Edge - UK (2020-10)

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something beautiful. Perhaps I shouldn’t have

laughed in 2015 when a business development

executive asked why I hadn’t implemented

a stamina mechanic in Her Story.

So where can we go from here? It’s easy.

First, we have the world’s trendiest tech giant

agree and proselytise that games are

worthwhile entertainment for adults. The

majority of people who buy phones are

grownups, so let’s tell them stories about

their lives. If Scorsese’s R-rated The Irishman

and its CGI is worth $160 million of Netflix’s

money, let’s see Silicon Valley get behind

a narrative medium that is even more aligned

with the software and hardware that

underpins its empire. If its tech can bring us

closer together, help us find a mate, capture

our memories, improve our mental and

physical health, surely it can also help us tell

each other our stories? Next: Apple starts

in-house game development. Just as Sony

spends big bucks for the bragging rights and

system-selling prestige of the Last Of Us Part

II, we see the hardware manufacturer set the

pace. This has always been the way – it’s the

in-house teams that have broken the ground

and set the quality bar whether it’s Nintendo,

Sega, Xbox or PlayStation.

At this point, Apple’s reading the room

and it’s time to turn off the golden faucet and

take a stand against the uncapped money suck

of the free-to-play economy. Games should

not be everlasting gobstoppers. This is a hard

one, but imagine a road-to-Damascus

conversion moment that comes from

someone very important thinking about what

happened to the tobacco industry. During

their regular morning meditation they ask,

“What if we’re the bad guys?” They know

they make their money from selling hardware,

so do they really need to rip off their loyal

customers by selling access to their wallets to

hucksters? Now we hit the tipping point. The

world is ready for the next step in interactive

storytelling. The streaming services and

generic set-top boxes are scrambling to get

there, but are held back by legacy hardware

and platforms. Apple though? It’s ready to

deliver. It has the hardware, the software and

the dev teams! It drops something new to its

1.5 billion users. A game that uses the power

and nuance of touch to drive a story,

interactive and dynamic in ways that melds it

to every player’s heart. It connects the global

community in a way we’ve never seen before.

Every phone screen becomes a magical

window into the soul. Humanity levels up.

Daydreaming to get through a global

pandemic? Guilty as charged.

T

his year has been like wading through

a tsunami of sewer levels. Even so, last

month a couple of events in particular

left a bad taste in my mouth – if only because

they underscored the tightrope walked by

narrative game developers. First was the news

that Apple, having corralled ‘premium’ mobile

games into the family-friendly walled-garden-

within-a-walled-garden of Apple Arcade, was

turning away from (read: cancelling) self-

contained games to focus on those that hooked

subscribers with maximal engagement and

infinite replayability. Soon after this came

word that the developer of the free-to-play

narrative app Lovestruck was dumping its

freelance writing staff after they organised to

improve their pay and working conditions.

Both of these cases highlighted that our most

usefully ubiquitous and accessible videogame

machine suffers under a marketplace that all

but makes it impossible to tell a story.

Why do I care? I care because I love the

idea of people using the devices that never

leave their sides, the devices that they use to

call, message and mail their friends and

family, the devices that wake them up in the

morning, to play narrative games. In 2007,

when I worked on the unnecessary prequel

Silent Hill: Origins for the PSP, the biggest

question we had to answer was: could you

have an atmospheric horror game on mobile?

On a small screen? On the go? You could. I’d

sit and play the game in bed with headphones

and scare the bejeezus out of myself. I was

intoxicated by playing a game like that so

intimately. It was like curling up with a book.

I evangelised that mobile gaming was the

future. It didn’t need to be casual and

disposable, it could be personal and immersive.

The golden age of iPhone gaming would bear

this out. I held the world in my hand and

explored its endless stories in 80 Days. I

crunched my way through snow and folklore

in Year Walk, then explored a story whose text

was its own map in Device 6. In Blackbar, I

uncensored my way through an epistolary

story. I thought this was the beginning of

If tech can bring us closer

together, help us find a mate,

surely it can also help us tell

each other our stories?

DISPATCHES

PERSPECTIVE

Unreliable Narrator

SAM BARLOW

Exploring stories in games and the art of telling tales

Sam Barlow is the founder of NYC-based Half Mermaid

Productions. He can be found on Twitter at @mrsambarlow