We need to change our definition of interactivity

Can watching video feel more intimate — or more engaging — than playing a game? In this interview excerpt, Sam Barlow and Justin McElroy explore what makes players and viewers feel like they are making their mark on media.

This interview was done in September 2024 as part of the release of our documentary The Great Game: The Making of Spycraft, about one of the most ambitious FMV games of the ’90s. Watch the full interview above.

Justin McElroy: Early on, a lot of FMV was undone by people who made video games wanting to make movies instead. I think there was a legitimacy they were going for there. I think what you did with Her Story, it sounds like you got to by thinking about mechanics first, and then video was the right fit for that, rather than, We have this ability to put video in something. How can we layer video game mechanics on top of it? which is very much what you see with Sewer Shark. But it sounds like part of the secret sauce with a lot of your games is this lack of changing what you are interacting with. The freedom to just let it be something that you are exploring with very limited “progression.”

Sam Barlow: I think at some point it is terrifying because you’re like, Wait a minute, isn’t this the stupidest idea? We’re taking this medium that ostensibly is about simulation; it’s “what can we program and simulate in a computer?” And then you’re building that out of something that is entirely fixed. But again, it gets really interesting as a game designer. You go, How much are we using the systemic element?

Take Uncharted. Uncharted has so much clever systemic stuff that goes into moment-to-moment making that character animate beautifully, and make it feel like you’re in control of them. But then structurally, all you can do with that character is jump on that one pipe, and when you jump on that one pipe, it will break and fall for everybody, dropping you into the marketplace in a surprising Indiana Jones-esque sequence. So you’re like, Well, OK, you’ve harnessed this technology, which is extremely fluid, but you’re using it to drive me into a single point.

So actually the thing that gets me is, What are you doing with me as a human being? I think there is a whole school of video games that’s about making me feel involved, which is cool, which is what Uncharted is doing. And it’s what all the examples people cite of Half-Life — we put this light here, and we put this yellow trim here, so that although you think you’re in charge of what you’re doing, all players will walk towards this door from this angle, whatever. So there’s that thing of, the interactivity is a mood enhancer and an atmosphere booster that is being used to juice up these very linear experiences.

But then the thing I’m really interested in is, well, if this is an interactive experience, shouldn’t it matter who’s playing the game? And I want to create things where if 20 different people sit down and play it, they’re getting 20 different experiences, and not necessarily because it’s entirely sandbox-y, right? Not to say in the way that something like Minecraft is expressive, because people are going and building stuff. But more in the case of, it’s not just that they’re making different choices and getting different results but, especially in the case of Her Story, the blanks they’re filling in with their imagination is actually the thing that’s really boosting the sense of uniqueness. And I think that is the very perverse contradiction at the heart of Her Story. It’s live action, so we have these very specific, realistic fixed chunks of content. So there’s nothing you can change about that. You can’t change the clothes Viva’s wearing, you can’t look at it from a different angle. You can’t do all the things we would normally think of. But because I’m never showing the detectives speaking, because you come to these clips from different directions and different contexts, the actual story that you’re telling yourself of Her Story is so derived from your own imagination, and inferences, and context, and personal knowledge that it becomes incredibly personal. I made this thing that’s very static but feels more engaging.

McElroy: Immortality, too. I would almost say it was revealing. It felt intimate to play in a strange way. When the characters would look at me, it felt more vulnerable, I think, because I did have the freedom to look at and interact with what I wanted to in the moment.

Barlow: Intimacy is a thing I’ve talked about a lot, and I realized during the making of Her Story and then Telling Lies, and I think Immortality came out of this a little bit, was the process of making film is really neat. And the bit where you’re in the suite with the editor and you’re reviewing footage and you are watching and rewatching little bits, you’re trying to choose: Which take do we go with? Which frame do we want to cut out of here? And you are obsessing over the eyes of the actors and their facial expressions. That’s so intimate! Digesting a performance at that level. And it’s so human, and it’s so interesting to just be realizing how much is happening on that level. And I was like, That’s what these games are letting you do. To some extent, traditional cinema is so wasteful! You get these incredible performances and they fly over your head 24 frames a second! And obviously now you can pause if you want. But traditionally, you’d sit in a cinema and this thing would move you deeply and fly past your head, but only the sort of real cinema nerds and people studying film would get to sit and really dig into things with that level of intimacy. And I think it’s really cool. And if you have a frame[work] where that isn’t breaking the suspension of disbelief — it’s very easy in Her Story going, Hey, it’s a police database computer, there’s a reason you’re pulling clips up and watching them again and again.

And Immortality, it’s slightly vaguer, but there is ostensibly the sort of framing of film footage and the editor’s POV and reviewing things which justifies why you are able to stop time and rewind things. So once you’ve got that out of the way, then you can just really kind of revel in that sort of intimacy. And that is, like I say, it’s very personalized. It’s why I kind of think of these games as being more novelistic than cinematic, because novels exist mostly in your head. It’s an individual thing. I sit with a book and I read it on my own. I’m turning the pages at my own pace, it’s coming alive in my head. So much is subjective and relies on me sort of filtering through my brain. And I think that’s what these games do is give you this sense of: There isn’t the constant motion of time. The arrow of time is not constant. You can stop and think, you can sit back and just mull on things and then you can drop in, and you have that ability to turn back pages and sort of reread passages and things. So I think for me, the really cool thing is actually going, These feel more novelistic than necessarily cinematic, which is sort of the phrase that we’re always going for with even normal video games, right? Oh wow, it felt like I was playing a movie! This thing felt so cinematic!

McElroy: So you want to further complicate the taxonomy. You want to start calling these things interactive books. ’Cause if so, I’m with you, Sam. I will die on that hill with you.

Barlow: Immortality was trying to make it feel a little bit like the thing is surprising, and watching you, and the idea of the rewinding mechanic — that actually came out of Telling Lies. With Telling Lies, there was a rewinding mechanic where I deliberately wanted it to be slightly — “tedious” is the wrong word — but I wanted the texture of surveillance. In surveillance, there is a lot of watching boring things and minutiae and becoming intimate with a character, to then catch them in the act of something more interesting.

And I wanted that feel to Telling Lies. I also wanted it to feel a little bit alive, so have it that you couldn’t instantly skip to the start of things because that would make it feel too controllable, and too like fixed video. So we had this mechanic where you could scrub, but it was deliberately slow, the scrubbing, so it kind of forced you to commit to rewinding. There was also a very [Don’t Look Back director] Nick Roeg thing I had of like, if someone is scrubbing backwards through a scene, they’re still absorbing what’s happening, but in reverse. Hey, this is kind of how memory works. When you remember things, you don’t remember them as playing out as a 30-minute conversation. You kind of jump around. But I was really into all this stuff, and I made all these very intentional choices. Then when the game came out, there was a bunch of people [who] played it who are like, This sucks. Does the guy not know how video playback works? Oh, he’s such a lazy dev. He can’t code rewinding properly. And what I realized was, at this point in time, we’d become so accustomed to video players and how a video player should work, whether you’re watching it on your phone or on your computer or on your TV, there’s a sort of core framework now and an expectation that video will obey me, and that I have a certain level of control over it.

And I violated that pact with Telling Lies and it pissed some people off.

So that really led to Immortality, of going, OK, can we use this as a cool thing? People have such a baked-in understanding now with video that they’re completely bought into the idea of, If I watch a video clip and rewind it, it will behave and it will always be the same when I play it back again. And it will always behave. And if we break that, it will feel really surprising and weird. And actually, we did some really early experiments, and it was freaking me out. I was like, Oh my God, I’m jumping, and I’m feeling weird about having these little surprising elements. And I think that there’s so much you could do with that. And then I think, the trouble with the TV people [making interactive movies] is there is a lack of game feel, which is a thing I’ve always also tried to lean into with my games is, yes, these are FMV games. Yes, they are nonlinear narrative games. But I want some game feel in there because as a Nintendo-head, I know that’s really, really important. So, how does the scrubbing work in Immortality? What is the aesthetic of the CRT screen in Her Story? So, the act of clicking when you type in Her Story, the stereo panning on the key noises, to try and make it feel very tactile.

These are all things that I know are really important to my games, and making them feel, and work, that doesn’t translate onto a television. Right? A TV remote is one of the worst game controllers going. So, there is that.

McElroy: Well, after the GameCube.

Barlow: [laughs] Oh, man. Don’t come for the GameCube controller, man! I’m the guy that was playing the Metroid Prime remaster with old-school controls. I want to feel like a robot lady. I don’t want to feel like I have fluid controls.

We’ll be running more excerpts from this conversation between Sam Barlow and Justin McElroy each weekend. In the most recent installment, they talked about the history of FMVs and what we lost in our obsession with high-quality video. Before that, they discussed how Netflix killed interactive films.

The Great Game: The Making of Spycraft recently won the New York Videogame Critics Circle’s New York Game Award for Best Games Journalism.