065LIVE-ACTION GAMES
exactly went wrong on an FBI Agent’s undercover
mission. The database can only list five videos at a
time, though, taking you to the point in the video
where the word you searched for appears.
Like Flavourworks did with Erica, Barlow found
the live-action nature of images and the non-
traditional gameplay made Telling Lies approachable
to just about anyone, no matter their amount of
gaming experience. “It’s like Googling. You know
how to Google. You get to just explore these clips,
like they’ve seen [on] TV shows where a cop
is sat in front of a computer searching through a
database to find that little clue that will save the
case,” says Barlow, “whereas, you know, like a game
like Uncharted is incredibly cinematic, but your job
in that game is to be a stuntman, right? You have to
be the person that runs the character through the
exploding street, jumps at the right time, lands in
the right place, turns and shoots the guy in the head.
Like that is a lot of pressure. [...] That combination
of [the live-action] genre, the look of it, the context
of what you’re doing, is all very welcoming to people
who are not necessarily gamers or are lapsed gamers.
That’s a really cool thing.”
OPEN SEASON
“I think the reason I ended up at video was because
I was thinking about character performances, and
emotions, and storytelling. And that led me to, ‘Oh,
if I do this with live action, it’s going to feel more
authentic,’” says Barlow. “But I’m already thinking
of this game framework where it’s not important
to have a frame-by-frame response. And I’m in a
world where I’m not trying to create this systemic
explorable world.” But that didn’t mean he wanted
to make something linear. In a sense, Barlow still
thinks of his games
as being open world.
“I make the comparison
to Metroid in that what
is cool about a Metroid
game is you’re exploring
this world, and the
backtracking where you
revisit rooms is about
building a mental map
of the space,” he says.
“Similarly, with [Telling Lies], as you learn things
about these characters, as you learn simple things
like character names and stuff, that gives you access
to parts of the story. When you rewatch things from
a different perspective, now you have gained insight
and knowledge of what’s actually happening.”
These clues can lead you to make further
discoveries by searching the database, and as you
play it genuinely feels like you’re uncovering what
happened yourself. “You’re watching the story, but
you’re also thinking and planning what you’re going
to type next and putting the pieces together. There
was a neat thing where the gameplay and the story
were kind of the same thing,” says Barlow. “Like if
I’m thinking ‘What does this character really mean?
And who is this person she’s talking about? Oh, how
did they first meet?’ That is both a story thing and
it’s a gameplay thing, and there’s enough frequency
of me typing stuff and thinking things and clicking
things that actually, just on a physical level, I’m still
engaged in this game, it’s not really about sitting
back and watching.”BACK TO BASICS
Using live-action actors helps to sell the idea that
you’re really peeking into other peoples’ lives, but
to Barlow the way the game plays make it the
opposite of a film. “I remember pitching it to Logan
[Marshall-Green, who stars], and I think he loved
this as an anti-movie, right?” he says. [In Telling
Lies] “These conversations are longer and more
sprawling and have moments of silence and have
people not speaking and have this texture to them
that is not what you could get away with in a movie.”
“My big sticking point was, as someone that was
really interested in telling character-driven stories,
the more I’d worked with actors, the more it felt
like – this isn’t obviously rocket science – but like
trying to tell a story about characters having the
character performance in there is a big part,” he says.
And to avoid his budget skyrocketing on complex
animation, it made sense to do it on film. “[For my
first project] one of the things I said: was, ‘I will get
rid of the 3D exploration. I’ll come up with a game
idea where I’m not reliant on being present in a 3D
space and how immersive that is, but what happens
if I get rid of that?’ And then the other thing I was
frustrated with was, so I wanted to make a game
with no systems, nothing systemic in it.”BETWEEN THE LINES
Barlow might owe his conversation-searching style
to real-life tragedy. “When I very first had the idea,
I thought ‘Oh shit, I’m gonna have to create the
most complicated flowchart to figure out how this
game works.’ But then I found a series of police
interview transcriptions,
[from] this real-life
case online in text
format,” says Barlow.
“So I grabbed these,
and I stuck them in
the game. Or in a
very crude version of
the game that I think
I made in like Excel
with Excel macros.
And I played this real-life transcript of the series
of interviews with this kid who was accused of
murdering his parents. And it was super-interesting
because it actually played okay.”
Playing through his hastily created morbid
database to test if the idea for the gameplay could
work resulted in a success. “I knew nothing about
this case, I just dumped this stuff into my prototype.
I noticed that this kid kept talking about money,
right? They would ask him questions about ‘What
are you doing this summer?’ And he’d be like, ‘Oh,
me and my girlfriend were gonna go on a trip but
I haven’t got enough money.’ ‘What are you doing
tomorrow?’ And he’s like, ‘Oh, I need to go to the
bank’. And like, there was this subtext that kept
coming up. And you know, I would then search for
words to do with money: cash, bank, money, loan,
whatever. And it became clear this was like a subtext
throughout the whole thing,” says Barlow. “And then
I go and look online and turns out this kid“J U S T O N A
PHYSICAL LEVEL,
I’M STILL ENGAGED
IN THIS GAME.”