Interview with Game Maker Sam Barlow (Her Story)

I'd also like you to say hello to Sean. Hi. Sean. Yeah, there's a Sean somewhere out there. Listen. Probably a few sans. Yeah, it was at least one or two. Garrison, what do we? What do we? What do we? What? What? What are we? Well, we're finally doing something I've been wanting to do for a while. Is branching off into kind of covering different parts of like media and culture UM that kind of

relate to all of these topics UM. I know both the with me, but both me a little bit and and Robert more so have worked for or have have written for UM like an online investigative journalism website called Belling Cat that deals in open source UM like research and One of the things that we're big fans of, that belling Cat I've talked with a few of the other people is a game called Her Story, which is a video game that has maybe one of the better

better depictions of kind of open source um investigations. Uh it's it's a it's a very it's a very good game. I highly recommended. I played it a few years ago. It was lovely and I recently uh well, Originally, when I bought Her Story, I bought both that game and like a spiritual sequel called Telling Lies, which I did did not play for a while because I was too

busy um. And then I went to the Earth First Gathering this summer and I and I came back and I had some free time, so I played Telling Lies, And because of the content of that game, I found it really interesting. Because I'm not gonna spoil tons of it, I think you should play it for yourself, and part of it is solving the mystery on your own. But but part of it does take place to like green environmentalism activism setting, and it has one of the more

honest depictions of environments like that. So I have we are we are graced with bringing on the creator of both Her Story and telling lies. Uh. Sam Barlow, Hello, Hey, exciting to be Lovely Interest. Yeah I am. I am. I'm very excited to talk with you. These games are some of my favorite things. Um. First off, I guess I would just like to kind of talk about your inspiration for this type of detective game, because it is it is unique to every other kind of investigative game

out there. UM. And it's you know, very much grounded in open source research. Um. And like you think computers that in the real world. What what kind of got you onto that kind of storytelling concept? I mean, I think there was a whole bunch of things that all kind of sparked off at once. Like when I made

Her Story, this was my first independent video game. So I've been making video games for ten plus years, um, working on other people's franchises, more traditional things kind of when I started out working on like Nicolas Cage movie,

Tiants and extreme sports games and all these kind of things. Um. But at some point I got to work on the Silent Health franchise, which is this very cool psychological horror franchise, and it's one of the certainly at that point in time, it was one of the few kind of established gaming franchises that had a story that was interesting and took place in the real world and had characters and things, So kind of from that point, I was really digging

into kind of a lifelong interest in storytelling as actually what we can do with it interactively and continue to be frustrated somewhat by working for these bigger publishers. And at one point I worked for three years I was directing and writing this this big budget video game that got canceled, and that kind of gave me a moment to kind of sit and think, like, what what do I want to do? Do I want to get on

board another of these big video games. I was very frustrated at the kind of incremental change that you see in the kind of bigger budget video game space. It feels like things happened very slowly, which can be frustrating. So I was kind of looking around. This was when like iPhones, people gaming on their iPhones and stuff was kind of starting to blow up. The fact that you could now distribute a game individually digitally and reach an

audience was sort of changing the landscape. So I kind of felt like I should get into that and so at its conception, her story was was me sing, what are all the things I've wanted to do that that I wasn't able to do when I was working with these bigger budgets, with these more established kind of gaming templates. So from the get go it was I wanted to deal with characters that essentially lived in the real world,

which is a hard pitch. You know, if you're asking for big bucks, every video game has to essentially be about superhero It needs to be some kind of wish fulfillment for a teenage boy is generally what people are asking for. And the big thing with her story was subtext as someone's interesting storytelling. Us always trying to push how important subtext is and the idea that there is.

You know, there are layers to a narrative that you're not spelling out for the audience that they're going to extract through performance or through whatever U and that was always a hard sell when you were kind of dealing with these kind of bigger companies that had a very

simple idea of what their audience was. So I wanted to prove that the audience was actually smarter than we were giving them credit for, and that if you gave more control to them, if you gave more of the kind of work of piecing these stories together, that that would be not not just something they could do, but which would actually be more interesting and more personal and um, you know, and with her story, I had a kind of lifelong love of like crime fiction and slightly more

kind of Gothic leaning crime fiction, and so I was like, right, I'm going to create a video game which is in that world and which kind of breaks a lot of the established rules of how you might tell a story. Um, and you know, a lot of that I was pulling from, Yeah, my love of some of the more kind of avant garde literary stuff, interesting pieces of kind of movies and things.

But it was, it was, it was pulling from a lot of different kind of storytelling traditions and ending up in this this interesting place where, like you say, it's kind of a game experience where you're essentially researching the story yourself and kind of putting the pieces together. Yeah. Yeah.

For for people who don't know, it's like you're basically on a virtual desktop, um, and you're sorting through like a hard drive full of footage and the versatility of the game, and you know, people learning how to use like search terms, right, just like people try to use like um in open source it's called like using like um Google operators. It's the same kind of the same thing, UM.

But also there's like the other side of things. I think a belling Cat wrote an article about your game where they like made like a Python script to scan all of the videos for specific keywords and put them into like different folders and files. So it's like you can do the thing where you just like search it, but you could like take this to a ridiculous level or you're like breaking the game open and doing it like you're actually like investigating this and you need to

be very quick. Um. So I think her story is is a lovely intro to this type of game concept. And then for telling lies, you kind of changed you change things with it. Um you made like I guess, I guess like an expansion would be the way I would describe it for how it like takes the same

concept and pushes it further. And I think watching these things now, it's very different after being like two years on Zoom right, I'm I'm sure I'm sure you've heard this from other people as well as like you know, because because because of how Telling Lies operates, it's like a lot of it is well you open the game, because you're basically cracking open and then I say hard drive.

So all of it is video from like webcams and stuff. Um, so you know, watching people talking to their computer camera like this after spending years on Zoom definitely uh hits harder. I guess it was one of those things. So when we would first working on this and conceiving of it, which was I don't know, maybe and something like that, Um, there was a leap, right and as a storyteller, you allow yourself sometimes to take that one leap that the orders to take with you. And the leap was like

these people are using video chat a lot. But I mean and as I was starting to put it together, I would start noticing people around that time doing video chat in the street on their phones, which was something I was not used to sing and I was like, oh, ship, maybe this is not too big of a leap. But yeah, I think I think it was The Virgin or somebody ran an article that like Telling Lies is still a great game mid pandemic, it's just real hard to play

now that like this zoom thing is our lives. I mean that was like, that was that was a big thing I was interested in at the time, was like, what what is this doing to us? What is communicating over the internet, How does that change how conversations and things happened? And was kind of looking into some of the research there. So that, Yeah, that was wild. Was was was kind of living in that world for several years putting the game out and then spending two years

on zoom calls. Yeah. I mean in a few ways, think the game has aged very well because of that, and because the way people. People are more used to interacting with the computer in that format now, so when they're you know, trying to search for these like hundreds of video files, I think they can understand it better. Um So, in some ways, I think it's not it's not necessarily a bad thing. Um But yeah, let's see.

So I think, well, I want to talk a bit about kind of the influences for kind of the surveillance aspect, because like her story is filmed in like a police um interrogation room for based basically basically the whole thing, whereas this pulls video footage of people like in private moments. Essentially, of course, this was like after like the Snowden stuff and after all of the other kind of after the

you know, surveillance became a bigger talking point. Um, But what what got you to decide you wanted to kind of revolve the game around this concept of internet surveillance and then you know, different three letter agencies kind of fighting each other a little bit. So I think it

was two things. One was in making her story and making lots of decisions somewhat intuitively kind of when it was finished and it was a big success, and I looked back on it, and then kind of when a little bit of time and passed, I then had this very different relationship where I had forgotten that I was the person that had made it and so could have

opinions about it. And I was really interested in how that that game established a level of intimacy with the main character that Viva plays, that you're seeing being interrogated, despite the fact that it's happening through a computer desktop, despite the fact that there's none of what traditionally you know that the agency you were traditionally having a video game, which you know, conventional logic would be that's how you would establish the idea that this person is alive and

that you're in contact with them. But the act of like digging into all this video footage of Viva and seeing her on screen talking essentially at you created this this interesting amount of intimacy that a lot of people responded to. So I was like, well, that's one of the things that is interesting to me to take further, because it's it's very rare that a video game creates this sensation of kind of intimacy or of getting close to or understanding people. And then it was Snowden UM.

I think it was one of the the early reports UM from from all the various things that came out via Snowden. There was a particular UM operation in the UK, which I think was called Optic Nerve or something, and the idea there was that they were spying on everyone's Internet traffic and I think it's a little bit easier to do that in the UK than it is elsewhere.

And this one particular operation, I remember there was a PowerPoint slide that was leaked that was like their internal presentation which proved that, like in any leaked government PowerPoint will be the worst power point you've ever seen, like

the clip part and this terrible nous, right, um. But in this scheme what they did and this blew my mind was for a period if I think it was two years, every single video chat that went through Yahoo in the UK was captured and recorded, and they had this issue, which I think is if you want to go about surveillance kind of post eleven, the big problem with surveillance and the extent to which is now used, is like what you do with all this data, Like

it's it's it's just too much. So they they were capturing all this Yahoo video chat and attempting to add the metadata and sort it, which is kind of interesting because that's kind of to some extent kind of how

something like her story worked. Yeah, yeah, totally. And the biggest issue they had, and they put up this power point and it blew my mind, was thirty of all the video chat through Yahoo at this point was sexual in nature, and they were concerned about the feelings of their operatives who were doing the tagging of all this data.

So they'd put their best computer minds on it and they'd come up with an algorithm which would detect an excessive amount of skin tone and would then kind of flag and silo those clips, and I just remember reading this and being like, what about the feelings of the people whose skin tone you're capturing? Right? Like you weren't you weren't stopping to think like why are we doing this? Shouldn't we be doing this? You're you're you're solving for the problem of like how do we stop our agents

seeing all this unity? And I think there was there was a bunch of other anecdotes right in the snowed and stuff of people alongside him, like you know, looking through people's webcoum data and stuff and in a in a voyeuristic way, and just this constant invasion of people's rights.

So I think that it was one of those things where I was like, oh, this is this is like new, Like you know, we now have you know you you you worry about certain levels of like your privacy being invaded, and you would certainly worry if someone was letting themselves

into your house at night. But we suddenly found ourselves in this position where we have these phones that we put by our bedside at night, that have cameras and microphones that are pretty much just running right and capturing and just the extent to which now technology has transformed surveillance and that that was really interesting to me because I um and a big thing I wanted to do.

You know, I've made her story. And like, growing up, I loved cop shows, and I particularly loved the good ones, like like Homicide, Life on the Street in the US. There was a show in the UK called Cracker Um and these were like, you know, somewhat nuanced in how they with policing, but you know, you're you're still you know, we're in this position now where we're starting to ask

deeper questions about whether we should watch this many cops shows. Yeah, when they're like the main thing on a'll tell itsh and all the time. Yeah, exactly, And that would be like when I made her story. Partly I pitched the bigger publishers like we should do the equivalent of a cop show like that, we should do crime fictional cop show, video game, and they would always be like nah, and I would say, well, look, this is like the evergreen. You know, if you're a book publisher, you have a

crime show, you have a crime book. You know, if you doing movies, you're going to have some movies with this genres. It works, and they would always kind of push against that. So when I made her story, that was, in fact, like the arc of of playing her story to some extent, mirrors my ark in that. Like at the top of it, I was like, I want to make an interesting detective game, and I want to deconstruct

how detective stories work. And I then started to do a bunch of research whereas digging into, well, how do actual criminal investigations work, how does one interrogate the suspect

doing all that stuff? And then I started to pull up what at the time like there was a bit it was slightly ahead of like the true crime explosion, but there was starting to be stuff on YouTube and in various places where footage from real investigations was online, and it was starting to get a bit weird and interesting, and that people were kind of vicariously watching these things.

And yeah, that raised also questions they were trying to piece Thegether their own kind of conclusions based on these leaked or sometimes officially released interview segments. Yeah, and and there was one in particularly got really into the Jodi

Arias case. It's just like a and and the way the media spun that story and just really dug into, Oh, there's like sex and murder and Mormons, and there's this beautiful blond woman who now when she goes to court has gone brunette, and they were endlessly talking about on cable news like her parents and setting her up as

this kind of them fatile kind of ice maiden. Um. On the slip side of this, I think there's like the thing with them the Making the Murderer documentary, which I think I have some issues with how they handle the main guy, but particularly how they showed the totally immoral interrogation tactics used on used on Brandon the kid um, and that really cracked that whole thing open, being like, yeah, the way the police are interrogating miners without it was

the lawyers is shocking. And that was that was that was part of this transition for me. Was was was going into her story with like, the hero of this is the detective. It's Andre Brower and homicide of life in the Street, it's the genius detective that's going to come in there and crack this case. And the more I dug into in cases like Jody's where um the word various um aspects to that case, she definitely did murder her lover, but there are lots of questions around

whether the relationship itself was particularly healthy. Um And by the end of it, like all of my sympathy was with Jody, not the interrogator who You watch it and you realize that, like, the reason this person is in this situation is because their life has gone very badly, and the reason for that is everything that's happened in their life prior to this, and they've never spoken to anyone about any of this stuff. And suddenly they're in this room with the homicide detective who's like, hey, you

can talk to me. I'm the first person that's going to sit and listen to you, and all these tricks that they use to just get people talking, and it becomes very intimate and becomes kind of like therapy session. But by the end of it, so for me, like the hook of her story is, oh, you get to solve a murder, but really, by the end of it, it's like a character Portney should entirely be with her

and is less about seeing justice done right. So even but even coming away from that, I was like, I still feel slightly uncomfortable with with kind of having made this thing that is reveling in how much fun it is to be involved in the police work or whatever. And so I was definitely thinking about the snows and stuff thinking about that aspect and the extent to which technology has just so empowered policing in general to the

point where it's there's this great um. Like one of the core themes that I wanted to dig into and telling lies was that when you see people try and defend this stuff and defend policing in generally, is they try and set it up so that you basically have They talk in terms of families and very close relationships, so they're kind of like, well, the government is your parent, and they're trying to look after you, and you understand as a parent, you're going to sometimes invade the privacy

of your children or sometimes you're going to inhibit their freedoms because you're trying to protect them. And we all understand that and that's part of being human, and that's all that's happening here with government, right We're trying to protect you from the big bad add the evil. I sort of like there's some tweet from the NYPD the other day that was like, you'll become you'll come running

when evil is on your doorstep. Someone was saying something bacrops and and and for me, once you you take that understanding of how people relate directly to each they have families, work. The second you scale it so the size of government, it breaks like that you cannot extend that metaphor. And then when you add in tech, Um, you know, the extent to which uh, you know, privacy has been degraded, our freedoms. Um, you know when you start just blanket looking for crime, right, you start creating

all the systemic issues that we have just suddenly become amplified. Um. So that that to me was kind of interesting. Um, well, you know, here is like a means to explore that. And I like one of the things that was interesting to me about her story that in retrospect was the extent to which it was about watching video, which seems like a dumb thing to say, but like the choice to use real video kind of inspired by watching all

this interrogation piece of footage from Jodi and people. Um, you know, it was was kind of made Oh yeah, that makes sense, and I just kind of got on with it. But then looking back, I was like, oh, well, it's interesting because people talk about this game as being an interactive movie, but it's nothing like a movie. No, not at all, And it's not how movies work. It just happens that it uses a video camera. Only similarity

is that it has live action footage. That so I was like, I really want to go even further into that texture. And so I was just thinking about and when I was starting to do my research, like the idea of surveillance and and the commonalities between like classic old school surveillance, I you know, someone sat in a car some binoculars watching someone and and modern surveillance, the commonalities of it's quite boring, right, there's just a lot

of sitting and watching doing nothing. Yeah, right. And but out of that and when you kind of read the first hand accounts of the people doing the surveillance or some of the depictions of this media, like there's a level of intimacy that you get with the person you're surveilling right where you know, if you're just sat watching the menucha, if someone's life, if you're listening to a bug in someone's kitchen and just hearing all the just everyday ship in their lives or if you are, you know,

watching them through some kind of technology. Um, you're just spending all this time with them, and that's like a that's like a very non cinematic thing. It's it's like this that manutia and the time stretching out of just being present with somebody. And that was kind of interesting to me of just kind of putting you in that headspace and kind of thinking about what that means. I think that totally gets through because of the way you

break up the conversations and telling lies. You have to sit and watch these characters as they're just doing nothing

for sometimes like like over five minutes. They're just like sitting there, um, and you do get like very intimate with these characters, but it almost like in a very like creepy way where you like you feel like I shouldn't be here, which is kind of the general feeling of telling It's really interesting because I like some people would have a very and and this was you know, completely again like trying to process how I felt watching the like the videos of all the various police interrogations

and stuff. Was like, this is fascinating because the human beings were fascinated by the human beings and here is this extremely interesting, dramatic stuff where people are just really spilling their lives out. That's why true crime blew up, right, But then you have all these moral questions around it. And obviously with telling lies, it's inspired by lots of real things, but it's fake and you're watching actors act

this stuff. But still some people would have this real visceral reaction of like I shouldn't be watching some of this stuff, and I'd be like, I mean, you can.

It's like that was that was where it became really not cinematic to me, was like, you know, if you're watching a you know, a noir film or you know, a thriller and you have you know, or even like the The thing for the domestic stuff for me was, you know, you could watch a sitcom, watching any a normal sitcom, and the husband and wife are sat in bed chatting. At no point do you feel like I shouldn't be here because you're in the kind of classic

Hollywood invisible camera set up. You're this you know, you had permission to be there as the invisible camera spectator, and it doesn't feel as weird as it would if you're hiding in the closet of this couple's bedroom. Um, So with the setup I'm Telling Lies, you immediately feel like, oh, like this, I am in this position that I shouldn't be.

So suddenly all those more domestic moments a very different vibe. Yeah, because you're watching them and you're you're not invited, Like right, you're you know, you're sitting looking at this ns A hard drive and you're like, yeah, I'm not supposed to be watching this like this, this, this isn't They never invited me into this conversation. Telling Lies very much feels

like a much more mature game than her story. Not in terms of like has like more mature content, but like in terms of like this concept growing up and like evolving and and gaining more depth. Um, particularly because you know, not only just because it has way more characters, but because you know, you get to know all of your kind of games deal with some degree of like characters lying to you and like just doing like straight lines to your face. That's kind of a that's my

read on a lot of a lot of your games. Um, I mean, you're the game is called Telling Lies, so so you definitely see like elements of of you know, all of these trying to figure out what is true and it is not. I think it is interesting looking at like how easier it is to lie via these technological platforms. Um, I don't have to, just like you feel like telling the truth is just so much more work and you may as well just get through this conversation by doing a few white lives, which is that

inspiral out of control. Um. When you combine this with you know, law enforcement, infiltration and all this kind of stuff, he gets it gets very complicated, very quickly. Um. One thing that I think you guys handled very well in telling lies was kind of the activism side of things.

So like when when I play this game, like almost immediately after coming back from the stop lining three protests, um, and like and and like an Earth First gathering, you know everyone there is always very people try to be aware of surveillance to be like, okay, you know, you don't talk about certain things if there's phones nearby and stuff.

So so that whole side of things was very interesting to like play this game right afterwards because you get to see like the other side of things, being like, okay, if the the FBI is infiltrating this group, here's you know, one of the ways that they do it, and like that from my perspective being you know, in activism spaces for a while, not just like environmental ones, but you know other ones like here in Portland. Um, you had

you handled this topic very accurately. Um, what what kind of stuff did you pull from to kind of create these like these you know environments and interactions between people. Because I'm not sure if you have any experience yourself and stuff like this, or if you've got people onto like you talk to people who are more experienced activists. What was kind of your inspiration for like, you know, the opposite side of things, not on the law enforcement. So that was that was like one of the big

initial jumping off points. So uh like in terms of the kind of real life inspirations, Like the seed of this whole thing was Remember when this was it was I'm gonna say two ten could be completely wrong here, but it was The Guardian in the UK I think broke the story, but it was and we've recently had some good progress in this this area, but broke the story of this UK spy Cops operation, which was a specific unit within the London Police whose job was to

infiltrate groups, to surveil them from the inside, and um, it was horrific and they were like a couple of things about it that were horrific. One of them was that like, essentially their modus operandi was to find vulnerable young women on the periphery of groups, target them romantically, and then they would be the collateral to get you know, to have people then more solidly enter into these groups.

And then they had like a whole you know, stepped plan of like once you're in, how you kind of would would destabilize steer these groups from within U And the that thing that really made this even worse, um was the fact that most of the groups, I think maybe all of the groups targeted with this particular unit were green activists. There's this incredible, incredible, like you couldn't

make this stuff up. But there's a famous libel case where McDonald's was suing these these two activists in the UK right because they were putting up flyers exposing some of the practices of McDonald's and the group that they were members of, which I think at this point was called Green Piece, but it was different to the kind

of more famous Green Piece in London. Prior to them doing this big kind of McDonald's thing, um was losing members and it got to a point where there were so few people in this group that it would have shut down had it not been for the fact that there were a large number of undercover cops in this group. So you know, if you imagine at some point they were actually more undercover cops and private security people undercover in this group that actual activists, which has enabled the

group to continue. And in fact, the original flyer that they put out was written I forget the guy's name now by one of these undercover cops. He wrote the copy for this flyer that went out and then was you know, saw this these people dragged up in court and was this huge you know, McDonald's won the case, but in terms of pr it was hugely damaging to them.

But yeah, that that for me was the thing that seemed even more point because because here you had this story of the state sanctioning the you know, one of the most terrible abuses, Like essentially, you know, what was happening was pretty easy to to kind of call it rape, right. There was women in sexual relationships with people and thinking it was consensual, but not realizing that they this was you know, what they were getting into was not what

they thought it was. And so this was just so appalling and like from a just to kind of base emotional level, just it was so hard for me to imagine the pain of um and these women win relationships with these undercover officers for years. Yeah, and then and and and part of the modus operanda was when you

were done, you had to exit and disappear. And they had this whole plan where the cops would claim that they were being followed and that they were worried, and then they would disappear, and then they would call from some European country and say that they had kind of fled the country because they were worried that the cops were onto them, and then they would slowly kind of disappear and this you know, some of these were kind of pre modern internet, so it was easier for I

want to kind of disappear. But this stuff totally happened in the Green Scare in the States, in you know, around this was around this was My big question was was this you know, some of these cases were kind of the original inspiration. And when I started thinking about trying to tell a story inspired by this. Originally it starts off and and and it's still in based in

the UK, and based on these things. And there was a particular, ah, a particular flavor to it where the cops doing this work it was part of the matt Police, who were you know, that's the more kind of gang story. Like there's there's a real reputation that the Met police have, So these cops that were chosen for this work were the ones that were a bit more kind of marcho

and edgy. And there we was there was I mean, there was so much stuff to it that that was horrific, Like they would only pick cops that were married, um, because they felt that that gave them some level of ability to be sleeping with these activists and not lose

themselves in it. Um. But obviously the wives didn't know what was ending um And and there's just there's so many layers of this that I just thought was it was awful, And coming off the first story, I was like, well, I would love to tell an undercover cops story in which we acknowledge that the undercover cop is bad. They aren't like, you know, because because it's such a classic trope is the undercover cops story because you get to have your cake and eat it. You get to see

someone on both sides the law. You get you get all the tension and thrills of it. But usually, you know, whatever, even if the if the movie or the story or whatever has a bittersweet ending, the protagonists always the undercover cop. And ultimately, because they're the protagonist, they're the one that your heart goes to, right. And the secondary characters, whether that's like the wife and Donnie Brasco or good Fellows or something, you know, they basically serve as a foil

to the main character. So I was like, well, can we tell a story where, um, we we treat the wife and the activist who's being targeted and the other people on the periphery of this guy think more about their perspective on this world, and let's acknowledge from our perspective that this is wrong. Everything that's happening is wrong and it's not justified. And then let's just see what

the impact is on people. Um. So, once we started developing it, and when I was speaking to Anna partner about doing it, um, I felt like, oh, we should move this to the States, um to make it feel certainly as well, because the larger audiences American to to kind of reiterate and make it feel kind of more identifiable and have it be less quaint and British. Um. So my number one question from day one was like, well, does this ship happen in the States and as much

does it happen in the same way. And so we on a researcher who then started pulling stuff up and and the big thing for me was replacing the undercover group the met with the FBI. And and then I that became fascinating to me because then I started digging into the FBI and understanding their history and everything that's

wrong there. But yeah, immediately I start seeing all these great examples of yeah, this explicit infiltration of green groups UM, some pretty horrific cases of entrapment um, where you know, people infiltrate these groups and then encourage them to do

more extreme and violent things on the record. It's the point where you're listening to like recorded FBI stuff and and you can hear the group being like I'm not sure about that, Like that doesn't sound like a great idea, dude, And the the FBI person is They're going like, Wow, I don't know, I I really do think we should blow this bridge up, guys. And it's so obvious, like when you listen to which is why a lot of these cases have ultimately been thrown out. But yeah, it

was it was. It was I guess for the project, reassuring to see that all this stuff was happening over here. Yeah. I mean, and the FBI, like the specific FBI agent that we kind of follow definitely feels very American and feels very real. Um. I really like the actor that you got to play him. Um, he definitely feels like a lot of kind of the law enforcement dudes who kind of handle this side of things. Um. That was that was That was definitely that was like an FBI.

He became like the fbiis of it became very important to it. And it was interesting the way that the FBI they had this brand, which is partly reinforced by the media, Like they had the great idea back in like forties or fifties to themselves fund and support cop shows. So this whole idea we have through the X Files,

through pretty much every serial killer media whatever. The idea of the FBI is being like the smartest and the best, like that's put out by them, but it's really interesting to see they believe that, like they are beyond approach and like they have higher standards for like, you know, if you want to join the FBI, there is in theory this kind of moral moral check that you have

to pass. But into ABI age and flipping backwards and shooting somebody when his gun falls out of his pants at a clock, Well, then you read about it and you're like, actually the experience, the lived experience, and we were it was it was so bizarre because I was like, I really want to understand what it's like to be an FBI wife, and um, let's find let's reach out the research I've done. Some of the stuff we pulled up. I was like, oh, it, it does sound pretty bad.

Like there's a requirement if you're an FBI age and you have to move every three years or something. So if you're the wife to an FBI agent, you essentially move every three years, and so you never get a chance to build your own career or to make roots, and so you're generally and the wage is not great,

which is why they're very vulnerable to corruption. Really Um, so you're generally living there's usually kind of areas where all the FBI families live, so it's this very insular world and you you start to see where some of these wives have come out and spoken about it. They're like, it's really shitty because our husbands, who believe themselves to be like you know, March of superheroes, get to disappear for three days at a time and we can never

ask where they are or what they're doing. And there's this kind of internal code which you see in a lot of law enforcement right where they will cover for each other and protect each other. Um. And you suddenly start see that like, ah, you know the this is not like And in fact, I remember reading sort of the guy who inspired like Silenced the Lambs. The TV show mind Hunter was based on him in his book. Um, this guy who was one of the early kind of

serial killer profiling people within the FBI. You read his book, It's a terrible book. When I heard that Fincher was adapting, I was like, wow, good luck. Um, but it's incredible the lack of self awareness he has. Um, this guy is so sexist and so bad. Every time he introduces a woman, it starts by from the legs up like

he's describing it and um. At the very end of the book, he reveals that his wife leaves him, and he kind of writes as if this is a huge surprise, and yeah, he's calling us from chapter one and he has the best buddy. So like the guy who's who's the kind of number two in mind Hunter on TV, there's like a real life version of him. And halfway through the book, his wife high is an assassin to kind of hitman to come in and kill him, and

the guy just narrowly avoids it. And the guy writing the book is like, what an evil woman, like my poor friend, and you're like, well, hang on a minute, what did your what was your friend like? Yeah, what was what was going on? Yeah, there's there's there's probably something going on there. So yeah it was Yeah, that that sense that which I think for me, expanded beautifully to the bigger picture of like that character kind of believing that he's the good guy absolutely, you know, he's

the sheriff in the Western. He's coming in and he's fixing problems and he's saving the world. M but and then hes apart and and and his inability like it's such a brittle world view that. Yeah, he is he is very once yeah, once he's exposed to thinking that the world is maybe different, it just totally breaks them. Yeah. His specific arc I think is extremely interesting. Um, but I don't want to spoil it because I think it's

it's it's too it's too shocking. Once you get to the final piece of his story, you're like, oh wow, um, I think that was laid out in a really beautiful way. But it's it's it's not like shocking away, like oh this this like doesn't make sense. It's like, oh no, yeah, I can see that, I can see why he's doing this, but it's still it's like you kind of slowly watched this guy get broken down piece by piece. Um, you know, because he starts he's very much like the superhero FBI agent.

He's like, yeah, ha ha, I'm gonna I'm gonna stop these terrorists or whatever, and then he just like yeah, watching him progress throughout the story and you can see like how pathetic he is. Sometimes there's a there's a great uh one of the UK spy cops, Um, I forget his name. If we're doing this three years ago and I've had all these names in my head. But he UM. Uh. So he was assigned and he was infiltrated this screen group somewhere in the UK for a

couple of years, had this relationship with this girl. UM was participating and facilitating. UM. The the one detail that I loved and tried to make sure he's accurate was all these cops would have a van or they would have like a big truck in the UK because they realized that, like in these smaller groups, like being the transportation was like your superpower. So like if you are someone was like, oh, I'll drive everyone to the thing.

I'll get us all there because I have this big van. UM. That was the easiest way to just kind of make yourself useful. UM. But this guy is doing all that. At some point, UM, they decided to pull him and they pull him out. He returns to his wife and

his normal life back in London. UM. But he can't go back to his normal life, and so he starts and he's done all the stuff of disappearing, but he just starts getting up and driving and maybe he's in the north of England somewhere, just just shows back up and he's like oh, I'm back, guys, And they're like, oh, Ship, what happened? I thought you had to like disappear because people are after you. And he's like, no, it's all right,

ah and just goes back to live as an activist. UM. And at some point one of his superiors notices that the mileage on his police paid vehicle is huge, and they're like, why is this guy doing so much my legions because he's driving all the way back uh and and continuing to live this life and inhabit this character that he's set up. Um. And at some point I think he gets found out and it all goes horribly wrong because he no longer has like the fake idea

and stuff that they gave him. But yeah, I mean that, and it's like that stuff is interesting. But then you it was always important to never be overly sympathetic when you see them struggling. There is an of life. There is certain points where you see the FBI agents struggling because of how like smug he is. You're like, yes, he's struggling, and you like get excited when he gets like when he gets like reprimanded or he you know,

people are like mad at him for various reasons. It very interesting how you like how sympathies get pulled in certain directions, because like, by the end of the game, you definitely have a much fuller perspective on who this guy is and how his kind of psyche works, because he is really in a lot of ways like kind of pathetic as like a person um and he like needs to like hype himself up for himself to like make himself feel like he's special. Then when that gets

broken down, he just completely collapses. M I guess one of the last things I want to talk about is like throughout all of your games you have kind of a through line of like fairy tales. You kind of you bring in fairy tale concepts into all of these games. Um And. I like how a lot of your games are very open ended in some ways. I think that her story being much more open ended than than telling lies in some ways. Um And, I really like that you kind of you can't like look up, like what

is the ending of this game. It's like no, like you have to piece it together in your own brain like that, and whatever you think the story is, that's where it is for you. There's no like definitive ending, especially like especially for her story, um and how this combines with fairy tales. I think it's it's really interesting way to like include like mythology into these more modern stories.

What's kind of your pot process behind you know, kind of kind of including mythology and fairy tales into these more like modern stories of like you know, people interacting with like government, law enforcement, and then just you know, breaking down their own psyches under these heightensed situations. Yeah,

I mean I think it. I think it came initially with her story of yeah, thinking about the kind of meta storytelling nous of these things, right of the expense which their experiments and like how we tell stories, um and but a lot of times, like the myths and the the kind of classic stories that people go to those right to try and understand the bigger questions or certainly like um, I guess partly came out of the

start of first story. I had like two youngest kids, and you're so you're reading them all the classic stories and you realize the extent to which these are just encoding our society's values. Right. But I had this incredible book that was my parents got for me, and I tracked down and made sure we still had when I had my kids. That was called it was like folk tales of the people's of the Soviet Republic from like the early eighties, and it was collected like a lot

of it was. It was Ukrainian folk tales, and they were amazing because they were so dark. Like the message of each of these stories was trust nobody. The rich will always win, you will end up dead and unhappy, right, And each story would start with the poor peasant his brother gets rich, he asks for help. The brother like is horrible. Like there's one story where there's this brother who's like, oh, if you want some grain because you're starving, and then gouge out your own eye and I'll give

you some grain. And then it comes back from more grain later and he's like, gauge out your other eye. Now, chop off your hand. And it's like they're so dark, and I'm like, but this is reflecting what it was like to live in that world and grew up and you're preparing people for the realities. So um, you know, I think that to me was really interesting in and her story tells this story that kind of to some extent,

grows out of this childhood and then we're tell him lies. Definitely, it was part of this idea of of, yeah, how Logan's character David sees the world and relates to his part in it and like his utter inability to realize that he's the bad guy in the story, right, and yeah, he's the good guy. Um. And and that was like that was partly the key to breaking his character. And

it was his daughter. So he has this character who's this six seven year old daughter and that's like, you know, he lets down and does horrible things to a whole

bunch of people. Um, but the thing he's not going to be able to get over is knowing that he's laid his daughter down, right, knowing that at some point she will grow up and be an adult woman who if she learns about what her father has done, we'll we'll think less of him and you know, we'll realize that he's the bad guy in the fairy tale whatever. So um, that was like just interesting to me to set him in that moment and have him reading those

stories and see see his relationship with his daughter. Um and yeah, I think that that ye just relating those things back to what are these these kind of base values, and so much of those foe tales is preparing you for the fact that people are going to lie to you and trick you and you know all those kind of aspects. Yeah. Well a lot of them do deal with, like, you know, failures of trusting people and you know, getting

getting let down and being misled. A lot a lot of those do kind of follow on these same same kind of rough templates. UM, let's see, is there anything you're working on now that you wanna that you wanna plug um, And of course you know people should pick up Telling Lies her story. UM. I have them on Steam. I think they are best suited to be playing on PC, but you can get them on console. We can get

them on iOS. But in any anything anything upcoming. Yeah, we're working on currently this project called Immortality UM which is very ambitious. Uh. It will be out next year. It deals with the story of an actress who only ever made three movies the latter half the twentieth century UM, and then disappeared. And we have recovered footage from these

three movies. UM. It. It's been interesting because with Telling Lies, like, I've always been someone that m when I think about the kinds of stories I want to tell I've always thought that I'm not a capital P politics person, right, I tend to be interested in how people relate to each other and some of the kind of smaller politics.

Um And once I got to telling lies, it was like, oh, actually, like there is some capital P politics tied to all this, and so dug into that was like, well, so I want to do right by this, right, So we did involve speaking to lots of people, didn't involve bringing in all the research and everything. Um So, coming away from telling lies, and as I mean, it was making the game was insane because it was during Trump Trump happens, and I remember going into it thing like we're making

this story about the FBI being bad. That's a pretty reasonable endpoint. And then once we hit Trump, you had all that stuff of like the good FBI agents and theory or the FBI might be the people that bring Trump down and suddenly they it was leaning into the myth of the FBI and I'll stick down it and just everything getting worse, and it was like, oh, this is like so intense to be making something and speaking to some of these issues whilst this is all happening.

Um So, finishing that I was like, well, Okay, for the next project, we are definitely going away from talking about real life issues and capital p politics, and then just accidentally it's become because we're talking about an actress in the twentieth century and what it means to make movies, and ah, digging into that suddenly becomes about a whole other bunch of systemic issues. So yeah, not not managed to avoid the politics again, but it's it's been a

really really interesting project. I think. I think once you crack that egg open of realizing that politics are kind of intrinsic to every story we tell, it's hard to hand. It's hard to kind of put that back in the box. Because once you realize you can use politics and a very interesting and calm storytelling way that still doesn't relily need a lot of audiences, it's like, oh, yeah, this is just using another way to interact with the world. I think that was that was one of the things

that were slightly disappointing. I guess We're telling lies was like we were working on it, I'm like, well, to make sure we get these things right, because like, these are very important issues and there are some nuances, and so we you know, we don't want to accidentally say something that is incorrect, or we don't want to give people the impression that we're you know, yeah yeah, yeah wrong.

So I was expecting some level of scrutiny in terms of discussing the games themes and everything, um, and I guess like the video games world is still not quite ready for that. Like they're quite happy to talk about the game mechanics and how this thing will work since a big picture emotional responses, but no one's willing to

kind of dig deeper. And we had like as the game was coming out and continues to be, you have the bigger name developers being like there's no politics and our video games as they're like invading make a game about you know, being a black Ops unit taking down communist countries. We're not gonna abou politics. We're gonna yeah that constantly a constantly just saying it's it's possible, and they'll always say we we both sides it right, Well, we'll tell both sides and let people make the decision.

And something that I was very adamant was very imported to me on telling lies was like, if we're making this game, it is not the point of the game is not to give you a mush of information and have you decide the moral yeah, you know, good or bad?

Something like. We are going into this with the assumption that we and the audience or most of the audience believe that people doing these things are wrong, and then we're just And then I'm interested in what does it due to the people, What what is it like to be in this world? What are the consequences of ramifications? How does one exist, ist and continue to live a life after having been involved in these things? So, for me, a political game is it can't be a political story

in any media. It can't be going back to first principles pretending we're in debate club, because I just I think that's just that's absolutely lies the audience. I think you can say a political story is one which embraces and acknowledges the reality of the various power struggles and inequalities that we have and and then has something to say about or has a particular angle it wants to interrogate,

or something it wants to shed light on. Um. But it's very childish and I think we're definitely struggling with

this in video games. To be like, oh, if it's about politics, then it should be a big question and we should assume no answers, right, And it's like, yeah, this is a completely bullshit and and it kind of it can lead to some problematic ways, which is why you see a lot of you know, game footage in actual like terrorist propaganda, like with like like with like Nazi the white supremacist stuff, they use a lot of game footage in their propaganda videos when especially when it's

like both sides of these issues. Yeah, it's a I have have a particular interest in the intersection between politics, extremism, and gaming because the gaming is very important to our modern kind of extremist ecosystem um, particularly around like four Chan and like you know, like mass shootings. All of these things play into game culture. Not not not saying games cause these events to happen, they don't, but like the way they interact with these people is actually interesting. You know.

This is very different from like the way like this Senate is like, oh, games are causing mas shooting because they're not. Yeah, I think it's it's it's it's it's it's it's a completely separate thing. It's it's there is there is a Fox News kind of hysteria around gaming. But at the same time, like and and clearly, you know, one way I pitched her story when I was telling people why it was interesting, it's like, this is a

game about listening. I was like, that's cool because, you know, whatever you think about the larger politics of it, or the question of whether video games themselves are inherently MPLO or anything, like, the fact that's still the stories we tell are about someone with a gun in their hand or assorting their hand, and the power dynamics and the story, the types of stories and the types of protagonists, Like,

it's screwed up. And I think to the same extent that the fact that, like the Marvel Cinematic Universe is about a bunch of glorified cops going around saying the world like, you know, if you continue to reinforce these things, Yeah, all of the art we make are saying certain things about the world, and we're reinforcing a certain narrative over and over again and not really thinking critically about it. Yeah, that's the problem with making art. I mean, I'm not

trying to conference being anti gamer. I would play a lot of games. I really like gaming. I just think some some companies need to figure out why why certain games are used in mass shooting manifestoes in certain games aren't um particularly around like politics like this is a particularly particularly talking about like white supremacy and how certain

games kind of playing too certain things. Because even even a game like Wolf in Stein, which I think handles this topic very well, still will you know, get brought up in certain you know, propaganda videos because they do have cool shots and Nazis walking around, right, that's the kind of the problem with some of these things. Um And you know, if they weren't killing if Nazis weren't killing people as much as wouldn't be as much of a problem. But because that's still a thing, that's still

a thing that needs to get talked about. Anyway, this this this took a very sad sad turned towards the end of anyway. Yeah, I but I will I will just strongly recommend playing her story, playing telling lies. I think these games, you know, interrogate our our predispositions about about kind of police detective work. Um and you just

get to learn a lot. You get to learn a lot about like people on characters because like a lot of these games, you know, are the setup is like, oh, solve this crime or mystery, but then by the end you're solving a very different mystery and you're kind of solving what makes the person tick. And it's very You've I really like the ark that you have in your games. They've brought me a lot of happiness. So thank you.

Thank you for that, and thank you for talking with all of us, um about your work, I mean doing it. Thank you, thank you for having me and uh yeah, like I say, I was, I was hoping to have hundreds more conversations about what Telling Lies was about and about these issues when it came out. But it's uh, you know that, it's I mean, it's hot just general media landscape now, like you put something out there and it comes out and people consume it, Yeah, move on,

Like you don't have that. It's bad of like discussion that that. I don't know, it feels like it used to used to be a thing. Yeah, I think it definitely did. It used to be a thing. And definitely your games have had an influence on media in certain ways. And I know there's been like a few other like projects that like Netflix is doing that is kind of taking your concept but not really doing it correctly. Yeah, they're coming now. Yeah, there's definitely been a lot. Yeah.

People always send me them. They're like, oh, this sounds a lot like a story, this thing, and it's like, oh, but it's it's built non linear. Yeah, exactly like you let people don't ye. Usually it's like watch there are eight episodes. You can watch them in any order, which isn't how her story works. No, Yeah, like, yeah, there's there's a Yeah, there's a whole different thing going on. But no, I mean it's it's interesting times for that sort of stuff. But anyway, play these games on Steam

and that that doesn't for today. You can follow the show on Twitter and Instagram at Happening here, pod and cool Zone Media. Do you have Do you have a social media that you would like to plug or would your people if people are on Twitter, that's where I tend to be despite its Yeah, I know I am. I am Mr Sambalo on Twitter, Ma Sambal. I will say I I actually actually do like your Twitter account. You do? You do post some fun stuff every once

in a while. That's that's kind of a weird contescen thing we think to say of anyway, Bye for Punny. It Could Happen Here as a production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool zone Media, visit our website cool zone media dot com, or check us out on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It could Happen Here, updated monthly at cool zone Media dot com slash sources. Thanks for listening.