Unreliable Narrator
Sam Barlow investigates the evolution of detective games
Detective videogames are all the rage. But haven’t they always been? Even before video, games loved murder. Yes, Cluedo, but also curios such as occult novelist and boardgame designer Dennis Wheatley’s popular ‘dossiers’. Each dossier contained a case file and pieces of physical evidence, along with a sealed envelope holding the solution.
When videogames came along, the synergies were obvious and the subject matter stood out next to the colourful early arcade games. The box for The Vera Cruz Affair promised “the sordid underworld of detectives, pimps and prostitutes” alongside an age rating of ten years and up. Infocom’s
Suspect gave players a socialite’s costume ball, while Magnetic Scroll’s Corruption threw in insider trading, cheating spouses and cocaine.
These games resembled the Agatha Christie whodunnits that popularised the detective story – players would run and re-run their clockwork simulations to eke out an understanding of events and solve their elaborate puzzles.
Detective stories are a fascinating form. Their audience actively works to imagine unseen events, their participation more conscious than with other fiction. The format lends itself to the limitations of games. Remember BioShock? A loosely sketched protagonist with a simple drive to investigate. Rooms full of objects and bodies (‘crime scenes’). Collecting pre-recorded testimonies and combing through piles of environmental storytelling (‘evidence’). All culminating in a cutscene where the puzzle is explained.
If the Infocom detective games matched the puzzle box appeal of Christie, the ’Shocks (and their ilk, such as Gone Home) are closer to the second evolution of the detective story, the how-dunnit. Exemplified by the TV show Columbo, these stories show the audience
whodunnit first. They watch to see the detective figure it out, and enjoy the drama of the murderer’s attempt to evade justice. In these games, if we’re ahead of our protagonist in figuring things out, that’s just dramaticirony gravy. It’s less about the puzzle and more about immersion in the drama.
A more conscious take on the howdunnit is the Phoenix Wright series. Here, the villain is shown to the player, or at least deduced quickly. The game is about walking into a courtroom knowing who did it but not how, then pratfalling before the judge in order to put enough holes in an alibi. The pleasure of a howdunnit is in helping put together a perfect story. Narrative sudoku. Rolling up our brain sleeves and thinking a story into shape.
Thank you, then, to Lucas Pope for making the sudoku analogy so palpable in The Return
Of The Obra Dinn, one of the nouvelle vague of indie detective games. Its genius was not in asking players to solve a single, complex murder, but instead 60 mini-murders. For each, a simple drop-down asks you to select who-died and how-died. As you whittle the list of unknowns down, it is inevitable you will find yourself in the sudoku headspace of solving several neighbouring answers by logical inference rather than deductive reasoning. Obra Dinn is the essence of a howdunnit: the fun of both observing and imagining very carefully.
After the howdunnit came the third evolution of the detective story: the whydunnit. It doesn’t care about puzzles and isn’t that concerned with how. Rather it wants to peer deeply into the mind of its killer. This is the template for the Nordic noir boom and serial killer films. Sometimes these stories turn their lens on the detective themselves. Like many modern stories, they are denser, less structured and care most for character. As games have embraced the open world template this generation, so detective videogames have mirrored this. In my Her Story, the whodunnit and howdunnit were the hook. Once pulled in, the real meat of the game was asking ‘why,’ and plunging players into a character study.
As games offer up islands, continents and whole cities to explore, the open detective game expands its scope inward. Disco Elysium
is a True Detective of videogames, devoting its energies to the exploration of its amnesiac detective and the world that broke him – the solution to its murder is just a punctuation mark for the character’s self-discovery. Disco’s
detective gameplay is a great structure to justify listening to lots of people talk, including the voices inside your head.
Maybe it’s this that makes detective games so wonderful. They make a mechanic out of listening, when other games are only interested in the sound of their protagonist’s own one-liners.
The pleasure of a howdunnit is in helping put together a story. Narrative sudoku. Rolling up our brain sleeves