Unreliable Narrator
Exploring stories in games and the art of telling tales
Sam Barlow on telling narrative stories on mobile devices
This year has been like wading through a tsunami of sewer levels. Even so, last month a couple of events in particular left a bad taste in my mouth – if only because they underscored the tightrope walked by narrative game developers. First was the news that Apple, having corralled ‘premium’ mobile games into the family-friendly walled-gardenwithin-a-walled-garden of Apple Arcade, was turning away from (read: cancelling) selfcontained games to focus on those that hooked subscribers with maximal engagement and infinite replayability. Soon after this came word that the developer of the free-to-play narrative app Lovestruck was dumping its freelance writing staff after they organised to improve their pay and working conditions. Both of these cases highlighted that our most usefully ubiquitous and accessible videogame machine suffers under a marketplace that all but makes it impossible to tell a story.
Why do I care? I care because I love the idea of people using the devices that never leave their sides, the devices that they use to call, message and mail their friends and family, the devices that wake them up in the morning, to play narrative games. In 2007, when I worked on the unnecessary prequel Silent Hill: Origins for the PSP, the biggest question we had to answer was: could you have an atmospheric horror game on mobile? On a small screen? On the go? You could. I’d sit and play the game in bed with headphones and scare the bejeezus out of myself. I was intoxicated by playing a game like that so intimately. It was like curling up with a book. I evangelised that mobile gaming was the future. It didn’t need to be casual and disposable, it could be personal and immersive. The golden age of iPhone gaming would bear this out. I held the world in my hand and explored its endless stories in 80 Days. I crunched my way through snow and folklore in Year Walk, then explored a story whose text was its own map in Device 6. In Blackbar, I uncensored my way through an epistolary story. I thought this was the beginning of something beautiful. Perhaps I shouldn’t have laughed in 2015 when a business development executive asked why I hadn’t implemented a stamina mechanic in Her Story.
So where can we go from here? It’s easy. First, we have the world’s trendiest tech giant agree and proselytise that games are worthwhile entertainment for adults. The majority of people who buy phones are grownups, so let’s tell them stories about their lives. If Scorsese’s R-rated The Irishman and its CGI is worth $160 million of Netflix’s money, let’s see Silicon Valley get behind a narrative medium that is even more aligned with the software and hardware that underpins its empire. If its tech can bring us closer together, help us find a mate, capture our memories, improve our mental and physical health, surely it can also help us tell each other our stories? Next: Apple starts in-house game development. Just as Sony spends big bucks for the bragging rights and system-selling prestige of the Last Of Us Part II, we see the hardware manufacturer set the pace. This has always been the way – it’s the in-house teams that have broken the ground and set the quality bar whether it’s Nintendo, Sega, Xbox or PlayStation.
At this point, Apple’s reading the room and it’s time to turn off the golden faucet and take a stand against the uncapped money suck of the free-to-play economy. Games should not be everlasting gobstoppers. This is a hard one, but imagine a road-to-Damascus conversion moment that comes from someone very important thinking about what happened to the tobacco industry. During their regular morning meditation they ask, “What if we’re the bad guys?” They know they make their money from selling hardware, so do they really need to rip off their loyal customers by selling access to their wallets to hucksters? Now we hit the tipping point. The world is ready for the next step in interactive storytelling. The streaming services and generic set-top boxes are scrambling to get there, but are held back by legacy hardware and platforms. Apple though? It’s ready to deliver. It has the hardware, the software and the dev teams! It drops something new to its 1.5 billion users. A game that uses the power and nuance of touch to drive a story, interactive and dynamic in ways that melds it to every player’s heart. It connects the global community in a way we’ve never seen before. Every phone screen becomes a magical window into the soul. Humanity levels up.
Daydreaming to get through a global pandemic? Guilty as charged.
If tech can bring us closer together, help us find a mate, surely it can also help us tell each other our stories?