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Sam Barlow - Gamelab VR 2021 Interview

In Gamereactor's very first interview in virtual reality we talk to renowned writer and bad-haircut Sam Barlow. In the video, and through his digital avatar, we hear Half Mermaid Productions' head talk about the value official archives can provide to video game creators and, of course, about his previous and future games, including Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, Her Story, Telling Lies, or the still mysterious Project Ambrosio.

Audio transcription

"Alright, so, hello Gamereactor friends, we are here at Gamelab Live 2021, this very special virtual reality encounter that we are having in April, way before the annual conference in June."

"First of all, of course, this is special because of the environment, it's pandemic times and this is probably one of the most unique ways to gather together and to talk about several things including archives and video games and we are joined by Sam Barlow, so thank you so much for joining us."

"It's great to be here, yeah, the VR gives us some novelty, it's the first time I've not had to worry about my Zoom background of being judged on my lack of haircut, so I tried to pick out an avatar, but I picked out an avatar that had as bad a haircut as I currently have in the real life, so."

"Alright, your panel was just some minutes ago and at the very end of it you were mentioning how archives and national archives and developers getting access to those was already inspiring you in how to use data for, for example, story-based games, so what can you tell us about that inspiration and how these archives can help developers going forward?
Yeah, so I think certainly when I started making Her Story and then with Telling Lies and my current Unnamed project, like a lot of what I've been doing has been figuring out how do you tell stories in the digital world, so I think so much has been transformed by digital technology and the way in which we get information and process information is a big part of that, right?
You know, 20 years ago if I was in a bar and had a question, unless I knew the answer I couldn't think about it, now everybody reaches for their phones and everybody is like five links deep in Google, so we have all this information around us and we're so used to now kind of navigating it and if we have questions we dig into those questions, and so my work as a storyteller has been figuring out how do you tell a story that way, like if you give over control to the player, how does the story work in that world and I think, you know, talking to the archivists today was very interesting because we're kind of sit, you know, occupying the same space, they have these vast repositories of information and knowledge and artifacts that contain all sorts of wonderful narratives and their job is to figure out how to structure it, how to organize it, what tools to give people so that they can kind of uncover those stories, because I think, you know, a large repository of information is just information, but if you can organize it correctly then it can, you know, create something much more meaningful to us, so that was, you know, that was pretty interesting. I think as well, like the games I've been making when I went independent, one of the big things that I wanted to do differently was to really invest in the writing and the research process, so, you know, normally for a big video game when the game starts being developed there are lots of team members, everybody is working and so as a writer you're kind of writing the story whilst somebody's building this part of it and these game mechanics are getting finalized and when I went and made her story I gave myself 50% of the development time to just think and research and so I went very deep pulling up transcripts of different police interviews and archives and court cases, going to the British Library and accessing various historical police training manuals, getting access to various academic texts, which was very interesting to me because there is a lot, so for example in the UK you can't get access to all the archived interviews that the police have done because clearly there is a privacy question there, but some people in the academic world had been able to access 30 years of transcripts and had gone through a process of anonymizing them so that they could use them in their research, so there was a lot of work that had been done in the academic space that gave me access to a lot of kind of really useful perspective and actual content that very strictly kind of inspired how I ended up kind of creating her story. So definitely for me like I think there's, you know, one of the hardest things to do as a game developer is to come up with ideas and I really believe that research is almost like a cheat, like it's a really good way of finding ideas and you know the deeper you dig and the more interesting, you know, less known things you find, the more likely you are to come back up with some interesting ideas for your story and your game mechanics and your narrative and so yeah this has been a very kind of interesting conversation today. A lot of things to talk about but we have limited time, but it's very interesting what you mentioned about documenting yourself and the way you spent, I think you mentioned almost half of the time of her story development just in that process of investigation and documenting yourself, is that the same approach you're taking for the next game you're developing, this unannounced project or how would you say it differs from her story and Telling Lies and in the way you're approaching the development process? Yeah, I mean I think with every game in this style the scale has increased, so for example on Telling Lies we brought in a researcher so that was the first time I'd explicitly had someone come in whose job was just to go off and do the research because with that game we were digging into, we were inspired by some real life stories but we wanted to create our version and make sure it was authentic so we did a lot of research into the history of the FBI in America and the way they policed subversion."

"You have really interesting questions, when we chose to set the game in America, obviously America's a very big place so you have interesting questions like well what town is this taking place in and then the researcher goes away and comes back with interesting demographics and specific details and so it's just lots of very useful tools. So the current game deals specifically with some events that occur in 1968, 1970 and 1999."

"So again there has been a very large research effort into digging into these events and finding details from, and the game deals with the film industry, so from what is, what technical aspects can we talk about, so what was the film process being used here, what types of lights and cameras, what was the infrastructure that was happening on this particular film shoot, but then what was going on in society at the time, what was going on around it, and all of these are, I just find the more research you do, you find things that are less common. I think anyone can sit in a room and brainstorm and I've found with some of these bigger brainstorms, if everybody saw the same movie six months ago, it's had just enough time to sink into their brains and so somebody will be, I don't know, oh we should we should do something, I don't know, but I remember when The Matrix came out, everybody wanted to do matrixy stuff, right, and when enough time has passed, someone will be like, well what if we do an idea about a character who's a hacker that can do these cool things, and everyone's like, oh that's a really cool idea, because they just enjoyed that idea, but then you end up with lots of things that are very samey, lots of ideas that are less authentic, whereas for me, if you take your research seriously, you can dig deeper and you find more specific things, more authentic things, and that directly kind of feeds back into the game itself and how that works."

"You say the next project is unannounced, you don't know, I don't know if you can share any details on when, can we learn more about it, if you have a production window or if fans of your previous projects can look forward to a specific date and type of game. Yeah, I mean, we were hoping to have shared more at this point, and there's the whole strategic game of what is happening with game shows and COVID, and that has kind of tweaked some of our schedule, so we're definitely going to reveal more this year."

"Yeah, we have a very mysterious Steam page that is currently up that hints at a lot, but also hides a lot, so that's like a fun thing people can look at, but yeah, we're hopefully going to reveal more soon, and I think it's going to unite the people that know me through the Silent Hill games I did, the people that know me through her story, this is a fusion of those worlds, it has horror elements, but it also has this kind of non-linear mystery set up. It's really nice that you mentioned that, I'm one of the former actually, I know you left Climax some years ago to, as you just said, to go independent and to create these different games, including full motion video, etc., but I hold Silent Hill's sad memories very close to me, very dear. To me it was a game changer in terms of narrative, not only branching, but also the way the world keeps changing according to your choices, and also I played it on the Wii back then, it introduced some physical feedback to the actions in-game, which is something we are seeing now for example here in VR, totally implemented in other games and experiences. So looking back all these years, looking back at sad memories, how do you feel about it? How do you feel about the cult following in God, and how you guys were trying out some narrative devices that we've seen expanded in games after that one?
Oh sorry, I lost your last question there, I don't know if that's my connection."

"Yeah, I mean it's very interesting because it was definitely, to some extent, it was a VR game before this current version of VR, right, and it was I think also a game that would have benefited from modern social media, because I think something that was really important to us was we were doing a very different take on branching narrative, right, and that we weren't creating a kind of choose-your-own-adventure, it wasn't about choice and consequence, and it wasn't about like play this game 20 times to get the optimal ending, the goal was that everyone that played it would get a very personal specific experience, and a lot of the changes that happened in the game world were changes that were made kind of, not secretly, but like they were being made by the game as a storyteller attempting to customize the story around the player. So I think that was like a very cool thing, but at the time no one really had the ability to discuss that, right, like I think if it came out now they'd love to share like, oh this was my version, and like oh this is completely different to what you got, and I think that would then give value to that because you would all have ownership over your specific route through the game, and I think you saw that very differently, but like when her story came out, people got very animated in their discussion of what the story meant and what had happened, because everyone had a slightly different take on it. So I think, yeah, we were doing a few things there that were slightly ahead of where the rest of the world was, but it's really interesting actually, whenever I do talks, especially in the Spanish-speaking world, there is always somebody waiting at the end with a copy of Shadow of Memory."

"People that did play it definitely had, you know, really enjoyed playing it, but I've been thinking about it lots because we're currently working on, so we have a co-made Project Ambrosio, which is the project that's currently being teased, but we've started work on a second project which is more directly a spiritual successor to Shadow of Memories, and that partly came out of, if her story was, you know, I spent three years before her story working on a Legacy of Pain game, a Soul Reaver game that got cancelled, and her story was kind of my reaction to some of the frustrations of the AAA game in terms of what kinds of stories we could tell and just wanting to explore something more experimental and pushing different ideas."

"I think now, like, enough time has passed that, like, if I look back at Shadow of Memories and I play other modern third-person games, I still feel a sense of like, oh, there are some really interesting directions that have not gone explored, and I think there's this wonderful emerging, I guess people call it the AA space, games like Hellblade, Control, that are not necessarily kind of, you know, naughty dog budget, they're not Grand Theft Auto, but there's enough content and production values there that we can tell these character-based stories and kind of dig into them, which is, you know, the kind of space we were playing in Shadow of Memories, so we're really keen to kind of revisit some of those ideas, but it's been interesting because, you know, thinking about what has changed instead of what hasn't changed, and, you know, at the time, one of the most shocking things about Shadow of Memories was that we got rid of combat. For sure, yeah. I think we were one of the first games where you had to just run away from the bad guys, because they were scary, and that's, so it's interesting now that that's almost the standard for horror games now, is you have that, so we're really thinking like, well, what is an interesting direction to go here now that some of these things have become a bit rote, how do we adjust to that, but I think we're really going deep on this idea of the the world transformations of light, because I think that was, for me as a writer, like one of the more interesting things, and I think the stuff that I've done since with Horror Story and Telling Lies and the current project in exploring these non-linear narratives, these kind of stories that are more player-driven and explorable, I think that is, you know, there's some synergy there, so I'm really interested in seeing, like, what does a third-person narrative game look like if we have some of the freedom that we have in a horror story to kind of really kind of go forward with the narrative and give players freedom, so yeah, that will be a few years out, but I look forward to that. If there are any Unreal developers out there that would be interested in working on it, we're staffing up. Okay, well, make sure to mention that, be sure I would have been one of those guys with the physical copy of Saturn Memories, but we are in this virtual world, I cannot have it here, and perhaps the Spanish community is very interested because of this inspiration by Luis Buñuel, which you've been quoted about several times, so thank you so much for your time, Sam, we'll be looking forward to that new project and whatever comes next, and thank you for your time. Thank you, good to hang out in this virtual space. Bye."

Gamelab

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