that games would usually steer clear of: legal dramas, erotic thrillers, bizarre horror. “There was definitely something cool about seeing that, at that point in history, bringing video in had brought in characters who were more like characters you’d see in other stories – partly through bringing in different creatives, and partly through just saying ‘We can now have human beings on screen’. They don’t have space helmets or ninja masks covering their mouths, they don’t have to constantly be fighting so we don’t have to justify that they’re a warrior of some sort. It was cool seeing that that had already kind of happened, and we just hadn’t necessarily worked it out.”
For Barlow, the most successful FMV games were the ones that acknowledged that the player was watching video. He admired Voyeur, in which you surveil a politician from an apartment building across the street because it “was kind of Rear Window-y, but it was very cheesy”; Night
Trap less so, with its health bar and game overs. “You get into the repetition being a problem – it stops being interesting. And that was one of the big advantages of the idea of Her Story, that the repetition was built in as a fun part of it. If you were watching clips and the context had changed, that was interesting.” Erotic thriller Tender Loving
Care, meanwhile, had a surprising amount in common with Barlow’s past work, starring John Hurt as a psychiatrist helping a couple deal with the loss of their child – even offering the player multiple-choice therapy questions.
This was the kind of experimental narrative space into which Barlow had unknowingly dipped a toe with Shattered
Memories – which, incidentally, was intended as a kind of homage to immersive sims such as System Shock, Thief and
Deus Ex). “There was a point where if you’d asked me, ‘What is the future of videogames?’, I’d have said this,” Barlow says. “It’s you, and it’s fully simulated, and emergent.” The aim with Shattered Memories was to “take the artifice out”, forgoing menu screens in favour of interactions via the phone and eschewing traditional controls for the intuitive motions of the Wiimote. Even the subtle machinations at work in the background of the
“IF YOU’D ASKED ME ‘WHAT IS THE FUTURE OF VIDEOGAMES?’ I’D HAVE SAID THIS . IT’S YOU, IT’S FULLY SIMULATED, AND EMERGENT”
game – its analysis of where a player would point their camera view, their answers to a psychiatrist’s questions or their interactions with the world, and warping the game to reflect them – were instrumental in creating a horror story that developed a kind of relationship with the player, one that felt uncannily real.
This kind of raw, honest relationship between a player and an interactive narrative is valuable to Barlow’s preferred brand of storytelling, something he’s been chasing throughout his career. But nowhere was the means of building one more simple and obvious than with Her Story’s FMV component and its reception. “The thing that was exciting was seeing how much it broadens the audience,” Barlow says. “The game got coverage in publications that wouldn’t normally talk about games – we’d get like, doublepage spreads in French newspapers. And I realised a lot of that was partly the genre – like, people understood what the story was. They would turn the page and you’d have a big picture of Viva [Seifert] in a police interview room, and they would get what they were looking at. Whereas you can take something that they might be interested in, like, Gone
Home, and what are you going to put as that visual? It’s going to be a CGI house, right? This sort of bypassed that.”
The power of video to reach a new audience for games, to help bridge the communication gap that has widened between interactive and non-interactive media, is just one of the reasons why Barlow has felt compelled to continue working in this space for his new game, Telling Lies. For him, it’s about creating a more meaningful link between player and medium – something which video is uniquely placed to do. “The reason why it doesn’t feel like I’m just making a sequel is that I did the thing I wanted to do [in Her
Story], which was to take all of the fidelity of exploration you would get in a normal videogame, and apply that to the story – but in some way, apply it to the video itself,” Barlow says. “In Telling Lies, the big difference is the relationship you have with the video.”
Barlow has been describing his new game as a political thriller: in truth, it’s more intimate than the label might suggest, a story about online relationships, personal secrets and modern communication. And again, the core premise of the story suits Barlow’s database-searching mechanic and real video footage: you’re combing through an NSA-style organisation’s collection of remotely captured digital conversations, including webcam footage and Skype calls, between four main characters. “It’s very much a story that’s interested in, what does that do to our relationships?” Barlow says. “And it’s a premise which really leans into this idea of empowering the imagination, because I don’t contrive reasons to have these people speak on camera. The only bits of the story you see are the bits where people are talking to each other on a camera, which gives you that kind of Shakespeare thing of like, people rushing on stage: ‘Oh, my God, the battle over there is intense, dude!’ You’re seeing these little snapshots through these people’s lives and relationships, and then filling in the blanks.”
For Barlow, it’s essential to put the player into that experience mechanically, too. He found himself surprised by just how intimate players had found the experience of entering search terms in Her Story, and the non-linear progression of a kind of conversation with the main character. “People felt like, by thinking of things, searching them and pulling up clips, they were almost having a more real conversation than a fake videogame conversation.”
Telling Lies aims to preserve this feeling, although from a different, perhaps more voyeuristic perspective. “When you search for a word, you will get dropped into a much longer video clip at the point where the word is spoken,” Barlow explains. “So at the very start, there is a prompt where the word ‘love’ is suggested as a search term. And a bunch of clips come up, and you’re dropped into the very end of a conversation in which someone says, ‘Love you’, and then hangs up. And now you can scrub backwards.” The analogue scrubbing is a crucial part of the experience of
Telling Lies, allowing players to seek forward and backward with degrees of speed and control. “It’s very tactile. So you have entire scenes and you’re immediately inferring context – there’s a mood at the point where you’re dropped into the scene – and it might be that you now scrub and actually watch the scene backwards, see the subtitles flash up.” Brit Perv film director Nicolas Roeg was a key inspiration for Barlow as he began to feel out the intricacies of his new game: he recalls an anecdote of Roeg being transfixed watching video footage playing backwards, and Roeg’s referencing of it in a scene of a buffalo coming back to life through rewound film in Walkabout. “All of Roeg’s best movies are full of this very free-associative combination of images and timelines – the sex scene in Don’t Look Now jumps between them getting dressed after they’ve had sex, and then they go to dinner with the actual lovemaking. And that was interesting. Like, how do I use film to communicate something about how we experience and remember things? And that’s a big part, for me, of Telling Lies.”
The nonlinearity with which the game’s series of relationships unfolds under the guidance of the player is a route into a more intriguing, and hopefully realistic, narrative. “If you try and recall a past relationship, you’re not remembering it as a fully linear story, right? You’re remembering the painful breakup moment. But you’re also remembering the happy time you sailed in a gondola in Venice, and it’s all part of the same experience, and you
“YOU’RE SEEING LITTLE SNAPSHOTS THROUGH THESE PEOPLE’S LIVES AND RELATIONSHIPS, AND THEN F ILL ING IN THE BLANKS”
have this kind of whole take on it. You have these moments that are very different and disparate, and they all exist as part of that.” And with multiple perspectives comes more room for the kind of interpretative, beyond-game mechanical player interactions: filling blanks in one’s head, making leaps of logic, scribbling notes. “In Telling Lies, oftentimes, you’re seeing a conversation between multiple people. And at any given point, you can only see one side of the conversation. So you are inferring the gaps – you get to just watch the wife’s face while she’s listening to what the husband is saying. And now all those rhetorical bits of speech that clue you into what someone has just said are firing your imagination. So you get these different POVs on things, and you have all the fun of having to figure out who are they talking to, inferring what they’re talking about, and how it relates to the larger story.”
Barlow’s own view as to the future of videogames, then, has evolved. Once, the 3D spaces of immersive sims seemed to him the best arena in which to set a story. Now, it’s the liminal spaces of narrative that Barlow wishes to explore. “Without bigging up this game too much,” he laughs, “the only game I played whilst developing it where I’m like, ‘Oh, they get it; this is what I’m trying to do’ was Breath Of The
Wild.” Barlow was not a fan of open-world games before the latest Zelda: “Open-world games are, I think, the biggest exploiter of the enjoyment of screwing around in a 3D world. But I really feel like Zelda, just in how generous it is with players but also it isn’t… It’s so much more about rewarding your curiosity. It understands that you’re not just wandering around in a big sandbox, you’re kind of enjoying landscape.” A world composed of hills to crest, copses to explore, paths to walk – the atmosphere of anticipation and possibility was what Barlow was interested in. “In Zelda there’s always more places I want to go to than I have been,” he says. “But I think the fundamental thing was that the journey – this is the cliché – is actually as much fun or more fun than the destination.”
This was what Barlow would focus on, above all else. “And it came from making Her Story as well, because the act of making a big ambitious video project, there’s a POV you have on it – you’re editing, and you’re surrounded by all this footage, jumping around it. You’re really enjoying, in a very fine grain, the pleasure of filmed performance and looking at video in a way that you can’t when you’re watching a finished movie going past at 24 frames per second. That’s an experience I want to communicate – to put an audience in that same position where they have this relationship to the text.” And a large part of that – in the same way as Breath Of The
Wild might have you walk for five minutes, or wait for the rain to pass – is about space, and time. Boredom, even. “And that is a texture that doesn’t exist generally in movies at all,” Barlow says. He was struck by Sam Taylor-Johnson’s 107-minute art film of David Beckham asleep in a Madrid hotel room. “I mean, it’s David Beckham, forget that it’s David Beckham. But here is this man sleeping, and so nothing is happening. But at the same time, to be there watching him is a really weird thing. It forces you to pay more attention to what’s happening because nothing’s happening. And the whole texture of that was fascinating.” As was 24 Hour Psycho, Hitchcock’s movie slowed to the exact length of a day:
“THE REASON THAT HER STORY’S FORMAT IS ST ILL SO INTEREST I NG IS THAT IT’S HOW WE EXTRACT INFORMAT I ON FROM THE WORLD”
“People would bring sleeping bags and sit and watch. It forced you to absorb it in a way that was very different.”
This unabashed air of anti-cinema is something which permeates Telling Lies, and that Barlow hopes will work in a similar way to Breath Of The Wild, with players able to set their own pace: letting things unspool naturally, or scrubbing through efficiently, clicking and chasing words and clues at the speed at which their brain is whirring. With eight times as much footage as Her Story, there’ll certainly be enough to do so. “In terms of the ‘difficult second album’ thing, I’m sure there are some people that will go ‘ Her Story was very pure and focused – this is bigger…’ But Roeg and Ken Russell, they made movies that weren’t always perfect: they were often a bit messy, but full of colour, life and texture.”
Her Story, he says, wrestled with the storytelling methods of BioShock and Silent Hill; Telling Lies “definitely feels like pushing in a more open world-y direction, in terms of the pacing, the amount of time you spend in the game and the amount of content.” The ‘completion chart’ of clips is gone, Barlow keen to encourage players not to be obsessive in the way that one might comb every road looking for inevitable items in, say, an open-world RPG. “I really wanted to be like, if you have ten things you’re thinking of jumping to next, go do those! Which, again, is something that I felt with Zelda. I just let myself be led by my nose.”
It’s a level of trust that the player is capable of directing a narrative, essentially, that imbues the best modern games with something more vital. And creating a kind of familiarity – through video footage, through communication through technology, through the mechanical intrigue of freeassociation – could be a way of imparting it. Indeed, Barlow believes it may even be the simpler choice, now that our own relationship with stories has changed. “I think the idea of telling a story by curating 90 minutes and leading you beat by beat through it is harder to do,” he says. “I think the reason that Her Story’s format is still so interesting to me is that it’s how we extract information from the world. I’ll have 20 tabs open on the internet, I’ll see something trending on Twitter, and then go and read three or four articles about it. I’ll read tweets – I can’t even avoid reading contrary tweets now because they’re forced into my timeline, so I have to be aware that some people think this stupid thing. Watching my kids watching people make YouTube videos about someone else streaming a videogame and it’s not even about the game. There are so many layers and everything is so nonlinear, free-associative and so subjective. We could all see the same tweet about something that’s happened, and based on where we click and how we proceed, and even our baked-in algorithm bullshit, get to a completely different endpoint, or perspective. And so it feels interesting to take a story and tell it in a format that is aware of how we see things now.”
And in Barlow’s estimation, real video footage has morphed from gimmicky, cheesy technological experiment to one of the most valuable tools when telling stories in today’s climate. “It feels like we’re in this interesting transitional space where all of the big entertainment companies know that this thing is going to happen,” he says. “They’re all terrified that they’re losing eyeballs to social media, and
Fortnite, and stuff that is not watching stories. So they’re all like, ‘Hey, we want to do something like this.’ But I don’t know what it is. No one knows what it is yet.” He is sceptical of the idea of honing his own forays into the interactive video space into something that’s a defined format or genre, “but the fact that we get so much entertainment through our devices feels like there’s a whole world of possibilities there, of which ‘ choose your own adventure’ stuff is one reasonably narrow avenue.” He voices a worry that Black Mirror’s interactive Netflix film Bandersnatch might become too definitive of this burgeoning genre; an admiration for Quibi, a forthcoming mobile-first service that breaks down long-form storytelling into tiny chunks. “You can sit and play it for two or three hours in a way that feels more immersive than if you had sat and watched a two-hour movie or episode of TV whilst checking your social media. So yeah, everyone’s head is in the same space, and we’re just trying to figure it out.”
The ability for live action to communicate emotion and character, he feels, “is a gift. It allows you to put people in those worlds, have them feel for these characters. And I think there’s so much that hasn’t been done – the fact that we now live in a streaming world, with the ability to just capture and edit video. It feels like that is a bar that is lowered to doing interesting things in this space. You look at what Emily Short’s doing, you look at what Inkle’s doing, at the way dialogue works in Oxenfree – these far more nuanced, organic experiences that are 20 years on from the classic ‘choose your own adventure’, turn-topage-23 stuff. I would love to see those people and that kind of thinking move over into this world and start playing with live action, rather than the live-action world having to catch up on those 20 years.”
Indeed, if anything, Barlow is concerned that Telling Lies, and its purposefully bare-faced depiction through full motion video of how modern communication works, might hew too closely to the contemporary bone. “The hardest thing has probably been the subject matter of this game, which has become very relevant over the last few years,” he says. “And just making sure that – because everything changes so quickly – your story is truthful enough. That it has enough authenticity in it.”