Hi, this is Mark Brown with Game Maker's Toolkit, a series on video game design.
In Her Story, the wildly inventive crime fiction game and the best thing I played in 2015,
you're trusted to uncover the story at your own pace, and on your own terms.
The game, if you haven't played it, has you trawling through ancient interview footage
of this woman, Hannah Smith, as she tells the police about her murdered husband, Simon.
But you can't just watch her seven interviews in chronological order because they've been
cut up into individual answers, and thrown into a creaky old database called LOGIC.
So to find footage you must type words into the game's clunky PC interface, and if that
word or phrase is spoken in one of the clips, it will show up in the search results.
It might not sound like much. In fact, it might sound like I'm describing how to perform
a Google search. But, trust me, this set up is intoxicating.
You'll watch a clip, and Hannah will say something like...
HANNAH: It must eliminate me. I was in Glasgow then
and you'll think, aha, Glasgow! You type that in, and start watching more videos.
You start listening for names, places, repeated themes, and motifs. You write notes and draw
timelines and jot down discrepancies. You go down different paths of inquiry - some
are pointless red herrings, while others are leading you towards more useful information.
Slowly but surely, you clear the fog, and build up a picture of what happened. And why
it happened.
It ultimately provides a very personal story, because you're lead through this process by
your own curiosity and intuition. It's up to you, how you piece together this fractured
narrative.
Or, is it?
Does the game actually guide you, very subtly, down certain paths and towards certain videos?
And besides, with that much freedom, what's stopping the player from accidentally stumbling
upon the very last clip, watching the ending before they've even really begun, and immediately
finding out that Simon-
Well, hold on. Because to dive deep into the game's genius design decisions, I'm going
to need to talk freely about the game. So if you haven't finished it, now might be the
time to quit the video, head to Steam or the App Store, and grab Her Story.
Okay, let's back up.
When Sam Barlow quit making big budget console games at Climax Studios, after Legacy of Kain:
Dead Sun got canned three years into development, he decided he wanted the first game in his
new indie endeavour to be about police interviews, because he was fascinated by their depiction
in TV shows like Homicide: Life on the Street.
He describes the interview room as being the ultimate gladiatorial arena for the homicide
detective. A place where the showboating interviewer would get into the suspects head, tear them
down, and trick them into giving themselves up.
Some games have tried to mimic this moment, but they've never really captured that intense
drama of the interview room. You're either one step ahead of the interviewer, as often
happens in courtroom drama Ace Attorney, or you can't ask the questions you really want
to, like in LA Noire.
In that game, detective Cole Phelps is limited to a handful of questions and three different
responses to the answer, which constricts the way you navigate the conversation and
cheapens the thrill of really nailing a killer.
COLE PHELPS: So if you didn't kill your wife, who did?
COLE PHELPS: You better come up with something Angel, this doesn't look good.
Ultimately, it's impossible to give players freedom to simply say or do anything they
want - which is something Barlow spoke to in his 1999 debut, Aisle, which was a witty
piece of interactive fiction where you could do, basically, whatever you like, be it to
eat pasta, talk to a woman, take your clothes off, dance, smile, scream, or sing.
The catch? You only got to issue one command before the story ended.
Talking in games is hard, so as Barlow pored over hours of real life interview footage,
like this stuff from the high profile Jodi Arias case in Arizona, he thought maybe this
police interview game should be less about asking the questions, and more about listening
to the answers.
He was also inspired by a different type of interviewer - the psychiatrist, who was a
large part of Barlow's most famous game before Her Story - Silent Hill: Shattered Memories.
The designer got the idea to jumble up the clips and ask players to find their own way
through the story, by an experimental, non-linear J.G. Ballard book called The Atrocity Exhibition.
The question, then, was how to make sure the player knew how to navigate the text, and
didn't get lost, or accidentally skip to the end.
When he first started designing the game, Barlow intended to structure it more traditionally,
and make it more like a puzzle where he would limit your access to parts of the testimony
until you had seen certain clips or typed in very specific key words.
But then he tested a prototype of the database system that would be used in Her Story, by
plugging in real interview transcripts, from the case of Christopher Porco: a New York
student who murdered his father and attempted to kill his mother.
As Barlow read through bits of the interview, he realised that almost everything Porco said
- even in answers to benign and open questions about his hobbies and life - would come back
to money. Then, by searching for terms related to cash, Barlow was able to jump around the
transcript, and dig up the more juicy details.
When he found out that Porco killed his parents to cash in on their life insurance money,
which Barlow could have figured out himself as he uncovered the hidden subtext in Porco's
answers, the designer realised that the player should be free to navigate the archived testimony
in full - by following clues embedded in the text, rather than by unlocking gates.
So that's what we end up with. Type any word in this search box, and you'll return all
of the clips that are tagged with that word, from the entire stack of 271 videos.
But that doesn't mean you need to just type words randomly, as Barlow actually creates
a pretty straightforward path through the clips, at least at the beginning, to help
guide you. And it all starts with the word that's already in the search box: "murder".
In one of the clips tagged with that word, Hannah will talk about
EVE: What's that got to do with Simon's murder?
Type that in, and you'll get a clip where she mentions
EVE: The Rock
That leads us to a clip where she mentions
EVE: So Eric was ringing on the phone
In the last clip of that selection she says
HANNAH: Have you met his wife, Diane?
Diane takes us to
EVE: I was in Glasgow then
which takes us to
EVE: I told him I was pregnant
which takes us to... well, you get the idea.
All this time, we're given other clips and other bits of information and other terms
to search, so we never feel like we're being led down a single path. But within just a
few clips, all linked together, we've built up a pretty good base of knowledge.
But, of course, you can just search for something random. Or have a hunch and see where it leads you.
Then again, Barlow is anticipating your every move. Throw out a wild guess about a knife
being involved, and you get a relatively pointless clip about cutting hair with a bread knife.
No good. Notice Hannah's bruise, or Eve's tattoo, which is often obscured by a glass
or a guitar to stop you seeing it so quickly, and search for that, and you'll get a bunch
of clips that almost wink at you, and say "well spotted. Now you're on the right track".
EVE: My tattoo? I got it to express my individuality.
It makes you feel clever, emphasising the feeling of being a cop chasing down a hot
lead. Like when you hear about her tattoo, which is
EVE: it's an apple and a snake
and how Simon
EVE: guessed my name from my tattoo
and you think... like, Eve? You type that in and, bam, five more clips. It's electrifying.
Sometimes Barlow will throw you. He'll anticipate your move and use it to disarm you. I won't
soon forget thinking that, hang on, does Hannah have an identical twin? And finding a clip
like this...
HANNAH: Twins? Really? Are you really asking me that question?
So with all this freedom, you might be wondering what's stopping you from accidentally stumbling
upon a clip where Hannah, or Eve, reveals some huge plot spoilers.
Because you could load up the game and immediately watch this video, where Eve describes the
murder, and says
EVE: So she grabbed a piece of the mirror and swung it round, she cut his throat clean open
just by typing in terms like clothes, present, crazy, or even the title of the game.
Or this one, where Eve says
EVE: We cleaned up, we bagged up the broken mirror. Her clothes. They're gone.
EVE: We took him down to the cellar
That one will show up in the search results if you type cellar, alibi, or watch.
Well, you're not actually that likely to find those revealing bits of testimony, as searching
for the more pertinent terms in the clips like mirror, wig, body, and baby, won't lead
you to these video.
That's because of the clever limitation in the search results - you'll only see the first
five clips that match your search term, and the clips are listed in chronological order.
So because the most revealing and juicy bits of testimony occur very late in the 271 video
pile, as Eve gives in and fesses up, it's likely that these important bits of interview
will be hidden by more benign clips from earlier in the testimony, which contain those same
words - though, perhaps in a very different context.
EVE: It reads the same backwards as forwards. It doesn't work if you mirror it though.
EVE: It's not quite symmetrical but, well, you get the idea.
So Barlow never breaks his own rules and no clip is out of reach at any point in the game.
But, as the author and designer, he can bias the results to improve your chances of seeing
the clips in a more gratifying order.
And don't forget that those two clips I showed earlier don't actually mean much without context.
Eve just says 'she' and 'her', so until you know who 'she' is, it's not the silver bullet
that you might think it is. Every clip is carefully written to be enigmatic without
wider context.
It also helps that the game is a complicated web, with two women meeting and dating the
same man at different times, making it even more difficult to wrap your head around the
plot with the benefit of more clips.
And even that is just the whodunnit. Not the whydunnit.
Ultimately, the game doesn't end with anyone in handcuffs and you don't have to pick a
killer from a line-up. It's actually about understanding and coming to terms with why
the crime happened, and you'll need to watch lots of clips to uncover that.
Or, at least, to get a grasp on it. As the feverish online discussion will attest, the
game is very much open to interpretation. You can put together a step by step sequence
of events, but can you trust the person who is presenting it? Does the subtext of her
words, and the way she delivers them, make you believe everything she says?
So yes, it's true that Sam Barlow gives you the freedom to explore his game's narrative
on your own terms. And if you've been watching Game Maker's Toolkit this year, and seen me
rally against the level of hand holding in modern games, you'll know I think this stuff
is important.
But Her Story reminds us that there's an art to letting go of the player's hand. It's not
just about letting them do whatever they want, and simply hoping they have a good time. It's
about quietly nudging them in the right direction, and subtly protecting them from spoiling their
own fun, without them even knowing that you, as the designer, are behind the scenes, expertly
crafting their experience.
Hi guys, Mark here. Thank you so much for watching. I hope you enjoyed this deep dive
into my favourite game of the year.
2015 has been an incredible year for Game Maker's Toolkit, so thanks for every comment,
like, follow, tweet, and upvote. I have lots planned for 2016, but I cannot do it without
you. If you want to help the show grow, then please head over to Patreon and pledge your
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