Episode Transcript

Charlie Melcher:

Hi. I'm Charlie Melcher, Founder and Director of the Future of StoryTelling. Delighted you could join me for the FoST podcast.

Charlie Melcher:

Our guest today, Sam Barlow, has a real knack for taking the gaming world by storm. Operating at the intersection of interactive fiction, cinema, and gaming, his creations are unique in their focus on narrative and the agency given to the player in creating their own path through the story. Since the beginning of his career, Sam has created games that blur the lines of traditional gaming genres. His first title, Aisle, released in 1999, let the player make only one move. This sparked an entire genre of one-move games.

Charlie Melcher:

Sam frequently cites being heavily influenced by writers and film directors, such as Shakespeare, Alfred Hitchcock, David Lynch, and Paul Auster. These influences are readily apparent in his most recent trilogy of games that play much like interactive films. The first of the set, Her Story, was nominated for 37 awards of which it won 13, including two BAFTAs, the Seumas McNally Grand Prize at the Independent Games Festival Awards, and the Mobile Game of the Year at South by Southwest. The second in the trilogy, Telling Lies, won a Webby for Best User Experience in 2020. And the third, entitled Immortality, just debuted at the Tribeca 2022 Festival and is set for release later this summer.

Charlie Melcher:

It's such an honor to have this trailblazing pioneer of narrative gaming on our show. Please join me in welcoming Sam to the FoST Podcast.

Charlie Melcher:

Sam, it's so great to have you on the FoST Podcast. Welcome.

Sam Barlow:

Thank you. It's great to be here.

Charlie Melcher:

I know that you were part of this interactive fiction scene in the 1990s. Can you tell me a little bit about what drew you to that and what that was all about?

Sam Barlow:

That came around... I went to college the end of the '90S, and this was my first real exposure to the internet, going into the computer laboratories and at that point, the vast majority of the internet was academic or small, interesting bits of NASA websites or whatever. As someone that played a lot of games, first thing you start looking for on the internet was trying to find where do I get the games? At that time there was this incredible resurgence of interest in text adventures, interactive fiction. It was this incredible community because half of it was motivated by nostalgia for things like the games that Infocom made in their heyday. But because it was a lot of young, very savvy people, the other half was, everybody there was really interested in taking these tools and repurposing them to try and make something more interesting. So there was a lot of interest in progressing the state-of-the-art in what is an interactive story? There was a annual competition, which was a locus for the community to... People would come out and compete and show off.

Sam Barlow:

I had to go at that and put in a somewhat flawed piece of work that, I think at the last minute, my hard drive died, and I tried to rebuild the whole thing from scratch. After having done that, I was like, "Okay, the next thing I do has to be really, really good." And that led me to this piece called Aisle, which was an attempt to break a lot of conventions and play around as well with what my thoughts were at that point with what the state of the art was with interactive fiction.

Charlie Melcher:

And Aisle was a big hit, right?

Sam Barlow:

Yeah. And it was one of those things as well, that again, you'd put these things out into the internet and at that time, other than a web counter, you weren't really tracking these things and measuring their reach. It was much later, in fact, I think it was a small part of my decision later to go independent after I had a job as a professional game designer, was realizing that there were still people out there playing this thing and talking about it and getting excited about some of the things that Aisle did with interactivity. And it was like, "Oh, it's neat." I had a moment of like, "Maybe I want to go back and tap into some of that."

Charlie Melcher:

I've always seen you as somebody who's been looking to push boundaries, reinvent forms, take traditional forms, whether it's something like literature or something like film, and think about how do you bend that in light of the way people today want to be able to interact with their stories? Is it been a difficult path to be trying to be somebody that is innovating or breaking the rules or trying not to do another one like something that someone else did?

Sam Barlow:

When I was a jobbing game designer and working for bigger publishers, there was definitely, I think the vast majority of my frustration was the very slow pace with which things move and evolve in the commercial game space. So the publishers looking around, they're going, "Well, what things have sold well recently?" You're essentially pitching them, "We are going to do a better version of this thing that already exists." And then you have to lock in your tech, and you have to build around that. And then you spend three, four years building it. And that leads to this world in which everything is moving very slowly.

Sam Barlow:

In movies and books, you have genre, which enables you to sell something. "Oh, I've written a book." "What kind of book is it?" "It's a mystery novel," or "It's a piece of science fiction." "Okay, well then we understand how to sell it."

Sam Barlow:

That works slightly differently in games in that our genres are specifically tied to mechanics and the way these things work. So if you say to someone, "I'm making a first-person shooter," it gets very specific in terms of how the controls will work, down to minutiae of how the work is executed.

Sam Barlow:

And really, that was something that I felt a lot when we worked... I worked on a couple of Silent Hill games, and these were some of the most progressive, boundary-pushing games at the time, in terms of the stories they told. They're tapping into psychological horror. You had characters that were much more grounded and real than in most games. But the template was still, "Oh, all of these games should behave exactly like every other survival horror game. Therefore, you will be collecting medical kits. You will be finding keys and solving puzzles."

Sam Barlow:

It always felt bizarre to me, because you'd look at something like Silent Hill, which was modeled very much after things like Jacob's Ladder, after more weird psychological fiction, and the games themselves still had to function essentially the same as Resident Evil and Alone in the Dark had done when they broke the genre. So I made the decision in, I think it was around 2014, to go independent because I was seeing some of what was happening in the mobile space.

Sam Barlow:

The big shift was when we started being able to sell our games directly via the digital stores. Suddenly, you didn't need a publisher to bankroll you. You didn't need somebody that was going to pay the fees and buy the engines for you. So there was this interesting spark of things happening, the way that phones and mobile gaming changed the interfaces and the types of people that were being exposed to the games. It felt like a moment where I was like, "Okay, if I jump off here and try some things, maybe I get to move things along more quickly then is possible normally."

Charlie Melcher:

One part of it was speed and being able to do things more quickly, but I also feel like you are somebody who's always really considered himself a storyteller. And you are coming out of certain powerful traditions, literary traditions even, of wanting to have complicated characters and rich narratives and psychologically challenging stories and much different than a shooter game of some sort or something that's testing fast-twitch muscles. In a funny way, I don't even consider you a game designer, although that's what you consider yourself. And certainly, what you are building are games. To me, they're stories that have interactivity, almost more than they are that they are games. Not everybody in the gaming world is as focused on telling the kinds of stories that you are. Your games might be, in some ways, closer to fiction references or cinema references than maybe to traditional video games.

Sam Barlow:

Yeah. I think that the term game obviously has a ton of connotations. For me, a video game is the loosest, most useful term to describe a piece of entertainment that takes place on a computer. It's a machine that we're interacting with to get some entertainment. So much of this is this overlap between the technology, the commerce, where can I sell this thing? What technology do I need to run it? And I think what's been good is over the last few years, we are slowly expanding people's expectations.

Sam Barlow:

But certainly, yeah, all of the traditions that I'm interested in came from avant-garde traditions in literature that I've always been fascinated by, especially works that mess around with things structurally, whether that's like Burroughs and his cut-up techniques or some of the more experimental novels by J.G. Ballard. A lot of what I look at and see in those works, there is clearly an enhanced, we could call it, interactivity. There is something that the reader or audience brings to the work.

Sam Barlow:

I think a lot of what is interesting to me in storytelling is in all these spaces where there is some kind of dialogue with the audience. The reason I gravitate towards games or digital things is because it gives us this ability to actually build on that and play with it. And I think, specifically again, this intersection of commerce and technology, if you look at the traditions of storytelling, and you look back, way back through history, where you have oral traditions of storytelling, where there is a reason stories were told in song and set to rhyme. It was because it was easier for them to be remembered and spread. You'd have people telling stories around the campfire in which there is a level of interactivity. There is a little bit of customization going on.

Sam Barlow:

And then you have the huge moment in storytelling when you have the printing press, and then in the 20th century, when you start to have radio and television and cinema. You suddenly have this incredible power to broadcast. For me, what is really interesting and, to the extent to which I feel like I'm doing something in those traditions, is that we're finding ways to combine this incredible scale of broadcast technology with creating something that has that interactivity and that human back and forth.

Charlie Melcher:

Well, you're singing my song. That's exactly the kind of storytelling that I'm hungry for, and it's the kind of work that we celebrate, as you know, at the Future of StoryTelling. I guess one of the questions I always come back to with contemporary storytellers, who are creating room for the audience, where there's a role to be played as opposed to a passive one, is the question about how you manage that. How do you give room for the audience or the player to have a real role and still have there be some of your authorship or control over narrative? This seems to me one of the fundamental challenges for storytellers in the 21st century. Talk a little bit to how you wrestle with those issues.

Sam Barlow:

Again, a lot of this came from, to some extent, frustrations when I was working as a commercial game designer in that I was constantly being told to not overestimate the audience. "The audience might be stupid. You have to make these things very explicit. You have to explain everything." This was completely at odds with my understanding of the audience.

Sam Barlow:

The amount of storytelling they've been exposed to now, through television and books and comics and commercials, and just being on the internet and social media now, they are so overeducated when it comes to story and structure and the tropes of storytelling. You look at linear writing, and because you have this audience that's so experienced and knowledgeable, it's really hard to surprise them because they know everything, they've seen every twist.

Sam Barlow:

When I set out to do Her Story, as someone who studied the detective story over the years, the detective character, who's very much a set of fun, little personality quirks, to the version of that form now, which is the, we call it, the why-done-it, in which the tropes and the puzzles and the twists of a detective story are much less important than these deep, deep, psychological explorations of characters.

Charlie Melcher:

Let me ask you to do me a favor, to tell me about Her Story, because I realize we're referring to it in the podcast, and people might not know it.

Sam Barlow:

Her Story was my first big independent game. The game itself concerns a woman who's being interviewed by the police. In the game, it starts out with this very opaque, interestingly opaque, proposition, which is a nineties computer interface, a police interview database. The provocation is to just pull the player in by saying, "This is an exciting murder mystery," and then throw a computer interface at them and a database.

Sam Barlow:

What you realize as you play is you're pulling up videos, pieces of video, of this woman being interviewed over seven different days. The key loop of the game is you'll watch this woman talk, and you can then discover more clips by typing in words. She might refer to her husband, Simon. So then you type Simon, and you pull up more clips where she talks about her husband.

Sam Barlow:

On one hand, you are playing the role of detective in that you're noting interesting things that she said. You're looking at how she's speaking. You are really trying to extract the subtext out of what is being said. And it creates this interesting wrapper over essentially something that is, to some extent, hypertextual, but it's much freer and more messy, with the only constraint being the specific way in which this database works.

Charlie Melcher:

Tell us where one of your favorite clips is, and we'll play it.

Sam Barlow:

Oh, gosh. Put me on the spot there. What famously is interesting about Her Story is if you are sat in a two hour detective movie, you have to wait till the last five minutes to see the solution to the mystery. In Her Story, in theory, you could guess what had happened, or you could infer very quickly some of the specifics of it, and then by searching for the right words, you could essentially pull up the ending. So it was very much empowering to the player.

Sam Barlow:

To communicate that to people, what we came upon was to start the game with a word already written in the database, which if you wanted, and a lot of people did, you could delete it, or you could search it and see what came up, and the word was murder. And this just happened. We discovered this. It just happened to be a word that pulled up the very first thing she said, from very early on, where she's being called into the police. And she says, "You think this is murder."

Speaker 3:

You think it's murder. Clearly, it's murder. What can I do to help?

Sam Barlow:

All the way to the very last piece of video footage they record, across these seven days, in which she's now being much more aggressive and adversarial towards the detectives and says, "You don't even have a murder weapon."

Speaker 3:

I'd like to speak to a lawyer now. Please. You have no murder weapon. You have nothing. And all these stories we've been telling each other, just that, stories.

Sam Barlow:

In presenting those two pieces to the audience, it very quickly says to them, "Look, this is not your usual thing. This is not A, B, C, D E. This thing is going to jump all around a timeline." Clips like that were what made people so excited by her story, because you were unlocking emotions and reactions in a way that, because you were literally digging these things up yourself, because you were extracting the emotion yourself, it would feel a lot more intense and hit a lot heavier.

Charlie Melcher:

So what I'm hearing you say is that the act of discovery, the act of the audience having some agency to interact with the content and do it with their own free will and following their own curiosity, creates a more powerful response when they discover things and get deep into the story. Is that what you would say?

Sam Barlow:

For me, the more I can have the audience use their imagination, the more real it's going to feel, the more effective that storytelling will be. And I think the interactivity just brings so much to it, because you're not just imagining in the way that you would be if you're sat in the dark, watching a movie. You are actually physically using your body. It might be as simple as tapping some keys on a keyboard, but there is a thought process, where your whole body is involved, and that already elevates things.

Sam Barlow:

But that level where the realness, which, I think, is on a level the crudest measure we can have of whether a story affects us, a lot of the cliches of did this thing make you cry? Did the horror movie make you genuinely fear for your life? A lot of this just comes back to how real did it feel? That's how effectively we can get inside people's heads.

Sam Barlow:

So I think, yeah, that for me is a lot of what is interesting about telling these stories in this way, is really the more I can hand over to the audience's imagination, the more they can feel part of it, just the more effectively we can tell them a story.

Charlie Melcher:

You once told me that there were four pillars of video games, and you focus on some of them and not others. Can you explain that concept to us?

Sam Barlow:

Yeah. So I think, and this came again, this was me trying to be analytical. Yeah, I think the four pillars, when I was looking at the video games that I loved and the things I was trying to build, were challenge. Video games, of course, are about challenge. Can you get a high score? Can you beat the boss? Can you escape the dungeon? I think that element of challenge, which I think exists... You can read a complicated novel, you could read a mystery novel, where the challenge can be quite literal. You're being asked to solve a problem. But I think there's that element of participation with some kind of goal and having something pushed back against you, which forces you to engage more, is definitely key to a video game and something that's interactive.

Sam Barlow:

Then you have expression. What is interesting about telling a story as a video game is it allows for expressivity, which is, again, it's this key human driver. Everybody loves to be creative, to play, to be playful, to express themselves as an individual in some way. That, I think, is something that has maybe set me on a slightly different path to a lot of game storytellers in that I think finding ways to allow the player to express themselves in a way that's more fluid, that has more freedom, it genuinely matters who has sat in front of the game.

Sam Barlow:

Of the four pillars, the third that I care about and love is exploration. We are hunter-gatherers, so exploration is tied into us, whether that's learning through mental exploration, or it's physical exploration of the land as we're hunting for berries and animals to chop up or whatever, find shelter. That is hardwired into who we are. A lot of what I've been doing with my games is to say, "Well, what does it mean to explore a story in the way you would a metric game?" And that means, how do we move through a story? How can we move through a story faster? How can we move through a story in different ways? How can we encourage the player to build up a mental map of the story, that they gain ownership of as they progress.

Sam Barlow:

And to finish up my top four, the fourth thing that I think is a pillar of classical video games and probably is what a lot of people think of is simulation. These are things run on powerful computers. A lot of the base tech of video games is built around simulation. The reason First Person Shooters is so popular is it's very easy to simulate the path of a bullet from a gun. The physics and kinetics and these things are very easy to simulate, and that creates a lot of engaging simulation gameplay.

Sam Barlow:

I think for the longest time, working in games, as I was growing up, I would see these games, and I would think that's the future. Virtual reality, existing in a simulated reality, that's how we're going to tell stories in the future.

Sam Barlow:

But I realized there was a trivial element to it. It's easy to engage people through that stuff, but I could never answer the question of how does this help the storytelling? How do I tell a better story? How does this character become more real? How do I feel more for this character through all this simulation? It always seemed like a trapping or a distraction, the extent to which you would see players just messing around. People love in video games to place a watermelon that you can smash into pieces, so you can see them all cascade around.

Sam Barlow:

That's not telling the story. That's a distraction. Forsaking this idea of simulation, I think, is also an interesting route to take, because we so often think if we talk about interactive stories, we see these trees of, essentially. simulated outcomes, cause and effect. I think stepping back and rethinking that idea that has been really important to me,

Charlie Melcher:

Jonathan Gottschall in his book, The Story Animal, talks about the future of storytelling being this merging of narrative forms, literature or film with the interactivity and agency of games, and being able to see those two things coexist and evolve into a new form. Hearing you talk, Sam, about your work, and having followed your career and your wonderful pieces, I feel like you're one of these authors or auteurs who are actually very much pushing towards that new form that is some hybrid. It's not a novel, it's not a game. It's something else. Does that align with the way you think about your work?

Sam Barlow:

As soon as I was meaningfully writing, even when I was doing my art and painting, I was also figuring out how to do pixel art on the computer and what I had to program to do that. There was always that element of having technology there and thinking about the ways in which things were cooler or more engaging. But I think yes, always blown away when I look back at all the pieces and realize that everyone was trying to do this. They just didn't have that technology right.

Sam Barlow:

One of my favorite movies is The Double Life of Veronique, by Kieslowski. Reading that he spent so long editing this movie, trying to wrestle it into shape, and he cut so many different versions. He pushed heavily for this idea of having every single cinema show a different cut of the movie.

Sam Barlow:

When we talk about the form and the function as well, that movie, in talking about what it is to be human and all of these threads that run through people's lives, completely made sense for that approach. But at the time, again, the business people said, "It makes no financial sense. How will people know which version they're going to see?" And there have been some other examples of people trying to having these pieces of story be more malleable or more personalized, having them feel alive, even just on a cheap level, making these things feel alive in a way that, therefore, my brain gets excited, because it thinks this isn't just a passive experience. There's something going on here.

Charlie Melcher:

We are so early in this march right now towards the kinds of storytelling that is responsive, that is personalized, that allows there to be a two-way stream of exchange or influence. Just seeing you working with this and pushing the medium, pushing the technologies, obviously the computer being what it is, it allows for that kind of interactivity. There's so many different ways that we're going through this dance between the creator and the player and trying to learn those lessons from different places and apply them to the craft of storytelling. It makes total sense to me that you call yourself a game maker, game designer, and that that's what your studio is doing. But really, what I think you're doing is creating the next generation of literature, of a form of high quality, interactive storytelling, the reinvention, if you will, of the novel for the 21st century.

Sam Barlow:

When I think of the difference between reading a book, it's how personal that feels. It's how much my imagination is brought to bear on bringing that book to life. When I think of the theater, there is that sense of it being alive. Even if you go see the same play as someone else saw two days ago, there's a liveliness to it.

Sam Barlow:

But yeah, I think it's finding those ways that I think exist in other forms that do feel more involved and more organic and more human, and then trying to marry them with this industrial scale and the broadcast aspects. So you look at it, and you realize for creators, whatever the medium, we've always been molding things to the audience. The problem we always had with broadcast media is there's a single audience.

Sam Barlow:

So you have to make a decision. Are we going to play for the... Is this going to be a big mainstream movie, in which case we want to hit lowest common denominators, that we want to get the reaction for the largest number of people. Is this more niche? Is it going to have a happy ending or a sad ending? But the creator of that work might be quite happy with both endings, depending on who the story is being pitched to. So I think that, just from the perspective of creator, to be in a position using this technology, using machines to give us that flexibility, to anticipate, and then roll with the punches when you have your audience, is clearly transformative.

Charlie Melcher:

Is there one thing that you are really excited about, Sam, in terms of technology, are you thinking about AI or characters that are artificially created and aware? What is the thing, that holy grail for you that you're most excited about or waiting to have materialized, to be a tool for you?

Sam Barlow:

I've always been interested, and I think this is where there is often friction with people's expectations, and again, the idea of a video game, but I've always been interested in the more invisible interfaces.

Sam Barlow:

I did this pilot for the company Echo, which was a fun little thing that was a re-boot of the movie War Games. One of the things we did there was, it was a somewhat traditional branching, if you're [inaudible 00:30:12] interactive story where things would happen differently, and characters could act differently, and it would loop around, but rather than give you an explicit choose your adventure choice, the game just noticed what you were looking at. We made that explicit because it was a webcam world, where you would switch between different camera feeds. So it was entirely hidden from the player, what was going to lead this story in a different direction. "We know that you're interested in this character. We know that you've been spying on this one and peeking closely here, so we're going to play against that, play with it."

Sam Barlow:

That was always super interesting to me. We did something similar with Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, where a lot of the story was based on getting a read of the player, from how they were playing. All these TV people, when I have meetings with them, they're terrified because they see how video games and social media and everything interactive is stealing the mindshare from their audience, because these things, as playful creatures that like to explore and play and have things play back with us, these things are naturally drawing them in. So they know that their television needs to change. They know that their entertainment needs to change.

Sam Barlow:

I think that there will come a point where you will look back, and it will be kind of interesting and quaint to look back and see these things that are very linear and controlled and static. I don't think we're fundamentally changing the rules of storytelling, but we are just opening these things up to feel more alive.

Charlie Melcher:

If anything, we're making it more responsive. That's all. We're just making the stories, or that's the goal at least, to make stories that will be more resonant for each individual, more appealing, more profound, hopefully. Though I must say, we need to do this carefully, because stories are already one of the most powerful tools in human existence. If we're going to supercharge their power, we do need to be careful. We might use a moral compass in how we yield this great power of ours.

Sam Barlow:

Yeah, no, I think that's... Again, I think there's... A lot of the debate in video games has been, as our stories become richer and more complicated and because we do have this active role in them, you see a lot of companies somewhat cowardly back away from engaging with the issues authentically. The cliche is to say that we don't want politics in video games. Or if a story is exploring capital P, Politics, it's to say, we'll see both sides, and the player will get to explore both sides. And I think just because these things are more fluid and alive, I think at no point do you give up your role as a storyteller. You don't give up your responsibilities to tell something truthful.

Charlie Melcher:

Well, I think that's a great place for us to end the conversation, Sam. Thank you for taking so much time today with me, and I look forward to participating in your stories and really look forward to the release of your newest, Immortality.

Sam Barlow:

We are hoping, touch wood, that we will be releasing Immortality on July 26th. We'll be in a bunch of places. We're going to be on Steam for PCs and Macs. We will be on Xbox Game Pass for Windows and Xbox. And we will also be on the new Netflix game service, so people with an iPhone or an Android phone will be able to play the mobile version of this. We're excited to get it in front of lots of eyeballs and have everyone dig in.

Charlie Melcher:

How exciting. Well, I hope all of our listeners will find it in one of those platforms. And what's so exciting is my sense is it's a story for gamers and non-gamers to really enjoy. Again, thank you and great speaking with you, and we'll look forward to more soon.

Sam Barlow:

Likewise. Bye.

Charlie Melcher:

A big thank you to Sam Barlow for joining me on today's episode. Sam's newest game, Immortality, is set to release later this summer. You can experience Sam's games for yourself by using the links in this episode's description.

Charlie Melcher:

My sincere thanks to you, our listeners. If you enjoyed the podcast and want more FoST in your life, please leave us a review wherever you get your podcasts, and sign up for our free monthly newsletter at FoST.org.

Charlie Melcher:

The future of storytelling podcast is produced by Melcher Media in collaboration with our talented production partner, Charts & Leisure. I hope we'll see you again soon for another deep dive into the world of storytelling. Until then, please be safe, stay strong, and story on.