Sam Barlow (Her Story, Telling Lies) – Part 2 interview - page 2

Ingmar: Can you tell me a little bit more about the four main characters in Telling Lies? Is there anything that you can tease about them?

Sam: I’ve been very bad about answering these questions. Someone else was like, “okay just tell me their names,” and I was like, “nah.”

Ingmar: You don’t have to. We can move on if you want.

Sam: We have these four main characters and they are played by a wonderful cast. There are many other characters as well, but essentially the fun thing about it for me is that of these four main characters, depending on how you play, any one of them can be the protagonist in the right story. Something I found interesting in structuring the game is we allow people to choose who the protagonist is. Essentially the person you spend the most time with and fix your idea of the story around becomes more important. We did this exercise where we had people come in and play for three or four hours, and at the end we asked them to, in a paragraph or so, tell us what is the story. And we had this beautiful spread where people would fix on a different character, whether it was Angela or Alex or Kerry or Logan. They would tell the story from that character’s perspective. Then we had one tester who was so into Angela’s character that she somehow managed to pretty much only watch stuff with her; she was able to just explore this story purely through the scenes involving Angela’s character, which was super-cool.

Telling Lies has a bigger cast than Her Story, with notable Hollywood talent (L-R) Logan Marshall-Green, Alexandra Shipp, Kerry Bishé and Angela Sarafyan

It’s going to be interesting to see how that plays out, because in that way it’s different to Her Story. Her Story was very much… you might have a different perspective on the story, or learn some things your friends haven’t, but essentially everyone’s digging into the same story. There are some plot points that people might miss, but in the sacred five or ten minutes at the start of the game, you definitely see people kind of laying down which character draws them into the story. That becomes quite fixed. Even in TV shows that have multiple characters and jump back and forth, there’s something different about that. This way you get to choose to follow a character, attempt to follow a character, dig further into a character. It feels like you have some ownership over that.

Ingmar: To my knowledge, Telling Lies has not been announced for consoles. Is there a possibility of that happening, and do you think that, generally speaking, there is a good way of making games with a text parser work on consoles?

Sam: I think there is definitely a strong possibility of that happening. There are a number of tweaks to how this game works above and beyond Her Story that actually kind of free you up. The typing is always there as an option, but part of wanting to encourage people to lose themselves was tweaking some of this. There’s a lot of emphasis on you being in a clip, moving around and scrubbing to discover things, and when you’re in a clip, if someone says a word you can just click the word or touch the word, and immediately search against that. So I really wanted to encourage you, if you saw something interesting, rather than write it down on a piece of paper and come back to it… again with my Nintendo analogy is that when I play Zelda I feel free. If I see an interesting thing, I will just wander over to it. I don’t have that busy work thing, where I’m like “aw, I gotta stick to the path, I need to do my mission, and I’m gonna ignore that thing.” I want you to do similarly when playing Telling Lies. Someone says something or mentions something and you’re like, “oh, that sounds interesting” and click, jump to that. So to make you feel better about doing that, there is a lot more in the virtual software here to allow you to track the clips you see and bookmark them and store that so that you can feel free, like you’re not going to miss something if you don’t have it written down.

The interface for Telling Lies has been tweaked to include direct keyword selection, though Her Story's text parser will remain an option

So yes, we’re going to have controller support on PC and Mac anyway, because I know a lot of people played Her Story with friends and family on the big picture mode or otherwise connected their laptops or whatever to the TV. We found that actually playing it with a controller is a lot more straightforward this time around because of the way in which things flow and the ability to jump around and strike directly the words being spoken. So definitely, it makes it a lot more straightforward to put things on a console.

The number of people I know that played this on a TV wanted to because it lends itself so much to playing it with your partner or your friends. It’s kinda cool. There aren’t many video games where… this probably isn’t true anymore; my kids’ generation love their YouTube, but for me, if I’m sat on a sofa watching someone else play a video game, there is always that frustration of them being in control and driving things. The difference with Her Story was that the gameplay itself, because it kind of floats above the actual game, the act of watching stuff, discussing it and talking about what they should be searching for and stuff, really lends itself to that.

So yeah, getting it in as many places as possible, making it as easy for people to play this thing, it’s definitely a priority.

Ingmar: No matter how many political elements a game contains, for obvious reasons AAA developers and publishers tend to claim that their games are not political at all, and don't contain any statements about current real-world events. Now, Telling Lies is not a AAA game, but it is set in the real world, and it covers a subject like NSA surveillance. Actually, earlier you said that you used to call Telling Lies a "political thriller". It would be very interesting to hear a bit more about this aspect, and how much of your own opinions about the state of the world can be found in the game.

Sam: Telling Lies is definitely a political game. It's about things that happen to real people in the real world and so clearly touches upon subjects that are political, as pretty much any story that has some tether to reality does. I also think it's a game that has an opinion about those political questions that it touches on – not one that it states literally for the audience, but one which I can only imagine is baked into its whole experience. It would be lazy or unfair for me to leave those opinions entirely in the hands of its players. I came to this story from a very personal, character-driven perspective but there's no separating people and politics and I have very strong opinions about some of the themes we explore. As does Amelia, who wrote with me, as do the actors who brought the characters to life, as does everyone on the team. Perhaps one of the greatest responsibilities I feel on this project is doing justice to these themes and being truthful above all else.

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