How Her Story Turns Video Clips into Clues

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 support for the new year.