In a cramped police interrogation room a woman is being questioned about her missing husband. Is he dead? Has she killed him? There are seven separate interviews, chopped up into short, teasing fragments, but the answers aren’t immediately obvious. It’s up the player to trawl through the video records and piece the mystery together.
This is the bare bones setup to Her Story, a fascinating police procedural game written by veteran developer Sam Barlow. Until a year ago, Barlow was working for mainstream studio Climax, where he designed the horror game, Silent Hill: Shattered Memories. Although it was part of a long-running series, the title was an oddity, hugely informed by Barlow’s interest in the “interactive fiction” genre of highly narrative-based adventure games. Now he has set up on his own, and is experimenting with new ways to build compelling interactive mysteries.
In Her Story, your job is to sit at a police terminal, accessing the video segments via a database search interface and then inputting relevant words to bring up more footage. The skill is in working out how the segments may have been tagged in this fictitious police system, and then studying any newly discovered clips for clues and pointers. Her Story is effectively a crime thriller told through the conventions of an internet search engine. It is True Detective crossed with Google.
“It is very of-the-moment, because we’re all now typing words into text prompts more than we ever have before,” says Barlow. “We intuitively get the process – the ‘game mechanic’ – of using the correct search terms, of narrowing a search, etc. I wanted to run with the idea that what you’re doing is essentially Googling.
“There is the magic of thinking up the word that unlocks something hidden, the ability to imagine a concept, put into words, type it and the game puts flesh to that idea – it is magical, in my opinion.”
The game also comments on another facet of modern digital society – the way in which social media and video sharing sites like YouTube have given rise to a culture of armchair detection. In high profile cases like Jodi Arias, Amanda Knox and the Boston bombing, the public became both juror and investigator, scouring news clips and search engines for clues, meaning that the justice process could be said to have become weirdly game-like. Jane’s Addiction once sang: “The news is just another show”. Now, it’s just another interactive social media experience.
But Her Story also borrows from the ancient history of game design, specifically the late-1980s genre of desktop thrillers. Constrained by the graphical capabilities of machines like the Spectrum and Commodore 64, developers found a way to explore complex stories by using the computer interface itself as a framing mechanism. In titles like Vera Cruz and the espionage thriller based on the Forsyth novel, The Fourth Protocol, players would take on the role of a coder or researcher using a database or hacking a mainframe to unpick the narrative. In this way the hardware (and its intrinsic limitations) became the medium and the experience.
When gaming visuals advanced during the 90s, the genre fell out of favour, but now independent developers are rediscovering its highly immersive appeal. Lucas Pope’s award-winning title Papers, Please brilliantly explores the politics of immigration by putting the player behind the desk of a single border officer in an unstable Eastern European state. Now, Her Story presents its murder mystery though video clips that the players need to discover and retrieve in order to advance.
“The conceit of making the computer itself a prop in the game was so neat,” says Barlow. “You weren’t being transported to an alien world, the world of the game was being transported to your desk-bound reality. It brings about a different approach to the player-protagonist relationship, that has stuck with me. A lot of the built-in assumptions about modern games are tied so strongly to the conventions of having an avatar, navigating a 3D space … these conventions impose a lot of restrictions.
“3D space also makes things easy for developers,” he adds. “Especially in say the horror genre. It’s quite straightforward to stick a player inside a dimly lit 3D world, hand them a flashlight and get a certain level of engagement out the gate. I wanted to see what happened if I gave up the prop of immersion in a 3D world. I have a love for police procedural thrillers, so when I started thinking along these lines, my mind naturally pulled up a lot of influence from the 8-bit desktop games.”
For Barlow, the aim wasn’t just accessibility, it was about creating a game process that was familiar, that relied more on real-world skills than a knowledge of game conventions. “The loop of listening to the woman, coming up with search terms, interrogating her story, navigating it via her own words … it feels organic, like a real dialogue,” he says. “It has this sense of making connections, of digging for truth that is more like ‘being a detective’ than many games that let you control a detective avatar. Even when there’s frustration – trying hard to hit on the right search words, etc – it ends up feeling very much like the detective work that we see on our screens.”
Even LA Noire, Rockstar’s fifities-based detective drama relied as much on the player’s driving and shooting skills as it did on interrogating suspects. Barlow wanted to remove all that video game stuff. “The key skills here are listening and thinking,” he says. “I’ve had a lot of testers tell me that they were compelled to play with a notebook to hand, like a real police detective, which is not something they’ve done for a long time.
“I’m very drawn to games where a large proportion of the experience takes place away from the screen. Strangely, I think it can be more involving than games where the attention is entirely focused on the game. I guess it moves the story out into the same sphere as other thought, which means the experience is not so easily compartmentalised.”
Indeed, Her Story is part of a whole movement in game design that’s getting away from familiar twitch-based mechanics, and away from using story as merely a setting for the action. Partly this is about the rise of indies, but it’s also about the arrival of new platforms. Barlow talks about the rise of the tablet, with its intuitive touch controls, and its sleek form factor that lets players curl in a chair and play – like reading a book. It’s personal and intimate. He’s been inspired by titles like Blackbar, Inkle’s 80 days and Emily Short’s Blood & Laurels. All deal with themes of mystery and detection in intriguing ways.
Games haven’t generally tended toward subtlety – this is something else Barlow wants to tackle. It is important if the medium is to mature and diversify. “One of the things that drew me to the police interview as a setting was a desire to make a game where subtext mattered,” he says.
“In most games, because the story is communicating your challenges, it’s a usability thing. Everything has to be on the surface: ‘Go here, kill this, do that’. This mechanic of searching the woman’s words kind of forces you to engage on a deeper level – it highlights those layers of meaning. The heart of any human story is subtext.”
- Her Story is released on PC, iPhone and iPad in “early 2015”.
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