It Could Happen Here - Interview with Game Maker Sam Barlow (Her Story)

Episode Date: October 13, 2021

We chat with the creator of the investigative video games Her Story and Telling Lies about online surveillance, how Police are viewed in gaming, and FBI infiltration into green activism. Nerd time baby! Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadowbride. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of fright. An anthology podcast of modern-day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It could happen here. Might.

Is. Possibly. Anyway, I'm Robert Evans. You know who I am because you're listening to this show unless you stumbled upon this having never heard of the internet before, in which case this is a show about how things are kind of falling apart.

And we also try to talk every now and then about how to maybe put them back together a little bit. My co-host is Garrison Davis. Garrison, say hello to the people. Hello, people. I'd also like you to say hello to Sean. Hi, Sean. Yeah, there's a Sean somewhere out there.

There's probably a few Seans, yeah. At least one or two. Garrison, what are we, what are we, what are we, what are we? Well, we're finally doing something I've been wanting to do for a while is branching off into kind of covering different parts of like media and culture that kind of relate to all of these topics. I know both me a little bit and Robert more so have worked for or have written for like an online investigative journalism website called Bellingcat that deals in open source like research. And one of the things that we're big fans of at Bellingcat that deals in open source research. And one of the things that we're big fans of at Bellingcat, I've talked with a few of the other people, is a game called Her

Story, which is a video game that has maybe one of the better depictions of open source investigations. It's a very good game. I highly recommend it. I played it a few years ago. It was lovely. And I recently... Originally, when I bought Her Story, I bought both that game and a spiritual sequel called Telling Lies, which I

did not play for a while, because I was too busy. And then I went to the Earth First gathering this summer, and I came back, and I had some free time, so I played Telling Lies. And because of the content of that game, I found it really interesting,

because I'm not going to spoil tons of it, because I think you should play it for yourself, and part of it is solving the mystery on your own, but part of it does take place in a green environmentalism activism setting, and it has one of the more honest depictions of environments like that. So we are graced with bringing on the creator of both her story and Telling Lies, Sam Barlow. Hello.

Hey, exciting to be here. Thanks for that lovely intro. Yeah, I'm very excited to talk with you. These games are some of my favorite things. First off, I guess I would just like to kind of talk about your inspiration for this type of detective game, because it is unique to every other kind of investigative game out there um and it's you know very much grounded in open source research um and like using computers in the real world what what kind of got you on to that kind of storytelling concept i mean i think there was a whole bunch of things that all

kind of sparked off um at once like when i made her story this was my first independent video game so i'd been making video games for 10 plus years um working on other people's franchises more traditional things kind of when i started out working on like nicholas cage movie tie-ins and extreme sports games and all these kind of things um but uh at some point i got to work on the Silent Hill franchise, which is this very cool psychological horror franchise. And it's one of the, certainly at that point in time, it was one of the few kind of established gaming franchises that had a story

that was interesting and took place in the real world and had characters and things. So kind of from that point, I was really digging into kind of a lifelong interest in storytelling, especially what we can do with it interactively and continue to be frustrated somewhat by working for these bigger publishers. And at one point I worked for three years, I was directing and writing this, this big budget video game that got

cancelled and that kind of gave me a moment to kind of sit and and think like what what do i want to do do i want to get on board another of these big video games uh i was very frustrated at the kind of incremental change that you see in the kind of bigger budget video game space it feels like things happen very slowly which can be frustrating so uh i the kind of bigger budget video game space. It feels like things happen very slowly, which can be frustrating. So I was kind of looking around. This was when like iPhones, people gaming on their iPhones and stuff was kind of starting to blow up. The fact that you could now distribute a game individually, digitally, and reach an audience was sort of changing the landscape.

So I kind of felt like I should get into that. And so at its conception, her story was me going, what are all the things I've wanted to do that I wasn't able to do when I was working with these bigger budgets, with these more established kind of gaming templates. So from the get-go, it was, I wanted to deal with characters that essentially lived in the real

world yeah which is a hard pitch you know if you're asking for big bucks every video game has to essentially be about a superhero it needs to be some kind of wish fulfillment for a teenage boy is is generally what people are asking for uh and the the big thing with her story was subtext, uh, as someone's interest in storytelling, I was always trying to push how important subtext is. And the idea that there is, you know, there are layers to a narrative that you're not spelling out for the audience that they're going to extract through performance or through whatever. Um, and that was always a hard sell, uh, when you were kind of dealing with these kind of bigger companies that had a very simple idea of what their audience was. So I wanted to prove that the audience was actually smarter than we were giving them credit for, and that if you gave more control to them, if you gave more of the kind of work of piecing these stories together,

that that would be not just something they could do, but which would actually be more interesting and more personal. And, you know, and with her story, I had a kind of lifelong love of like crime fiction and slightly more kind of gothic leaning crime fiction. And so I was like, right, I'm going to create a video game, which is in that world and which kind of breaks a lot of the established rules of how you might

tell a story um and you know a lot of that i was pulling from uh you know my love of uh some of the more kind of avant-garde literary stuff interesting pieces of kind of movies and things but it was it was pulling from a lot of different kind of storytelling traditions and ending up in this this interesting place where like you say, it's kind of a game experience where you're essentially researching the story yourself and kind of putting the pieces together. Yeah, yeah. For people who don't know, it's like you're basically on a virtual desktop and you're sorting through like a hard drive full of footage. sorting through, like, a hard drive full of footage. And the versatility of the game and, you know, people learning how to use, like, search terms, right?

Just like people try to use, like, in open source, it's called, like, using, like, Google operators. It's the same kind of, same thing. But also there's, like, the other side of things. I think Bellingcat wrote an article about your game where they, like, made, like, a Python script to scan all of the videos for specific keywords and put them into like different folders and files so it's like you can do the thing where you just like search it but you could like take this to a ridiculous level

like you're like breaking the game open and doing it like you're actually like investigating this and you need to be very quick um so i think her story is a lovely intro to this type of game concept. And then for Telling Lies, you kind of changed, you changed some things with it. You made like, I guess, I guess like an expansion would be the way I would describe it for how it like takes the same concept and pushes it further. And I think watching these things now is very different after being like two years on Zoom. Right. I'm sure you've heard this from other people as well as like you know because because because of how telling lies operates it's like a lot of it is well you open the game because you're basically cracking open

an nsa hard drive so all of it is video from like webcams and stuff. So, you know, watching people talking to their computer camera like this after spending years on Zoom definitely hits harder, I guess. It was one of those things where, so when we were first working on this and conceiving of it, which was, I don't know, maybe, I don't know, 2016 or something like that, there was a leap, right? And as a storyteller, you allow yourself sometimes to take that one leap that the audience will take with you. And the leap there was like,

these people are using video chat a lot. But I mean, and as I was starting to put it together, I would start noticing people around that time doing video chat in the street on their phones, which was something I was not used to seeing. And I was like, Oh shit, maybe this is not too big of a leap. But yeah, I think, I think it was the verge or somebody ran an article that was like telling lies

is still a great game. Mid pandemic. It's just real hard to play now that, that like this zoom thing is our lives. But yeah, that was like, yeah, that was, that was a big thing I was interested in at, that was like, yeah, that was a big thing I was interested in at the time was like, what is this doing to us? What is communicating over the internet? How does that change how

conversations and things happen? I was kind of looking into some of the research there. Yeah, that was wild. Was kind of living in that world for several years, putting the game out, and then spending two years on Zoom calls. Yeah, I mean, in a few ways,

I think the game has aged very well because of that. And because the way people... People are more used to interacting with the computer in that format now. So when they're trying to search for these hundreds of video files, I think they can understand it better. So in some ways, I think it's not necessarily a bad thing. But yeah, let's see. So I think, well, I want to talk a bit about kind of the influences for kind of the surveillance aspect, because, like, her story is filmed in, like, a police interrogation room for basically the whole thing,

whereas this pulls video footage of people in private moments, essentially. Of course, this was after the Snowden stuff, and after all of the other kind of... After surveillance became a bigger talking point. But what got you to decide you wanted to kind of revolve the game around this concept of internet surveillance and then, you know, different three-letter agencies kind of fighting each other a little bit? So I think it was two things. One was in making her story and making lots of decisions somewhat intuitively, kind of when it was finished and it was a big success and I looked back on it.

kind of when it was finished and it was a big success and I looked back on it and then kind of when a little bit of time had passed I then had this very different relationship where I'd you know forgotten that I was the person that made it and so could have opinions about it and I was really interested in how that game established a level of intimacy with the main character that Viva plays that you're seeing being interrogated despite the fact that it's happening through a computer desktop despite the fact that there's none of what traditionally you know that the agency you would traditionally have in a video game which you know conventional logic would be that's how you would establish the the idea that this person is alive and that you're in contact with them but the act of like digging into all this video footage of viva and seeing her on screen

talking essentially at you created this this interesting amount of Viva and seeing her on screen talking essentially at you created this interesting amount of intimacy that a lot of people responded to. So I was like, well, that's one of the things that is interesting to me to take further, because it's very rare that a video game creates this sensation of kind of intimacy or of getting close to or understanding people. And then it was Snowden. I think it was one of the early reports from all the various things that came out via Snowden. There was a particular operation in the UK, which I think was called Optic Nerve or something. And the idea there was that they were spying

on everyone's internet traffic. And I think it's a little bit easier to do that in the UK than it is elsewhere. And this one particular operation, I remember there was a PowerPoint slide that was leaked that was like their internal presentation, which proved that like in any leaked government PowerPoint will be the worst PowerPoint you've ever seen.

Like the clip art and just terribleness. Right. But in this scheme, what they did, and this blew my mind was for a period of, I think it was two years, every single video chat that went through Yahoo in the UK was captured. Yeah.

And recorded. And they had this issue, which I think is, if you want to talk about surveillance kind of post 9-11, the big problem with surveillance and the extent to which it's now used is like, what do you do with all this data? Like, it's just too much. So they were capturing all this Yahoo video chat

and attempting to add the metadata and sort it, which is kind of interesting because that's kind of, to some extent, kind of how something like Herstory worked. Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally. And the biggest issue they had, and they put up this PowerPoint and it blew my mind, was 30 to 40% of all the video chat through Yahoo at this point was sexual in nature.

And they were concerned about the feelings of their operatives who were doing the tagging of all this data. So they'd put their best computer minds on it and they'd come up with an algorithm which would detect an excessive amount of skin tone and would then kind of flag and silo those clips. And I just remember reading this and being like what about the feelings of the people whose skin tone you're capturing right like you you weren't stopping to think like why are we doing this should we be doing this you're you're you're solving for the problem of like how do we stop our agents seeing all this nudity um and i think there was there was a bunch of other anecdotes right in the snowden stuff of people uh alongside him like you know looking through people's webcam data and stuff and in a voyeuristic

way and just this constant invasion of of people's rights so i think that was one of those things where i was like oh this is this is like new like uh you, we now have, you know, you worry about certain levels of like your privacy being invaded. And you would certainly worry if someone was letting themselves into your house at night. But we suddenly found ourselves in this position where we have these phones that we put by our bedside at night that have cameras and microphones that are pretty much just running. Right. at night that have cameras and microphones that are pretty much just running right uh and capturing and just the extent to which now technology has transformed surveillance um and that that was really interesting to me because i um and a big thing i wanted to do so you know i've made her story and like growing up i loved cop shows and I particularly loved the good ones.

Like, um, like homicide life on the street, the U S there was a show in the UK called cracker. Um, and these were like, you know, somewhat nuanced in how they dealt with,

uh, policing. Um, but you know, you're, you're still, you know, we're in this position now where we're starting to ask deeper questions about

whether we should watch this many cop shows um yeah when they're like the main thing on all television all the time yeah exactly and uh and that'd be like when i made her story partly i pitched the bigger publishers like we should do the equivalent of a cop show like we should do crime fiction or cop show yeah video game and they would always be like nah and i would say well look this is like the evergreen you know if you're a book publisher you have a crime show you have a crime book you know if you're doing movies you're gonna have some movies with this genre it's it works and they would always kind of push against that so when i made her story that was in fact like the arc of of playing her story to some extent mirrors my arc in that like at the top of it i was like i want to make an interesting detective game

and i want to deconstruct how detective stories work and i then started to do a bunch of research where i was digging into well how do actual criminal investigations work? How does one interrogate a suspect? Doing all that stuff. And then I started to pull up what at the time, like there was a bit, it was slightly ahead of like the true crime explosion, but there was starting to be stuff on YouTube and in various places where footage

from real investigations was online. And it was starting to get a bit weird and interesting and people were kind of vicariously watching these things and um yeah that raised all sorts of questions they were trying to piece together their own kind of conclusions based on these leaked or sometimes officially released interview segments yeah and it and there was one um in particular i got really into the jody arias case. Yeah. And the way the media spun that story and just really dug into, oh, there's like sex and murder and Mormons. And there's this beautiful blonde woman who now, when she goes to court, has gone brunette.

talking about on cable news like her appearance and setting her up as this kind of femme fatale kind of uh ice maiden um on the flip side of this i think there's like the the thing with the making the murderer documentary which i think i have some issues with how they handle the main guy but particularly how they showed the totally immoral interrogation tactics used on Brandon, the kid. And that really cracked that whole thing open, being like, yeah, the way the police are interrogating minors without lawyers is shocking. I think that was part of this transition for me, was going into her story with like, the hero of this is the detective. It's Andre Brower on Homicide Life on the Street.

It's the genius detective that's going to come in there and crack this case. And the more I dug into in cases like Jodie's where there were various, you know, aspects to that case. She definitely did murder her lover, but there were lots of questions around whether the relationship itself was physically healthy um and by the end of it like all of my sympathy was with jody not with the interrogator who you watch it and you realize that like the reason this person is in this situation is because their life has gone very badly yeah and the reason for that is everything that's happened in their life prior to this. And they've never spoken to anyone about any of this stuff. And suddenly they're in this room with the homicide detective who's like, hey, you can talk to me.

I'm the first person that's going to sit and listen to you. And all these tricks that they use to just get people talking. And it becomes very intimate and becomes kind of like therapy session. But by the end of it, so for me like the hook of her story is oh you get to solve a murder but really by the end of it it's like a character portrait no yeah your empathy should entirely be with her and it's less about uh seeing justice done right so i even but even coming away from that was like, I still feel slightly uncomfortable with kind of having made this thing that is reveling in how much fun it is to be involved in the police work or whatever. and the extent to which technology has just so empowered policing in general to the point where it's there's this great um like one of the core themes that i wanted to dig into in telling lies

was that when you see people try and defend this stuff and defend policing in general it's they try and set it up so that you basically have, they talk in terms of families and very close relationships. So they're kind of like, well, the government is your parent and they're trying to look after you. And you understand as a parent, you're going to sometimes invade the privacy of your children, or sometimes you're going to inhibit their freedoms because you're trying to protect them. going to inhibit their freedoms because you're trying to protect them. And we all understand that. And that's part of being human. And that's all that's happening here with government, right? We're trying to protect you from the big bad, the evil. I saw like, there was some tweet from the NYPD the other day that was like, you'll come running when evil is on your doorstep. Someone was saying something. And for me, you you take that understanding of how people relate directly to each other how families work the second you scale it to the size of government it breaks like yeah you cannot extend that metaphor and then when you add in tech um you

know the extent to which uh you know privacy has has been degraded, our freedoms, you know, when you start just blanket looking for crime, right, you start creating all the systemic issues that we have just suddenly become amplified. So that to me was kind of interesting. Yeah. Well, you know, here is like a means to explore that and i'd like one of the things that was interesting to me about her story that in retrospect was uh the extent to which it was about watching video which seems like a dumb thing to say but like the choice to use real video uh kind of inspired by watching all these interrogation pieces of footage from Jody and people,

you know, was, was kind of made as, Oh yeah, that makes sense. And I just kind of got on with it. But then looking back, I was like,

Oh, well, it's interesting because people talk about this game as being an interactive movie, but it's nothing like a movie. No, not at all. And it's not how movies work.

It just happens that it uses a video camera. Only similarity is that it has live action footage that's it yeah so i was like i i really want to go even further into that texture and so i was just thinking about and when i was starting to do my research like the idea of surveillance and and the commonalities between like classic old school surveillance i you know someone sat in a car with some binoculars watching someone. Yeah. And modern surveillance, the commonalities are that it's quite boring, right? There's just a lot

of sitting and watching. It's a lot of doing nothing. Yeah. Right. But out of that, and when you kind of read the firsthand accounts of the people doing the surveillance or some of the depictions of this in media like there's a level of intimacy that you get with the person you're surveilling right where you know if you're just sat watching the minutiae of someone's life if you're listening to a bug in someone's kitchen and just hearing all the just everyday shit in their lives or if you are you know watching them through some kind of technology um you're just spending all this time with them. And that's like a very non-cinematic thing. It's like this, that minutiae and the time stretching out of just being present with somebody. And that was kind of interesting to me of just kind of putting you in that headspace and kind of thinking about what that means.

I think that totally gets through because of the way you break up the conversations in Telling Lies. You have to sit and watch these characters as they're just doing nothing for sometimes like over five minutes. They're just like sitting there. And you do get like very intimate with these characters but it almost but like in a very like creepy way where you like you feel like i shouldn't be here uh just kind of the general feeling of telling it was really interesting because i like some people would have a very and this was you know completely again like trying to process how i felt watching the like the the videos of all the various police interrogations and stuff was like, this is fascinating because as human beings, we're fascinated by other human beings.

And here is this extremely interesting, dramatic stuff where people are just really spilling their lives out. It's why true crime blew up, right? But then you have all these moral questions around it. And obviously with Telling Lies, it's inspired by lots of real things but it's fake and you're watching actors act this stuff but still some people would have this real visceral reaction of like i shouldn't be watching some of this stuff and and i'd be like i mean you you can it's like you that was that was where it became really not cinematic to me was like you know if you're watching a uh you know a noir film or a you know a thriller and you have you know or even like the the thing for the domestic stuff for me

was you know you could watch another sitcom watching any a normal sitcom and the husband and wife are sat in bed chatting at no point do you feel like i shouldn't be here because you're in the the kind of classic hollywood invisible up. You're this, you know, you have permission to be there as the invisible camera spectator. And it doesn't feel as weird as it would if you were hiding in the closet of this couple's bedroom. So with the setup on Telling Lies, you immediately feel like, oh, like this, I am in this position that I shouldn't be in. So suddenly all those more domestic moments become charged with like a very different vibe. Yeah. Because you're watching them and you're, you're not invited. Like, right. You're, you know,

you're sitting looking at this NSA hard drive and you're like, yeah, I'm not supposed to be watching this. Like this is, this isn't, they never invited me into this conversation welcome i'm danny thrill won't you join me at the fire and dare enter nocturnal tales from the shadows presented by iheart and sonora an anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters. To bone chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. I know you. Network, available on the iHeartRadio app way more characters but because you know you get to you know all of your kind of games deal with some degree of like characters lying to you and like just doing like straight lies to your face that's

kind of a that's my read on a lot of a lot of your games um i mean your the game is called telling lies so so you definitely see elements of all of these, trying to figure out what is true and what is not. I think it is interesting looking at how easier it is to lie via these technological platforms. Sometimes it's just like

you feel like telling the truth is just so much more work, and you may as well just get through with this conversation by doing a few white lies, which then spiral out of control. When you combine this with law enforcement, infiltration, all this kind of stuff, it gets very complicated very quickly. One thing that I think you guys handled very well in telling lies was kind of the activism side of things.

So when I played this game, almost immediately after coming back from the Stop Line 3 protests and Earth First gathering, everyone there is always very... People try to be aware of surveillance and be like, okay, you don't talk about certain things if there's phones nearby and stuff.

So that whole side of things was very interesting to play this game right afterwards because you get to see the other side of things being like okay, if the FBI is infiltrating this group, here's one of the ways that they do it. From my perspective, being

in activism spaces for a while, not just environmental ones, but other ones like here in Portland, you handled this topic very accurately. What kind of stuff did you pull from to kind of create these environments

and interactions between people? Because I'm not sure if you have any experience yourself and stuff like this, or if you got people on to talk, like you talk to people who are more experienced activists. What was kind of your inspiration for the opposite side of things, not on the law enforcement? So that was one of the big initial jumping off points so

uh like in terms of the the kind of real life inspirations like the the seed of this whole thing was i'm trying to remember when this was it was i'm I'm going to say 2009, 2010. Could be completely wrong here. But it was the Guardian in the UK, I think broke the story, but it was, and we've recently had some good progress in this area, but broke the story of this UK spy cops operation, which was a specific unit within the London police whose job was to infiltrate groups to surveil them from the inside. And it was horrific. And there were like a couple of things about it that were horrific. One of them was that like essentially their modus operandi

was to find vulnerable young women on the periphery of groups, target them romantically. And then they would be the collateral to get, you know, to, to, to have people then more solidly enter into these groups. And then they had like a whole,

you know, stepped plan of like, once you're in how you kind of would, would destabilize, steer these groups from within um and the the thing that really made this even worse um was the fact that uh most of the groups i think maybe all of the groups targeted with this particular unit were green activists. There's this incredible, incredible, like you couldn't make this stuff up, but there's a famous libel case where McDonald's was suing these two activists

in the UK, right, because they were putting up flyers exposing some of the practices of McDonald's. And the group that they were members of, which I think at this point was called Greenpeace, but it was different to the kind of more famous Greenpeace, in London, prior to them doing this big kind of McDonald's thing, was losing members. And it got to a point where there were so few people in this group that it would have shut down had it not been for the fact

that there were a large number of undercover cops in this group. So, you know, if you imagine at some point there were actually more undercover cops and private security people undercover in this group than actual activists, which has enabled the group to continue. And in fact, the original flyer that they put out was written, I forget the guy's name now, by one of these undercover cops. He wrote the copy for this flyer that went out and then saw these people dragged up in court and was this huge, you know, McDonald's won the case,

but in terms of PR, it was hugely damaging to them. But yeah, that for me was the thing that seemed even more important because here you had this story of the state sanctioning one of the most terrible abuses. Like essentially, you know, what was happening was pretty easy to kind of call it rape, right? There was women in sexual relationships with people

and thinking it was consensual, but not realizing that they, this was, you know, what they were getting into was not what they thought it was. And so this was just so appalling. And like from a just kind of base emotional level i just it was so hard for me to imagine the pain of um and these women were in relationships with these undercover officers for years year oh yeah no yeah and then and and and part of the modus operandi was when you were done, you had to exit and disappear. And they had this whole plan where the cops would claim that they were being followed and that they were worried, and then they would disappear.

And then they would call from some European country and say that they'd kind of fled the country because they were worried that the cops were onto them. And then they would slowly kind of disappear. And this, you know, some of these were kind of pre-modern internet. So it was easier for someone to kind of disappear. I mean, like this stuff totally happened in the green scare in the States in, you know, around 2010 too. This was my big question was, was this, you know, some of these cases were kind of the original inspiration. And when I started thinking about trying to tell a story inspired by this originally, it starts off and is, you know,

still in based in the UK and based on these things. And there was a particular, a particular flavor to it where the cops doing this work, it was part of the Met police who were, you know, that's the more kind of gangstery, like there's a real reputation that the Met Police have. So these cops that were chosen for this work were the ones that were a bit more kind of macho and edgy.

And there was, I mean, there was so much stuff to it that was horrific. Like they would only pick cops that were married. Jeez. stuff to it that was horrific like they would only pick uh cops that were married um because they felt that that uh gave them uh some level of ability to to be sleeping with these activists and not lose themselves in it um but obviously the wives didn't know what was happening um and and there were just there's so many layers of this that i just thought was uh was awful and and coming off the first story i was like well i would love to tell an undercover cop story in which we 100 acknowledge that the undercover cop is bad but yeah like they are like yeah you know because because it's such a classic trope is the undercover cop story because you get to have your cake and eat it.

You get to see someone on both sides of the law. You get all the tension and thrills of it. But usually, you know, whatever, even if the movie or the story or whatever has a bittersweet ending, the protagonist is always the undercover cop. And ultimately, because they're the protagonist, they're the one that your heart goes to, right? And the secondary characters, whether that's like the wife in Donnie Brasco or Goodfellas or something, you know, they basically serve as a foil to the main character. So I was like, well, can we tell a story where we treat the wife and the activist who's being targeted and the other people on the periphery of this guy? Let's think more about their perspective on this world. And let's acknowledge 100% from our perspective that this is wrong.

Everything that's happening is wrong and it's not justified. And then let's just see what the impact is on people. So once we started developing it and when I was speaking to Anna Perna about doing it, I felt like, oh, we should move this to the states um to make it feel certainly as well because the larger audience is american to to kind of reiterate and make it feel kind of more identifiable and have it be less quaint and british um so my number one question from day one was like, well, does this shit happen in the States?

And does it happen in the same way? And so we brought on a researcher who then started pulling stuff up. And the big thing for me was replacing the undercover group at the Met with the FBI. And then that became fascinating to me because then I started digging into the FBI. Yeah. And then that became fascinating to me because then I started digging into the FBI and understanding their history

and everything that's wrong there. But yeah, immediately I start seeing all these great examples of, yeah, this explicit infiltration of green groups. So pretty horrific cases of entrapment where, you know, people infiltrate these groups and then encourage them to do more extreme and violent things on the record uh it's the point where you're listening to like recorded fbi stuff and and you can hear the group being like i'm not

sure about that like that doesn't sound like a great idea dude and the the the fbi person is there going like wow i don't know i really do think we should blow this bridge up guys and and it's so obvious like when you listen to it which is why a lot of these cases have ultimately been thrown out but um yeah it was it was it was i I guess, for the project reassuring to see that all this stuff was happening over here. Yeah, I mean, the FBI, the specific FBI agent that we kind of follow definitely feels very American and feels very real. I really like the actor that you got to play him. He definitely feels like a lot of kind of the law enforcement dudes who kind of handle this side of things um that was that was that was definitely that was like an fbi he became like the fbi-ness of it became very important to it and it was interesting the way that the fbi they had this brand which is partly reinforced by the media like they had the great idea back in

like 40s or 50s to themselves fund and support cop shows yeah so this whole idea we have through the x-files through pretty much every serial killer media whatever the idea of the fbi is being like the smartest and the best like that's put out by them but but yes it's really interesting to see they believe that like they are beyond reproach and um like they have higher standards for like you know if you want to join the fbi there is in theory this kind of moral moral check that you have to pass but flipping backwards and shooting somebody when his gun falls out of his pants at a club. Well, then you read about it and you're like, actually the experience, the lived experience. And we were, it was, it was so bizarre because I was like, I really want to understand what it's like to be an FBI wife. And let's find, let's reach out.

The research I'd done and some of the stuff we pulled up i was like oh it it does sound pretty bad like there's a requirement if you're an fbi agent you have to move every three years or something okay so if you're the wife to an fbi agent you essentially move every three years and so you never get a chance to build your own career or to make roots and so you're generally and and the wage is not great which is why why they're very vulnerable to corruption, really. So you're generally living. There's usually kind of areas where all the FBI families live. So it's this very insular world. And you start to see where some of these wives have come out and spoken about it, they're like, it's really shitty because our husbands

who believe themselves to be like, you know, macho superheroes get to disappear for three days at a time. And we can never ask where they are or what they're doing. And there's this kind of internal code, which you see in a lot of law enforcement, right? Where they will cover for each other or protect each other. And you suddenly start to see that, like, you know, this is not like... And in fact, I remember reading sort of the guy who inspired,

like, Silence of the Lambs, the TV show Mindhunter was based on him and his book. It's this guy who was one of the early kind of uh serial killer profiling people within the fbi you read his book it's a terrible book yeah when i heard that fincher was adapting i was like wow good luck um but it's incredible the lack of self-awareness he has um this guy is so sexist and so bad every time he introduces a woman, it starts from the legs up, like he's describing her. At the very end of the book, he reveals that his wife leaves him. And he kind of writes as if this is a huge surprise.

And you're like, he's calling this from chapter one. And he has a best buddy. So the guy who's the kind of number two in Mindhunter on TV, there's like a real life version of him. And halfway through the book, his wife hires an assassin to come, a hitman, to come in and kill him. And the guy just narrowly avoids it. And the guy writing the book is like, what an evil woman. Like, oh, my poor friend. And you're like, well, hang on a minute.

What is your friend like? Yeah, what was going on? Yeah, there's probably something going on there. So, yeah, it was, yeah, that sense that, which I think, for me, expanded beautifully to the bigger picture of, like, that character kind of believing that he's the good guy. Absolutely. And, you know, he's the sheriff in the West,

and he's coming in, and he's fixing problems, and he's the good guy absolutely you know he's the sheriff in the west and he's coming in and he's fixing problems and he's saving the world um but and then he slowly falls apart yeah and and his inability like it's such a brittle worldview that he's yeah he is he is very once yeah once he's exposed to thinking that the world is maybe different it just totally breaks him yeah the his specific arc i think is extremely interesting um and i don't want to spoil it because i think it's it's too it's too shocking once you get to the final piece of his story you're like oh wow um i think that was laid out in a really beautiful way but it's it's it's not like shocking away like oh this this like doesn't make sense it's like oh no yeah i can see i can see why he's doing this but it's still it's like you kind of slowly watch this guy get broken down piece by piece um as you know because he starts he's very much like the superhero fbi agent he's like yeah i'm gonna i'm gonna stop

these terrorists or whatever and then he just like yeah watching him progress throughout the story you get to see like how pathetic he is sometimes there's a there's a great uh one of the uk spy cops um i forget his name if we were doing this three years ago i'd have had all these names in my head but he um uh so he was assigned and he was uh he infiltrated this green group somewhere in the UK for a couple of years, had this relationship with this girl, was participating and facilitating. The one detail that I loved and tried to make sure was accurate was all these cops would have a van or they would have like a big truck in the UK because they realized that like in these smaller groups, like being the transportation was like your superpower. So like if you were someone who was like,

Oh, I'll drive everyone to the thing. I'll get us all there. Cause I have this big van. Um, that was the easiest way to just kind of make yourself useful. Um, but this guy's doing all that at some point.

Um, they decide to pull him and, uh, they pull him out. He returns to his wife and his normal life back in London, but he can't go back to his normal life. And so he starts, and he's done all the stuff of disappearing, but he just starts getting up and driving,

and maybe he's in the north of England somewhere, just shows back up, and he's like, oh, I'm back, guys. And they're like, oh, shit, what happened? I thought you had to, like, disappear because people were after you. And he's like, oh, I'm back, guys. And they're like, oh, shit, what happened? I thought you had to, like, disappear because people were after you. And he's like, no, it's all right. And just goes back to living as an activist. And at some point, one of his superiors notices that the mileage on his police paid vehicle is huge. And they're like, why is this guy doing so much mileage?

you know, vehicle is huge. And they're like, why is this guy doing so much mileage? And it's because he's driving all the way back and continuing to live this life and inhabit this character that he set up. And at some point, I think he gets found out and it all goes horribly wrong because he no longer has like the fake ID and stuff that they gave him.

But yeah, I mean that, and it's like that stuff's interesting, but then you, it was always important to never be overly sympathetic when you see them struggling to return to life. There is certain points where you see the FBI agent struggling because of how like smug he is. You're like, yes, he's struggling. And you like get excited when he gets like when he

gets like reprimanded or he you know people are like mad at him for various reasons it is very interesting how you like how sympathies get pulled in certain directions because like by the end of the game you definitely have a much fuller perspective on who this guy is and how his kind of psyche works um because he is really in a lot of ways, kind of pathetic as a person. And he needs to hype himself up for himself to make himself feel like he's special. And when that gets broken down, he just completely collapses. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill.

Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I guess one of the last things I want to talk about is like throughout all of your games you have kind of a through line of like fairy tales you kind of you bring in fairy tale concepts into all of these games um and I I like how a lot of your games are very open-ended in some ways I think her story being much more open-ended than telling lies in some ways. I really like that you kind of you can't look up what is the ending of this game. It's like, no, you have to piece it together in your own brain. Whatever you think the story is,

that's what it is for you. There's no definitive ending, especially for her story. How this combines with fairy tales, I think, is a really interesting way to like include like mythology into these more modern stories. What's kind of your thought process behind, you know, kind of including mythology and fairy tales into these more like modern

stories of like, you know, people interacting with like government law enforcement and then just, you know, breaking down their own psyches under these high tense situations. Yeah. I mean, I think it, I think it came initially with her story of yep thinking about the the kind of meta storytellingness of these

things right of the extent to which their experiments and like how we tell stories um and but a lot of times like the myths and the the kind of classic stories that people go to those right to try and understand the bigger questions or uh certainly like um i guess partly came out of uh the start of her story i had like two youngish kids and you see you're reading them all the classic stories and you realize the extent to which these are just encoding our society's values, right? Yeah, totally. I had this incredible book that was – that my parents got for me and I tracked down and made sure we still had when I had my kids

that was called – it was like folk tales of the peoples of the Soviet Republic from like the early 80s. And it was collected like – a lot of it was Ukrainian folk tales. And they were amazing because they were so dark. Like the message of each of these stories was, trust nobody, the rich will always win, you will end up dead and unhappy, right? And each story would start with the poor peasant,

his brother gets rich, he asks for help the brother like is horrible like this is one story where there's this brother who's like oh if you want some grain because you're starving and then gouge out your own eye and i'll give you some grain and then he comes back for more grain later and he's like gouge out your other eye now chop off your hand and it's like they're so dark uh and i'm like but this is 100 reflecting absolutely like to live in that world and grow up and you're preparing people for the realities so um you know i think that to me was really interesting and and her story tells this story that kind of to some extent grows out of this childhood. And then with Telling Lies, definitely it was part of this idea of, yeah,

how Logan's character, David, sees the world and relates to his part in it. And like his utter inability to realize that he's the bad guy in the story, right? And he thinks he's the good guy. And that was like, that was partly the key to breaking his character. I think it was his daughter. So he has this character who's like the six, seven-year-old

daughter. And that's like, he lets down and does horrible things to a whole bunch of people. But the thing he's not going to be able to get over is knowing that he's let his daughter down, right? Knowing that at some point she will grow up and be an adult woman who if she learns about what her father has done will will think less of him and you know will realize that he's the bad guy in the fairy tale whatever so um that was like just interesting to me to sit him in that moment and have him reading those stories and see his relationship with his daughter. And yeah, I think that element of just relating those things back to what are these kind of base values. And so much of those folktales is preparing you for the fact that people are going to lie to you and trick you and you know all those kind of aspects yeah a lot of them do deal with like you know failures of trusting people and you know getting getting

let down and being misled a lot a lot of those do kind of follow on these same same kind of rough templates um let's see is there anything you're working on now that you want to uh that you want to plug um and of course you know people should pick up telling lies her story um i have them on steam i think they are best suited to be playing on pc but you can get them on console you can get them on ios uh but any anything anything upcoming yeah we're working on uh currently uh this a project called Immortality, which is very ambitious. It'll be out next year. It deals with the story of an actress who only ever made three movies the latter half of the 20th century and then disappeared.

And we have recovered footage from these three movies. we have recovered footage from these three movies. And it's been interesting because with Telling Lies, like I've always been someone that when I think about the kinds of stories I want to tell, I've always thought that I'm not a capital P politics person, right? I tend to be interested in how people relate to each other and some of the kind of smaller politics. And once I got to Telling Lies, it was lies it was like oh actually like there is some

capital p politics absolutely 100 tied to all this yeah totally and so dug into that was like well so i want to do right by this right so it did involve speaking to lots of people it did involve bringing in all the research and everything um so coming away from telling lies and and as i mean it was making the game was insane because uh it was during uh trump right trump happens and i remember going into it being like we're making this story about the fbi being bad that's a pretty reasonable end point and then once we hit trump you had all that stuff of like the good fbi agents in theory or the FBI might be the people that bring Trump down. And suddenly they,

it was 100% leaning into the myth of the FBI. And I was like, damn it. And just everything getting worse. And it was like, oh, this is like so intense to be making something and speaking to some of these issues whilst this is all happening.

So finishing that, I was like, well, okay, for the next project we are definitely going away from talking about real life issues and capital P politics. And then just accidentally it's become because we're talking about an actress in the 20th century and what it means to make movies and uh digging into that suddenly becomes about

a whole other bunch of systemic issues um so yeah not not managed to avoid the politics again but it's it's been a really really interesting project i think i think once you crack that egg open of realizing that politics are kind of intrinsic to every story we tell it's hard to kind of put that back in the box. Because once you realize you can use politics in a very interesting and complex storytelling way, that still doesn't alienate a lot of audiences. It's like, oh yeah, this is just using another way

to interact with the world. I think that was one of the things that was slightly disappointing, I guess, with Telling Lies was like, when we were working on it, I'm like, we want to make sure we get these things right because like these are very important issues and there are some nuances and so we you know we don't want to accidentally say something that is incorrect or we don't want to give people the impression that we're you know yeah yeah yeah um so i was expecting some level of scrutiny in terms of discussing the game's themes and everything.

And I guess like the video games world is still not quite ready for that. Like they're quite happy to talk about the game mechanics and how this thing works and big picture emotional responses. But no one's willing to kind of dig deeper. And we had like, as the game was coming out and continues to be you you have the bigger name developers being like there's no politics in our video games as they're like invading countries yeah we're gonna make a game about you know you know being a black ops unit taking down communist countries we're not gonna talk about politics we're gonna yeah constantly uh constantly just saying it's possible.

They'll always say we both sides, right? We'll tell both sides and let people make the decision. Yeah. And something that I was very adamant, was very important to me on Telling Lies was like, if we're making this game, it is not, the point of the game is not to give you a mush of information and have you decide the moral good or bad of something. We are going into this 100% with the assumption that we and the audience or most of the audience believe that people doing these things are wrong.

And then I'm interested in what does it do to the people? What is it like to be in this world? What are the consequences, the ramifications? How does one exist and continue to live a life after having been involved in these things? So for me, a political game is, it can't be a political story in any media. It can't be going back to first principles, pretending we're in debate club. Cause that just, I think that's just, that's to infantilize the audience. I think you can say a political story is one which embraces and acknowledges the reality of the various power struggles and inequalities that we have.

And then has something to say about, or has a particular angle it wants to interrogate or something it wants to shed light on. But it's very childish. And I think we're definitely struggling with this in video wants to interrogate, or something it wants to shed light on. But it's very childish, and I think we're definitely struggling with this in video games, to be like, oh, if it's about politics, then it should be a big question, and we should assume no answers, right?

And it's like bullshit. Yeah, it is complete bullshit, and it can lead to some problematic ways, which is why you see a lot of game footage in actual like terrorist propaganda like with like like with like nazis and white supremacist stuff they use a lot of game footage in their propaganda videos when especially when you like both sides of these issues yeah it's uh i have a particular interest in the intersection between like politics extremism

and gaming because i think gaming is very important to our modern kind of extremist ecosystem um particularly around like 4chan and like you know like mass shootings all of these things play into game culture i'm not not saying games cause these events to happen because they don't but like the way they interact with these people is actually interesting you know this is very different from like the way like this senate is like oh games are causing mass shooting because they're not yeah i think I think it's a hard conversation to have. It's a completely separate thing. Because, yeah, there is a Fox News kind of hysteria around gaming. But at the same time, like, and clearly, you know, one way I pitched her story when I was telling people why it was interesting, I was like, this is a game about listening.

I was like, that's cool. game about listening i was like that's cool because you know whatever you think about the larger politics of it or or the question of whether video games themselves are inherently harmful or anything like the fact that still 99 of the stories we tell are about someone with a gun in their hand or a sword in their hand yeah and the the power dynamics and the story the types of stories and the types of protagonists uh like it's screwed up. And I think to the same extent that the fact that like the Marvel cinematic universe is about a bunch of glorified cops going around saving the world. Like,

you know, if you continue to reinforce these things. Yeah. All of the art we make are saying certain things about the world and we're reinforcing a certain narrative over and over again and not really thinking critically about it. Yeah. That's the problem with making art.

I mean, I'm not trying to come off as being anti-gamer. I would play a lot of games. I really like gaming. I just think some, some companies need to figure out why, why certain games are used in mass shooting manifestos and certain games aren't. Particularly

around politics. Particularly talking about white supremacy and how certain games kind of play into certain things. Even a game like Wolfenstein, which I think handles this topic very well, still will get brought up in certain propaganda videos because they do have cool shots of Nazis walking around.

That's kind of the problem with some of these things. If Nazis weren't killing people as much, this wouldn't be as much of a problem but because that's still a thing that's still a thing that needs to get talked about anyway this this took a very sad sad turn towards the end um anyway yeah i but i will i will just strongly recommend playing Her Story, playing Telling Lies. I think these games interrogate our predispositions about police, detective work. And you get to learn a lot about people and characters. Because a lot of these games, the setup is like, oh, solve this crime or mystery.

But then by the end, you're solving a very different mystery and you're kind of solving what makes the person tick. And it's very, you've, I really like the arc that you have in your games. They've brought me a lot of, uh, happiness.

So thank you. Thank you for that. And thank you for, um, talking with all of us, um, uh, about your work.

I've enjoyed it. Thank you. Thank you for having me. And, uh, yeah, like I say, I was, I was hoping to have

hundreds more conversations about what Telling Lies was about and about these issues when it came out but it's uh you know that it's I mean it's hot just the general media landscape now like you put something out there and it comes out and people consume it yeah move on like you don't have that span of like discussion that that i don't know feels like it used to used to be a thing yeah i think it definitely did did used to be a thing and definitely your games have had an influence on media in certain ways and i know there's been like a few other like projects that like netflix is doing that is kind of taking your concept but not really doing it correctly yeah yeah yeah no comment no yeah there's definitely been a lot yeah people always send me them they're like oh this sounds a lot like her story this thing and it's like oh but it's it's built as a non-linear yeah yeah

exactly it's like you you let people i don't know yeah usually it's like watch there are eight episodes you can watch them in any order. Which isn't how her story works, no, yeah. Like, yeah, there's a whole different thing going on. But, no, I mean, it's, yeah, it's interesting times for that sort of stuff. Anyway, play these games on Steam, and that does it for today. You can follow the show on Twitter and instagram at happen here pod and cool zone media uh do you have do you have a social media that you would like to plug or would your people uh

if if people are on twitter uh that's where i tend to be despite it's despite it yeah i know i am mr sambalo on twitter mr sambalo i i will say say, I actually do like your Twitter account. You do post some fun stuff every once in a while. That's kind of a weird condescending thing to say. Anyway, bye, everybody. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources.

Thanks for listening. You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow of Wrath. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of right. An anthology podcast of modern day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.