In David Bordell’s book “Narration in the Fiction Film,” he makes the claim that the role of viewers of films is to perceive what is happening on screen and make inferences and hypotheses based on that perception. As more information is revealed, they should be refining their inferences and constantly testing their hypotheses using the new information. In detective stories, readers are pushed to continue reading in order to reach that next bit of crucial information which either supports or conflicts with theories that have been formed so far. This loop of hypothesis, testing it against new information, and then reforming and adjusting theories is what keeps readers engaged in the uncovering of new information. Her Story brings this loop to the spotlight by giving its players freedom to decide what kind of information they want to attempt to uncover in order to develop their hypotheses in whichever direction they choose.
When you begin playing Her Story, you are greeted with the sight of an old computer screen. Your attention will be drawn to the main window where you can see a search bar where the word “MURDER” has been typed and 4 videos beneath that. Readme files on the desktop will also give a narrative introduction, instructions on how the database works and how to interact with it. The main gameplay involves searching for videos from the database and then watching the videos showing the interrogation of an initially unknown woman in which her dialogue contains the search term. These first videos set the stakes and can introduce countless different questions for players to try to answer. Being given the name of the murder victim, players might think to search “SIMON,” hoping for more information about who he was or what happened to him. The woman alludes to some event that happened in February, so maybe “FEBRUARY” could lead to hearing about that anecdote. Our group wanted to figure out who this woman was, so we searched for “NAME” and quickly found an early video where she introduces herself as Hannah. And there are countless other words that people can be led to search for from this starting point. “INNOCENT,” “GUILTY,” “WEAPON,” “DEATH,” or “BODY” could all be reasonable starting points to give a few examples.
At this point, players won’t have very much information to go off of to make hypotheses, but they will have plenty of questions to ask, and with every video they watch, they are likely to come up with even more. To give some examples, starting with “SIMON” as your search term will give players information about some of Simon’s friends, things that he owns, places where he would go, his marriage with Hannah, and the circumstances of his death. Depending on what the player is interested in learning about, they can choose which of these threads to follow next by choosing an appropriate search term.
The ability to search for any keyword means that they players are always free to decide where to aim their information gathering, and the nature of the database means that they are likely to continue to discover new threads that they can pursue. Some players may choose to focus initially on understanding the relationship between Hannah and Simon, while others follow the stories that Hannah tells about her childhood, while others still will want to learn about Simon’s friends and parents. And at any point, they can drop what they’re focusing on to jump to a different search term or revisit one that they considered earlier.
This system makes the otherwise passive activity of listening to these interviews into an active experience. Unlike a movie which will inevitably progress to its conclusion, the only way to discover new information about the case is for the player to pick out potential search terms from what they have learned so far, or from the connections they have made. While narratively these interviews have already happened, the experience to the player feels like they are able to ask questions using the search terms and get answers in their own form of interrogation.
Once the player has acquired enough information about the characters and a general timeline of events, they will begin to realize that they are missing key bits of information that would close gaps in their knowledge. At this point, rather than searching for new threads to follow, it becomes more useful to find ways to answer specific questions you have. This is especially true in cases where you have found multiple clips that are from the same day, but with an unknown stretch of time in between them. It is often the case that the clips which are from that missing time period will give further context that you need to understand the ones around it, but the challenge becomes figuring out what search terms will lead you to the missing clips.
The tactic that my group employed was to focus on what information was missing from the story we had so far and to hypothesize what possible information could be true that would fill in these gaps. From there, we could take words that would be associated with one of our hypotheses and use them as search terms. If no clips came up, then it was likely that this hypothesis was incorrect, and we could move onto testing the next one. To give an example, at one point in the game we began to suspect that Hannah was not the only person we were seeing speak in the video clips. We thought that there was either a case of split personality, or that Hannah had a sister who was pretending to be her. In order to test these theories, we tried search terms like “SISTER,” “TWIN,” and “IDENTITY,” which led us to discovering the character Eve and continue putting together the story.
Again, the freedom that players have in entering their own search terms means that they have the tools to try to test any theories they might have. While a more linear story limits the possible number of hypotheses that characters have time to speculate on and investigate, the open-endedness of Her Story means that any number of theories can be considered and tested.
By Alex Duarte
Intermittent Mechanism 