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In Sam Barlows Her Story, the narrative is uncovered entirely at the players direction. In this interview excerpt, Barlow talks about how previous experiences in mainstream games made him long for a game where theres no hand-holding at all, and the player is left to their own devices.This interview was done in September as part of the release of our documentary The Great Game: The Making of Spycraft, about one of the most ambitious FMV games of the 90s. You can watch the full interview above.Sam Barlow: A frustration I had coming out of making 3D games was the obsession with continuous time and space, and the obsession with embodying a character in a world. It made storytelling harder in some ways. It stopped you from using certain tricks. And there are examples, like Thirty Flights of Loving, and stuff where [] you can just click and you can jump somewhere else, and people will figure it out!Growing up, as I was maturing into an adult, I was a PC gamer, and my big thing was immersive sims. They were my favorite. If you had caught me at the right age, my favorite games wouldve been Thief, System Shock, Deus Ex, Ultima Underworld. If youd asked me to have an opinion, Id have been like, The future of games, man, is going to be like the Holodeck. More and more simulation, more and more immersion. I am just the character in a world, stacking boxes and doing stuff.Then I kind of grew up a bit more. And then when I started working in games, I became much more of a Nintendo-head. What Nintendo was doing was way more sophisticated and interesting, and the extent to which they were thinking about the players desires and the intent of the player was really cool.When I went and made Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, that was kind of my love letter to immersive sims, and the idea of creating a continuous space where your physical presence in the space is extremely immersive. And we did a lot of stuff in that game that was kind of trying to remove the artificiality. No menus, no loading, everything was seamless, there were lots of beats where we were trying to make you feel physically connected to the world. As I was doing that, I was really aware as a storyteller that a lot of these assumptions around the player, the player character, are really limiting. And theres a deliberate setup in that game which is going, Hey, everythings telling you that you are the player character, that you should identify with this character, but, spoilers, this character is not a real thing. And so coming off of that, I had cured myself and now I wanted to try doing even more interesting things, and immediately became director of the [eventually cancelled sixth] Legacy of Kain game with a lot of publisher input where they were like, No, dude, you gotta have visceral combat!Justin McElroy: Bigger swords!Barlow: And collectibles!So when I made Her Story, I very consciously was going: If Im going to make an indie game, Im going to take some of these ideas Ive been having of, like, why is it the default that we are a 3D character in a 3D world, with continuous time and space? Im the avatar. Wed gone through that whole discourse of narrative dissonance, which to me also was maybe the wrong discussion to be having, this assumption that there should be no dissonance, that I should be doing things, and they should work and everything should behave like the real world. And so Her Story was me I remember I wrote a little manifesto, to be fully pretentious. That was: Im going to make a game that has no state model. Like 99% of Her Story, youre not meaningfully changing the state of the game. So there is no choice and consequence, there is no someone will remember this, theres no accumulated score or progress, there are no bottlenecks.McElroy: Theres only three rocket launchers, total.Barlow: Yeah, two key puzzles. [both laugh] One of the other things was: no 3D movement. No player inhabitation of a character. And then the other one was subtext. Id had lots of arguments with a producer on the game I was working on, where I would submit script drafts and they would read it and theyd be like, Hey, why isnt the character saying what theyre thinking?And I was like, No, dude, thats bad writing, right? No one writes like this. All the cool stuff should be in subtext. And the argument from them at the time was: Theoretically, but we dont have the tech to communicate the nuance that guarantees this will come across in a way that a movie can. And my response to that was like, Well, couldnt we at least try? But there was this interesting sort of argument to usability of, if the story equals your quest if the story and your mission objective are one and the same and if the player wants to have a good time, they should understand everything. And so everything should be extremely overstated and clear. And so with Her Story I was like, I explicitly want to make a game where subtext is important.McElroy: Thinking about this state that you were in earlier in your career, where youre in increasing and decreasing levels of control, do you feel like working in FMV games, where you are directing the footage thats being shot and then designing how the game will implement that footage, do you feel like you have more control over the end product? Do you think thats something thats important to you?Barlow: Probably on balance, no. I think one of the things thats interesting, specifically when I was doing Her Story, I had the moment where I was designing it where I was like, There should be no traditional flow and scripting and bottlenecking. You would play something like Phoenix Wright; its very carefully hand-held through the mystery. And the big moment for me on Her Story was, What if I just let you just search and find anything? Thats going to feel exciting, and freeing, and it could enable you to feel more like youre having these leaps of logic. But its kind of scary because everything else I had ever done as a game designer, you fake the freedom, and there is a level of control. But I had this little prototype where I was playing some transcripts Id got of a real-life police interrogation, and I was like, Its so cool. This game mechanic of word searching [] I wanted to try and recreate that feeling for my players. So I think with the FMV games, the ones Ive done, Ive increasingly tried to compensate for the weirdness versus a traditional game for the apparent lack of reactivity with an increasing player freedom, and also at the same time a generosity and a lack of punishment.I think you can ask a lot of the player. Part of Her Story or other games has been going respect the players intelligence. Dont overexplain; let them figure stuff out. Allow them to be confused initially. Thats interesting. But if you sit down and play Her Story, or Telling Lies or Immortality, just by participating, youre going to see some stuff, and youre going to uncover things, and its all going to be interesting. And if you just keep participating, you will start to put the picture together, and youll start to figure out whats going on. And at no point are you told [buzzer noise] Game over. Which does happen in Night Trap; that was like the cardinal sin of those old FMV games was, Hey, if you get a game over, youre seeing the same footage again. Suddenly the magics gone. Or even Phoenix Wright, you have the risk-reward mechanic to make it feel like theres a challenge to it. But the point in a Phoenix Wright game where you fail and you have to restart and youre like, Oh my god.I did this little interactive pilot for [production company] Eko of WarGames, and when I did Her Story, it was very indie, lo-fi. I was costume, makeup, photography, everything. But then when I went and did the WarGames thing, it was my first time working with a full film crew. And I remember the wardrobe person coming up to me before we were about to shoot, and they were asking me to choose a hat. And I was like, Why is it so important to them that I pick a hat? Because my game director brain was like, You can keep changing hats until you ship. You shoot the mocap, and then you can put different hats on, and you can move the camera, and you can do all this stuff. It is a very obvious thing! But suddenly I realized in that moment, Oh shit, yeah, if youre shooting live action and we choose the hat, thats the hat. Outside of Marvel-scale reboots.McElroy: [laughs] Right? Listen, the hat isnt working, guy, we got feedback in.Barlow: I love, on a film set, being able to be looking in-camera and then moving props around. I mean, technically I shouldnt, because thats a union thing. But I mean, going in and tweaking the mise en scne, and improvising things with the actors, and having that ability to, there and then, be very free. Whereas in games, if I was like, I want to change the shirt this characters wearing, or if I want them to turn around and pick up this thing, people are going to be like, Sam! Do you know how expensive it is to remodel a shirt or animate picking up a random prop? Like, dude! So there was this really nice sort of freedom to be hands-on with the footage, but then you realize, Oh, what we commit to becomes frozen in time.Which, I mean, still kind of happens in games. I remember being amazed hearing that on [Fullbrights] Tacoma and I can understand why they did this I believe with Tacoma, one of the very first things they did was record the script, because so much of it would then map out spatially across their spaceship. Because that whole game was like, characters walking around talking, and you can sort of scrub a timeline. So I think they kind of decided that something was going to have to get set in stone to make it all work, and it was the script. But I remember that sounding terrifying to me that youre making a narrative game and the first thing you lock is the script.I think theres lots of different, interesting things that are or arent fixed. I mean, its funny when people sort of question if an FMV game can even be a game because of the lack of player control. And Im like, Do you realize whats happening when youre playing Uncharted? You do realize that 50% of those real-time cutscenes are actually pre-rendered to hide streaming and to facilitate things?This is the final excerpt of this conversation between Sam Barlow and Justin McElroy. You can read all the previous entries, including the most recent, which contended with Roger Eberts famous assertion that art must be fixed, and that video games, with their player choice and multiple endings, cannot be art.The Great Game: The Making of Spycraft recently won the New York Videogame Critics Circles New York Game Award for Best Games Journalism.
