The Full Motion Video game (FMV) carries a lot of unfortunate genre baggage. This is due in no small part to Sega's notorious 1992 "interactive movie," Night Trap - an ill-received title for the Sega CD that put players in the role of a surveillance agent tasked with monitoring and protecting a group of teenage girls trapped in a house under siege by home invaders. Nearly all of the game's shortcomings drew back, in some way, to its fully-filmed, live-action presentation. Night Trap was leery, voyeuristic, and painfully cheesy, but the single most common complaint leveled against Sega's C-movie CD flop was that it wasn't much of a game at all. Its interactive mechanics amounted to the ability to switch between multiple camera views inside the house as the events of the night play out for the viewer in real time as live-action, filmed segments. The player can make slight interventions at crucial moments if they've been tuned in to the right camera feed, but watching in real-time remains the principal activity. After all, there isn't much you can do to disrupt a pre-recorded scene. The oppressive linearity of live-action footage seemed simply incompatible with the game form, and the gimmick was largely rejected.
Her Story, published independently in 2015 by writer/developer Sam Barlow, bears the same FMV trappings as its clumsy predecessor, but turns them from set pieces into puzzle pieces. Barlow's game is ostensibly a detective story: it opens on a first-person view of a computer desktop, the screen partially filled by a program window for a searchable police database. The word "murder" is already entered in the search bar, and once the player clicks the search button, the database returns four video results showing the same young woman in each of the thumbnails. Upon watching these videos (and exploring the desktop a bit), it becomes clear that you're viewing excerpts from a series of police interviews regarding the murder of a man named Simon. The video clips are of varying length, ranging from a few seconds to over a minute each, and a timestamp in the upper right hand corner indicates that they are also from varying days and times - the clips are not presented in the order they were filmed, but all depict seemingly one-sided interrogations with the same woman. If the player clicks on a .txt file labelled "README" on the in-game desktop, they can read a note explaining how the search engine functions, but it's also entirely possible for this mechanic to be intuited following the player's (presumed) curiosity. Essentially, the police database to which the player has been granted access contains an archive of all of the segmented video clips collected during the alluded-to murder investigation. By reading another .txt file on the desktop, or comparing the year on the desktop clock to the timestamps of the videos (or making note of the aesthetically dated operating system), the player quickly infers that the game takes place in the modern day, and you are playing as someone looking back at an old investigation from 1994.
The game's central mechanic revolves around digging up videos from the archive in order to piece together the story behind this murder, as it is explained through the woman's tense conversations with the police. It doesn't take long to find out that they hold her as a suspect. Each video seems to point to information that you don't yet have, and it becomes clear that what you are seeing are fragments of longer rolls of footage. The "incomplete" nature of each clip prompts the player to search for its continuation, or otherwise some follow-up on the pertinent topics that only receive enough mention to pique curiosity. In one of the first four videos returned by the initial "Murder" search for instance, the woman not only references the deceased man by name, but also casually mentions his former occupation, place of business, and the month when the death occurred. The player recognizes these as "plot-relevant" words, proper nouns that invite their own respective searches in the database. Text-based puzzle games have always required the player to get inside the head of the developer in order to suss out a kind of operative vocabulary - "what would the developer have thought to include as a valid input?" These new searches lead to more videos and more words that begin to pop out as jarringly suspect candidates for the next search query - "pregnancy," "fight," and "money." The more details emerge, the more keywords the player adds to their investigative vocabulary.
It's important to note that the search function does not act as a direct answer to the player's presumed questions and often returns unexpected results. Each video is logged in the database according to its transcript, which manifests in-game as the captions transcribing the woman's responses to the unseen interviewer's questions. The database's search engine will return a video clip as a result of a search if the searched keyword appears anywhere in the video transcript, regardless of the context, and will only display the top four results of any given search. This means that a player can be searching for information regarding a knife referenced in one video, only to be distracted by a new thread for investigation found in a video where the word "knife" is only mentioned as a largely irrelevant detail. Because the number of search results is limited, the player must continue to refine their search criteria and constantly be looking for new possible jumping-off points if they want to uncover new clips. It's very easy to find yourself falling down a rabbit-hole of suspicious words in Her Story, a trail of associations and unexpected tangents that resembles the experience of bouncing from Wikipedia article to Wikipedia article when following a chain of hyperlinked text. Trees of investigation branch out broader and broader when accidental discoveries provoke divergence from the original path. To make navigation easier, the game allows players to save clips to their "session" (a personal "bookmarked" bar that can be accessed at any time) or add customizable tags to clips so the player can group them based on their own criteria.
As the player continues to coax new clips from the archival database, they gather more and more context about the woman's relationships, upbringing, and identity, but there is never any authorial voice confirming or denying the connections that the player puts together. In fact, the game doesn't really have a win condition, per se - the archive does contain a finite number of video clips, but any of them could hypothetically be accessed at any time, in any order, even stumbled upon by accident. There are no secret clips to be unlocked, and there is no "test" to ensure that you've properly solved the mystery. The only resolution that the game provides for you comes in the form of a question- once you've viewed a certain percentage of the video logs, a chat window pops up and your friend (whom we find out has been waiting outside the police station where you're doing your research) asks you if you feel like you have enough information to understand what happened. Though his address to you does implicitly reveal one specific, smaller narrative twist (no spoilers here!), it leaves the larger "why" and "how" questions unanswered. If you respond "yes," (that is, you feel that you understand what happened) the game ends. If you respond "no," you'll get to dive right back into your searching.
The fact that Her Story doesn't afford its players a coded-in narrative conclusion only further highlights the fact that it doesn't offer its players a coded-in narrative trajectory at all. It presents the player with an archive of open information and gives them the tools to access the raw materials, but doesn't supply a decoder ring to give these bare data points meaning. In fact, it is only when these clips are put in conversation with each other - when they are viewed one after another, out of sequence, then reviewed, then re-shuffled - that meaning begins to emerge in the space between them. The diligent researcher following a trail of seemingly unrelated clips is not just engaging with the externalized mechanics of searching, browsing, and watching; they are also participating in a completely internal process of meaning making, of constructing sense and narrative out of independently senseless morsels. If the player was a director in Night Trap, they are an editor in Her Story. And just as a film editor exerts a creative influence over the narrative that they stitch together, so too does Her Story's player participate in creating the very story they experience. Which details connect with which others and which plot points begin to solidify first all depend on the unique route that the player's curiosities lead them to take. The story definitely has narrative twists, but what triggers the "aha!" moment will differ from player to player - spoilers do not exist in any one clip itself, but in the mental montage that the player performs with each new discovery. The game operates on a model of success that is purely determined by the player's satisfaction with their own level of understanding. Unlike detective games such as Ace Attorney or Danganronpa, Her Story does not impose the threat of a test upon its players at the end of their investigation. Rather, it mobilizes the itch of curiosity as its own gameplay mechanic, and presents narrative satisfaction as its own reward.
Barlow's FMV game manages to skirt the tyranny of filmic linearity specifically because its presentation is so atemporal. Unlike Night Trap, Her Story treats its live-action clips as inert, archaeological objects to be interacted with at the player's own pace. They can be rewatched, rewound, and reordered, but there is no pretense of being able to change them. Rather than trying to use live-action footage as a tool for heightened immersion in the present, Her Story acknowledges that filmic events can only ever exist as windows to the past.
Comments