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Sam Barlow (Her Story, Telling Lies) – Part 1 interview

Written by Ingmar Böke
It will take you 17 minutes to read this interview.

In 2014, former AAA writer and designer Sam Barlow set himself up as an independent "in order to tell the types of stories that are neglected in the mainstream games industry." In 2015, the UK-based developer released his interactive murder mystery Her Story, which quickly became a flagship of the indie scene, garnering critical acclaim around the globe. For his soon-to-be-released surveillance thriller Telling Lies, Sam has teamed up with publisher Annapurna Interactive but continues to explore the concept of a fragmented plot that is unravelled via a database of video clips. Eager to learn more, I got hold of Sam on Skype recently and we thoroughly discussed Her Story, Telling Lies and other topics related to interactive storytelling. In fact, our conversation got so extensive that we have decided to split the article in two halves. Enjoy hearing his story as each part contains loads of meaty insights from the mind of Sam Barlow.
 


Ingmar: Hi Sam, it's a pleasure speaking to you! Please talk about the concept and story premise of Telling Lies.

Sam Barlow: Hi! This is a less simple pitch than Her Story. It's a much bigger, messier, more colourful game. Essentially, we've gone from Her Story's kind of gothic murder mystery to something which is...umm, I was calling it a political thriller, but the more I've said that, the less interesting it sounded, so I need to come up with a better word. (laughs)

When the game opens, we see this woman run out of a car at night in Brooklyn. She runs into an apartment, pulls open a laptop and retrieves from her bag an external hard drive which she plugs in and boots up her laptop. On this hard drive is a stolen portion of an NSA database, which contains all sorts of captured footage particularly concerning this core group of four characters. We kind of understand from the get-go that there is this larger picture of what's going on, and then we're thrown into what initially appears to be lots of intimate conversations, thrown into the domestic minutiae of the characters' lives. All of these clips we're watching – that are stored in this database – are people speaking on the internet: Face Time conversations between a husband and his wife, people webcamming in the early days of their relationship, a father reading bedtime stories to his daughter.

I‘ve started calling Telling Lies "anti-cinematic", mainly as a response to Her Story generally getting called an interactive movie. With Telling Lies, I was thinking more consciously about the structure and what does it mean to use video this way. I was aware that the texture of this, in a way, is the opposite of cinema, which boils everything down, uses montages, and the dialogue and the plot structure in a movie are very concentrated. Here the effect is much more novelistic, somewhat more theatrical. There are scenes that unfold at a more organic pace. You're listening to people talk to people they have personal relationships with, and these are not movie scenes where a scene opens, characters talk back and forth for thirty seconds, and then there's a cut, and we're out of the scene. This is a much more interesting pace. 

For me the thing that was interesting with Her Story was that the initial hook was: "solve a murder", so that was most people's initial cognition, but reasonably quickly you'd have a pretty solid idea of that, and then you'd have more interesting questions along the lines of: "why did this murder happen?", "why did this person do this thing?", "what is the story of this character?", "what's all of the stuff in the backstory?", and you might have questions which you want to resolve. I think with Telling Lies, to some extent, I jumped straight to the character bit because ultimately this way of deeply exploring characters' lives was the thing that was interesting in Her Story.

Like Her Story, Telling Lies is going to make you ask initial questions like: "what is going on here?" There is a series of events which have caused this whole thing to happen, there's a reason this woman is crawling through the database, and there's a reason she's stolen this hard drive, so your first instinct might be to answer these questions, and once you have that understanding, once you have the spines of the story, then the more interesting questions are: "why did these people do these things?" and "what did they really believe?" Obviously the title is very direct; a lot of your questions about the characters are gonna be understanding these relationships, understanding why people do what they do, and having opinions.

Ingmar: There was a certain point in Her Story where the game allowed you to pretty much leave if you wanted to. It was possible to say “ok, I’ve seen enough, the game is over for me.” But once I got there, I started digging deeper, deeper, and deeper, because I wanted to find out more about the things that were going on in the background. Is there going to be something similar in Telling Lies?

Sam: Yeah, in fact one of the things I was surprised by with Her Story was the number of people who found 100% of the clips or felt compelled to. I was never sure if that was because there was a Steam achievement attached to it, or if it’s just the nature of when people are given a video game. Or whether it’s because people really did just want to feel like they’d found everything. And I think initially with the new game I wanted to free people a little bit from that sense that they had to see and find everything. And part of that was just making a lot more content. Like I said, this is a bigger, messier canvas that you’re exploring, so it feels less like you can see everything. I think it was the guys at inkle when they were talking about 80 Days…their approach on that game to avoid people digging too much into the mechanics, or worrying about branches and trees, was just to give you so much content that you just kinda stopped trying to keep hold onto it and enjoy yourself.


And so I had this initial idea – half of which survived in the game – that on the one hand the carrot for making people worry less about finding everything was just to make this thing feel so big and rich and have so much content that it was easy to skip around it. And there’s some changes to the way you actually navigate between things, which encourages you to jump around and be less disciplined. But then I also had in mind the stick, which was that the game takes place across a fixed time period. So it starts at midnight and takes place over five or six hours as this woman is trawling through this database through the night. And time progression is somewhat linked to your actions as a player, what you’re looking at, what you’re doing.

One of my original plans was that being aware that time was passing, you would understand that things were rushing to a head and that there was a limit and that you would run out of time. Once you reached a certain point, the game would essentially finish itself and wrap things up as a way of saying “you can’t find 100%, so don’t worry about it.” But then when we were testing, and I was playing it, I found it so obscenely awful because even though I knew what the story was, I would be getting towards the end and I would be digging around and following down some thread and then the game would kick me out and I was just furious with myself. I was like, “this is the worst idea ever.” It does still have a similar thing but it’s slightly different.

Sam: I remember even with Her Story, there was an early version where I wasn’t even sure if there was going to be an ending. And I showed it to some other developers and everyone was very angry at me for the idea of not having an ending. [laughs] And the argument wasn’t even that they wanted the kind of catharsis of an ending as much, more that they needed to know when they could move on, right? Especially in a structure like this, where there may be bigger questions or twists there. So the logic in Her Story was getting you into a position where the game is saying “hey, if you’re cool to go away, you can do. If you wanna walk away, trigger the credits, get the ending, get this extra little explanation, you can do that, and you can put the game on the shelf and you can go on with your life and have had a whole experience and not be left with lingering questions. But if you want to keep digging, go for it.”

There’s definitely a few tweaks to how things get wrapped up and there are some slightly unique bits that you can see depending on how you’ve played Telling Lies. But the thing that surprised me when we were testing this one was the length of the game. I wanted it to be more generous, and I wanted it to feel like there was more stuff so you weren’t as obsessive, but still, I like games that are 2/3/4 hours long that you can finish in one long sitting, and so in my head that was what this game was. But then when we ended up putting it all together and shot all the video, I was like, “shit. [laughs] This is actually pretty big!"

Sam previously worked on Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, the most adventure-like installment in the acclaimed survival horror series

When I was making proper video games, if you’re making a ten-hour game you know that’s actually a five-hour game with five hours of filler content. When we were making Silent Hill games, the producers would always remind us that we might only have two hours of content, but people are gonna get lost for two hours because they missed a key somewhere or they got lost. That was just a given; that was a production efficiency on making a classic Silent Hill game. And so when we made Shattered Memories and said “oh, we’re not gonna have that stuff”, they were horrified. “Where are you gonna get your two hours of wandering around that’s gonna make this feel like a properly timed video game?”

In a few interviews I’ve named [The Legend of] Zelda: Breath of the Wild as a game that I feel kinship with. I’m not saying this is a 100-hour game. Often if I play an open world game I feel like it’s more work than it is fun, and I feel like the state of the world is there to make me trudge over there to get five things to trudge back here. Whereas, playing Zelda I felt like this is such a rich and generous world; I’m walking along and see something that looks beautiful over that hill, and I walk over there and it is interesting, it is beautiful, and it feels handmade. And it feels like they just built this world and filled it with an abundance of stuff. But I was never really being forced to do stuff. Even in a lot of the side quests and things, go do them if you want to, but no one is forcing you to.

Ingmar: That’s a really good thing. Pretty much the opposite of something like, let's say, the latest Assassin’s Creed, for example, where you do loads of generic side quests so you can level up your character to be ready for the next main mission, but in the meantime you have nearly forgotten about the main story. That can be very, very frustrating.

Although much different experiences, Barlow's games share a kinship with the organic open-world exploration of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

Sam: Yeah. I’m not comparing myself with Nintendo, but when you play a game like Zelda, you don’t worry that you’re gonna miss something. You don’t feel that sense of it being work. It was always like “ooh! There’s another thing over there I want to go and see”, and you feel like you can trust in the game that if I wander off this path and go over there, I will enjoy myself and I’m not penalised. It felt like when they were saying you can go in any direction and do what you want, it actually was meaningful.

With Telling Lies I think the analogy works, but as much as the job here is exploring video rather than exploring the world, it’s very much saying “here is a ton of video and you’re gonna look through it and explore it and you will see something that is interesting to you and use that as a jumping off point.” And on the scale of mechanical tweaks, I guess on paper this is a subtle tweak, but quite a big one in terms of how the game plays: In Her Story you were discovering these very small clips, individual lines or answers that this character gave. The way Telling Lies works is the files you’re discovering are entire conversations, so if Logan’s character is talking to Kerry’s character for seven minutes, there will be seven minutes of video.

Now the two interesting things are: as with Her Story the perspectives on the conversation are split. So you will have a video that is Logan’s side of the conversation and you’ll have a video that is Kerry’s side of the conversation. And so instantly you get some of the stuff you had in Her Story where you’re inferring what the other person has said. So somebody’s answering a question and through the rhetorical language you might infer what the question was. This is because we have the entire conversation here, so you might be watching Kerry listening to what Logan’s saying and you don’t know what that is, but you’re looking at her face and you’re seeing how she’s reacting and now you get to really dig into that. And on one hand you know you’re really drawing from the performance and the subtext of what’s happening here, and on the other hand it puts you in the perspective of the other side of the conversation. So you have this very different texture.

So what happens is, if you search for a word you will get dropped into the clip at the point where the word is spoken. So very early on, search for “love” and you’ll get dropped into a scene in which Kerry’s character says “love you!” and hangs up. And from there you can then scrub backwards and discover what scene preceded this, the whole conversation. And we heavily emphasise this use of scrubbing through the video, almost in a way that is analogous to walking, running, riding, exploring in an open world game. And we have a very tactile, analogue scrub, so you’re scrubbing forwards or backwards like in an old editing suite. It’s a very hands-on way of exploring the video because we have subtitles. What you often find yourself doing is watching a scene backwards, and you know oftentimes that what is happening at the start of the scene, middle of the scene, end of the scene can shift dramatically. You’ve been dropped into a scene that’s very intense and you rewind to discover “how the hell did we get here?”

Sam: Having chosen to let people explore video non-linearly in Her Story somewhat naively, I kind of wandered into that idea. For Telling Lies it was very much having some perspective and going “well, the gameplay is about reading between the lines, exploring this video content; how do I do more of that? How do we dig deeper into that?” This is the next step up in terms of making the act of exploring a story through these videos as interactive and hands-on as we can. So you get this very unique way of exploring the content because you jump around a timeline in a way that is non-linear. Whereas Her Story was seven interviews over a course of a few weeks, this story takes place over about two years and you’re seeing clips across this entire span of the story. So you’re jumping around that, and within a scene itself you are moving forwards and backwards.

The fun in Her Story of inferring the context, of understanding the subtext of the scene, trying to figure out what was being discussed…Limited perspective. You get even more of that here, and the scrubbing really encourages you to dissect the performance. You just click or touch the screen to start scrubbing. The interface encourages you to freeze-frame almost, because you can move through this footage like being a video editor or something. You’re kind of scrutinizing it. It really encourages you to not only dig into the words being used, but further dig into the performance. Because the camera is untethered from a single interview room as with Her Story, now there is all this story and information stored in everything else you’re seeing. So you’re going to be seeing into the lives of these characters, you’re going to see where they live, seeing the locations they’re in, seeing how those change over time. There’s so much more information that you can absorb from that and stuff you can infer there.

This idea of exploring story through video, to some extent consciously, some extent not, very much came from looking at games like the Silent Hill series, having worked on that and knowing how much fun it is to explore a 3D space, how atmospheric it is. Some of the thematic storytelling you can do by having the environment be meaningful. But ultimately, certainly in the classic survival horror model, if you needed to tell a story you were doing it through diaries, audio logs, cutscenes. With Her Story, I considered the emotional response I had to Gone Home. I’m attributing like 80% of that to the audio pieces, which if I remember correctly were not in their original dev plan and at some point the team realised they needed them to give you some connection. And Her Story to some extent was the thought experiment of: “What if I threw out exploring a cool house, a cool meat packing plant, a cool abandoned creepy school…What if I got rid of that 3D exploration and put all of the video game exploration into the audio log itself? Or video logs. What if I took the amount of freedom and choice and depth that you would have in that 3D space and put it in the actual story content?” I think Her Story proved that interesting idea, and by basing some of your exploration gameplay on the language that was being spoken, it created some richness that you wouldn’t necessarily have with the normal gameplay verbs and kind of made it accessible in an interesting way.

Ingmar: It’s funny you mentioned the interactive movie thing a bit earlier because I’ve had a certain fascination with those since the early ‘90s, but when I think of Her Story, I don’t really think of an interactive movie or an FMV game. It’s a game that uses live-action elements but it never feels like it’s using them for the sake of using FMV. In comparison, playing something like Uncharted 2 for the first time, which doesn't use Iive-action video, made me feel way more like, “wow, this is like a movie!”

Sam: Yeah, I think something I clung to was it’s still a relatively unique take on using video in a video game, in that 90% of the games that do that have traditional gameplay and they use their video as the content. And that creates problems, because the video does not have the fidelity of live 3D or sprites, but what Her Story does is go “no, we are watching videos. We’re not hiding that, but the mechanic is watching videos.” So we wanted to own the fact that we are watching videos, which instantly frees me up from having to create the idea that the video represents you as a protagonist.

There are a few examples, even something like Night Trap, for its cheesiness I respected the fact that its frame was you are watching video cameras. You are spectating. There’s another game that I’ve never played but I watched some Let’s Plays, and it wasn’t great, called Voyeur, which again was saying “look what is cool about video, what can it allow us to do”, which you couldn’t have done back then with 3D. But it leant into the framing that you are watching something through a camera. Whereas I think the less successful stuff says, "oh no, this is a traditional game; everything is happening in real time." Which the video can't hope to deliver on. Even something like Uncharted, which is very linear and cinematic, all motion captured animations, still has an amount of flexibility and timing that it can utilise because it’s real time 3D, right? Everyone’s going to do the same jump at the same point in the environment, but it will happen when they press the jump button, so it feels cool. You do that game with live-action, like Dragon’s Lair, or --

Ingmar: Gabriel Knight 2 or Phantasmagoria and so on...

Sam: Yeah, you will not have that real time fidelity. So I think it is very timely with Her Story because video was becoming a bigger deal – watching videos on our phones, we’re dropping videos into our social media. When my kids watch TV shows on Netflix, they don’t sit and watch 30 minutes of a TV show on broadcast like I would. They have an amount of freedom and agency and it’s already a more active thing. And that’s just the way everyone’s brains work now. If you are sat in a pub and a conversation topic comes up and it’s something you don’t know about or can’t quite remember instantly, everyone’s pulling out their phones and Googling and digging into things in a way that just wouldn’t have existed previously.


By thinking about what a true crime detective database weird video game looks like, Her Story accidentally side-stepped suddenly into something that made a lot of sense to people. They’re watching more true crime stuff on TV, they’re used to experiencing information in this multi-threaded, hyper-textual way through their devices. Everyone is Googling. It’s almost like a reflex action now. You have a question stuck in your head, boil it down to some keywords. So it was very fortuitous that it fell in sync with that.

I remember the first time I showed it in public, I had journalists say to me, “what made you think of revisiting the FMV genre?” and it hadn’t occurred to me that was what I was doing. I was like, “oh, I guess!” I was just being obsessive about police procedural TV shows and going down YouTube rabbit holes and thought “this could be a game.” So yeah, it’s a very different thing. It is funny though because I think even now if you talk to anyone outside of video games about interactive narrative, in their heads they still think choose your own adventure, they still say interactive movie, so there are some very fixed ideas of how these things might work that dominate everyone’s imagination.

(To be continued in Part 2)
 


Interview transcription provided by Richard Hoover, Joe Keeley and Shuva Raha.