Hi everyone,
Hi everyone,
Happy Study Day! Here’s a thread for some open-ended thinking and writing about Her Story (click that link and follow the link to purchase if you haven’t done so yet). Feel free to follow your interests in what you write about, with two qualifications: first, make sure that you cite and discuss the work closely and directly in whatever you address, pointing to specific moments, clips, or other elements. Second, your post should address both the form of this work and the ways that form relates to its narrative and thematic content — how do things like the work’s organization, interface, interactivity, sound and image, etc., change how we read it, and how do they relate to thematic issues (gender, mystery, identity, etc., to name a few without giving spoilers)?
Reminder: Your writing should go in the comments section for this post — click either on the link near the bottom of this post where it says “Leave a Reply” or towards the top where it says “Leave a Comment.” It should be at least 250-300 words, and is due by midnight Monday, October 28th. If you have any questions, let me know via email.
Literature in the Digital Age, Fall 2019 
After playing the mobile form of the game Her Story, I was left with a feeling of unresolved curiosity. I watched clips from the database for an hour until I could no longer come up with ideas for new search terms. This aspect of the work, the mediation of a “readers” experience by their search terms, was particularly intriguing for me. Searching for videos in this way makes each player’s experience unique and allows the control of their own investigation. In that sense, the form of the work is aligned with the murder mystery theme, as the reader can act like a crime investigator sifting through a database or conducting their own interviews. Additionally, the non-linear story telling also fits with the theme of work, as the reader is forced to put together pieces of the puzzle in a way similar to crime mysteries that are not solved linearly (i.e. new information later fitting into the story from new witnesses).
With regard to the content itself, I found it interesting how they chose to characterize the interviewers. Although the video clips only include the witness Hannah talking, the reader can make inferences about the attitude of the interviewers based on Hannah’s reactions. For example, during one of the early clips Hannah is introducing herself and says, “My name is Hannah, H-A-N-N-A-H, it’s a palindrome.” She then continues to explain what a palindrome is but stops herself and apologizes when (I infer) she notices that the interviewer(s) is not interested with non-relevant information. Here, the interviewer is characterized as serious and focused without us ever hearing their voice. This serious attitude is juxtaposed with Hannah’s relaxed, sometimes comical attitude. Juxtaposition between witness and interview is quite common when the witness believes (or wants the interview to believe) that they are innocent while the interviewer has an intuition that the witness is guilty.
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When first opening Her Story, I found it incredibly interesting that the player was immediately thrown into the game with no instructions and very little context as to what was going on. Being presented with little information, I was left to my own devices and reasoning to figure out what to do next. After watching a few clips, I realized I could search for different keywords to find more clips which would give me more information. As I was watching, I was always listening for new information which I could then process into a keyword search. This idea of a non-linear game experience is an interesting structure. When reading a book or watching a film or show, when the consumer is introduced to new information or context that is only alluded to or is not fleshed out enough, the consumer knows that soon enough, the rest of the information will be revealed eventually through the course of the story. This linear way of consuming media means the viewer or reader does not have to work to figure out what the information means (though many do through the use of fan theories, mind maps and even fanfiction) because they know it will be resolved in front of them very shortly. In Her Story, the player has to actively piece together the information and play a big role in the literal detective process. There will be no next episode or chapter that will explain the new information being presented or clarify any misconceptions. The players themselves have to set out to do this, if they want to see any results or answers. Through this interactivity, it creates a longer lasting sense of a cliffhanger- the mystery will not be resolved if the player does not actively advance in the game.
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Her Story is a very difficult game to classify. It’s genre is multifaceted, with elements from mystery games, adventure games, story and role playing games as well as countless others, but to me it functions most adeptly as a kind of safe-cracking game. I want to make the distinction between this categorization and a more straight forward detective game in a few ways, the first being extreme intimacy of scope. Her Story is an incredibly personal game that removes a concrete avatar that a typical mystery game would let you use to explore the game world. Here, the mode of conveyance is totally in sync with the narrative position of the player, making you the detective. This second part is what I think gives the impression of an almost stealth like feeling of play as you delve deeper into the secrets of Simon’s Murder. The game gives you only the barest of instructions before leaving you to initiate, forcing you to prod and probe at the small crumbs of information you start with before you begin to see a broader picture. However, because of the way the interface works, this journey of discovery feels much more adversarial. Because you can only view the first five chronological videos with any search term, in addition to the frustrating design of the video session tracker, you feel as though you are coming up against a real kind of resistance that wouldn’t be present if the game let you explore and reconstruct the information with a more effective operating system. A moment that particularly highlighted this feature was when I first discovered that the interview subject had a miscarriage. Searching the term yielded six results which meant I would have to probe further for a search more complete term that would get me to that final video. I felt cunning with each new breakthrough and each new roadblock, a feeling that I have never experienced in a game that lacks so many common difficulty mechanics like time restrictions of hard failure states.
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(I was actually thinking of the search term ‘reflection,’ miscarriage actually resulted in a clean five videos, giving me a feeling of victory and solid progress.)
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Her Story differs significantly from any text I’ve read or game I’ve played in the past. Its narrative structure is entirely nonlinear, so that it is up to the reader (player?) to unravel the story in whatever order they choose through different search results. The game’s initial interface gives you very few clues on how to navigate its narrative; the read.me text files on the simulated computer screen give baseline instructions on how to search for video clips but aside from that we receive no information on the case being investigated. Because of this, the chronology in which information is found out about the case can tend to seem very ‘out of order’ (of course I say this knowing that there is no real intended order to this game). For example, I found that during my playthrough I learned the defendant’s name, Hannah, almost 30 minutes after learning many intimate details about her marriage and sex life. This, coupled with the fact that our role is that of viewer rather than interviewer, left me feeling quite disoriented in my interactions with the text. There is a tension in the level of agency we have in this game; while players can quite literally search for whatever term or phrase they want in the database, it is rather frustrating to not be able to watch each of the seven interviews in their entirety or ask Hannah our own pressing questions as a reader. For this reason, I felt that the game’s interface emulated some of the big-picture questions of technology and the digital age that we’ve been mulling over in class. In the internet era, anyone with a computer can look up whatever they want and be met with millions of search results and sources of information, but it is up to us as individuals to analytically comb through this information and craft our own personal truths out of what we are presented with.
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Her Story is different.I’ve played a few games where you get dropped in with little to no context, but in those cases I’ve seen media for them, trailers and whatnot. So I have a slight idea of what’s going on. Not here. The only context is the “read me” and “really read me” files, which barely explain anything but some of the mechanics of the game. It’s incredible. There’s a lot of games that say you “have to explore to figure out what’s going on,” and some do have that, but Her Story really means it.
The non-linearity of the game is brilliant, and really serves to heighten the mystery of what’s going on. Other mystery games have some sort of plot, generally where you’re retracing the steps of some victim, or doing your own investigation. There may be some flashbacks, but most of what happens is in the game’s present. We’re discovering disjointed bits of the story, with a vague idea of what may have happened plot-wise. I’d say we’re discovering the plot at the same time as the main character is, but we are the main character. It changes how the game feels, when we are literally the main character of the game. Makes everything feel much more personal. It’s the difference between I need to find out what happens next, and I need to find out what happens next to the main character. It’s a subtle difference, but it’s there, and (to me at least) makes it much more interesting. It makes me feel more invested, like I have a job to do (except I have to pay to do it, instead of being paid). A game of cliffhangers.
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I think the form of Her Story is really what makes it so interesting to me; the story itself is a good mystery and quite intriguing, but the interactive form really makes it. In particular, the way in which you move about the content is a new experience for me. There is really an endless possibility of ways you can “read” this, I chose to look through the videos that came up automatically with “murder” and from there plugged in some keywords relating to crime that I thought might get results. This didn’t prove incredibly fruitful, in retrospect I was searching for things that I assumed would be in the story, I thought it was a more paint by numbers murder mystery then it ended up being. As I began to grasp the story more and I picked out recurring concepts, names, and objects and started plugging those in. I think the act of thinking about what to search for and getting results from that is a wholly new experience, and greatly impacts how we “read” this text. We all have different experiences and ways of thinking that will impact how we prioritize our search terms which makes us all have a different experience. It goes without saying that this form is interactive, but it is beyond what we have experienced so far in the class, we dictate the flow of the story completely. There were times in my playing that I watched a new clip and saw how it subtly connects to later ideas that were revealed, someone else may view this in reverse order and never return to their first clip to experience this kind of meaning. To give an example, after I discovered the idea of Eve and Hannah, I watched an earlier clip of Hannah talking about her marriage, she says it never felt like it was just the two of them and that there was a “pressure” around them. I instantly took this to mean Eve and their double life, someone who watched this before that revelation could never understand the double meaning. I think this kind of unique revealing of information and clarity is one of the strengths of this form, it also heavily relates to ideas of identity, as myself and another person have different ideas about how to move through the content and discover this mystery of identity.
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The thing that I found most interesting about “reading” Her Story was the way in which I had to piece together the story in my head; both by trying to figure out the chronology of the story based on the dates written in the corner of the videos, and by trying to figure out the story itself that she is sharing about Simon’s murder through the videos. I found it interesting how the app had files on the desktop titled in a way that enticed the viewers/readers to click them. Due to the fact that there was no actual start to the story, as the viewer you get to decide where and how to begin investigating the murder mystery. Rarely when reading something do you get to decide how the experience of the story begins. The viewer/reader is not actually deciding the true start of the story, you have to determine where the story began, or attempt to do so, by creating a storyline in your head as you go through the videos and readings. The app gives you the freedom to decide how and what you will experience.
It is also interesting how as the viewer/reader your own biases will affect the unfolding of the storyline as you choose what to watch and what to search. The thematic elements in the story are also affected by these biases that the viewer/reader holds because the theme of the story is essentially created from whatever they perceive as the truths and key facts that the speaker is sharing. When I was on the app, for example, I was most lead by the names that the speaker would mention. I would want to know how people like Eve, and the baby where tied into Simon’s murder. Then, by searching their names other potential key phrases or bits of information would come about that I would want to further investigate, and that’s exactly what I would do. Every viewer/reader is going to find their information differently because they will search different things and find different elements interesting and/or necessary to the storyline, which they have created in their own mind. It’s not that what is said is different; everyone using this app has access to the same information, but unlike a physical book in which all the information is laid out in a predetermined amount of pages, you have to search though this app to find its truths and to figure out the truths of the murder mystery itself.
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Her Story’s form allows for a kind of narrative immersion that is seldom seen in other forms of media – the act of playing the game is the same as what the player is doing in the narrative, viewing various videos from a police database. Adding to the immersion is the dated UI and the poor video quality alongside glare that emulates that of a CRT screen, firmly placing the viewer within the time period of the narrative. This serves a few narrative purposes: it helps the player suspend their disbelief to the dated nature of the database system, and also serves as a method to display the reflection of the screen itself and who exactly is operating the computer (spoilers). When key videos are uncovered, the computer monitor would momentarily dim itself to more clearly show the reflection on the screen, which provides an implicit resolution to what is happening within the narrative.
When “playing” the game, I found myself writing notes in the same way that I would leave bookmarks when reading House of Leaves – key pages or footnotes became key search queries as I narrowed my searches down to look for more video clips. There was a kind of satisfaction watching (and discovering) the database checker program to check my progress – Barlow scripted the videos such that key search terms and other game mechanics would stick out, signposting the narrative for the player to follow. Whenever “Hannah” spoke oddly specific words, they would often lead to more important revelations that would eventually wrap around the rest of the database. Similar signposts were also left in the readme.txt files – the hint concerning quotation marks allowed me to access the harder-to-access portions of the database: the lie detector videos were only accessible by searching “”No”” and “”Yes””. This kind of obfuscation gives an agency and presence to the player that would be absent had the videos been simply displayed in order. That, combined with the occasional police siren and monitor fluctuations constantly reminded me of my presence in the game world.
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Her Story was an unusual experience for me. I don’t normally play games and when I began “playing” I didn’t really think of it that way. It was an interesting way to play a game though. There was an unsettling mood about the design with flickering lights, the static sounds and much more. The aspect of starting the game with little to no information threw me off a little. I opened the game to the word “murder” typed in the search bar. So from there, I kept picking words that would pop up in other videos and try to piece together a sense of what happened. The narrative is anything but linear and each player is going to have a completely different experience when it comes to interpreting the information and in what order the information is presented to them. I would say that this game has a strong external exploratory narrative because there’s nothing I could do that would change the real story line, the story line is already set. I get to chose what words to search and what videos to watch, which influences how the information is delivered to me, but that is it. Having the control of how I am going to “read” the story and engage with it was enthralling. Each time I clicked on a video I would wonder what new information could I use to piece into this storyline. Her Story is something that we’re addressing as being read or played. We’ve talked about the different ways you can engage with a text and how that shapes new definitions for reading and literature in the digital age. I would say that Her Story is the embodiment of most of aspects of literature in the digital age. There is a story line that we are following (or piecing together), a narrative voice, and we are engaging with it. There are aspects of everything you do and experience when reading a text in the traditional sense of the word “reading”.
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As I was playing this game, I made sure to follow and pay attention to every word that appeared. There are words that I originally thought would yield no important results, but upon searching, interesting videos would show up. As I started, I was thrown into a confused state as I did not know who the characters were and what is happening. The reader has to pick up cues and piece the story together, like solving a puzzle, except we do not know the full picture. It felt like a webbed map where one result led to another and many results overlapped with each other. The parts where the duality of the character Hannah was revealed was shocking, yet all of the previous weird answers from the character has actually been prepping the reader for this revelation. After that, I slowly began to know what to look for in this game and would constantly check my progress to see whether or not I was going in the right track. Each video is separate and non-linear, yet this game had the power to allow the player to make sense of all the information that is randomly thrown at them. Players can fill in the empty spots.
The content of this game itself reminded me a lot of the movie “What Happened to Monday” in the way that the character had to share a life and essentially mirror each other and rotate their appearance in the world. As I played on, I got more and more into the story and would keep jotting down and testing out keywords to try to find the next piece of the puzzle. What added on to the challenge was the fact that only five of the top results were available, so the factor of the unknown was strong. There would be words that yielded 60 results, yet I would only have access to the top five.
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The HerStory experience is exactly that – an experience. In other words, the story is designed like a video game in which the reader has to choose which clips to view and eventually piece together the puzzle that Barlow created. I see this video game to be organized chaos. Every clip has a place and order, but the audience has to comb through the videos to understand the narrative. I did this by searching for keywords and watching clips that were associated with those keywords. It was interesting to have to think about the clips I’ve already watched and reimagine new possibilities of key terms to add to the story. Rather than a passive reading experience, I was like a character (detective) in the video game itself. The experience has several moments ambiguities, such as when Hannah(?) says, “Can you arrest someone that doesn’t exist?” in one of the clips. Is she lying? Does she have a twin named Eve, or is this an attempt to cover her tracks? Rather than wait for the answer, we have to find the answer. Each viewer will choose different key-words in different orders and therefore discover information in various ways. Therefore, the form in which we engage with the clips forms the narrative.
My perception of the woman’s identity develops as I engage more and more with the game. It is interesting that the form is set up like an interview (with me as the interviewer) because although we don’t hear any questions from the interviewer, this puts me in a position in which I am skeptical of her rather than supportive of her. This position may evoke certain stereotypes/biases within me that could interfere with my judgment of her character. Therefore, another aspect of the interactive experience with this game is forcing yourself to take her words at face value. You have to pay attention to her tone of voice, the content of the words she’s saying, the emotions expressed, body language, and more and put them together in your head. That way, although you are learning the narrative from a skeptical point of view, you are forcing yourself to see it from another perspective.
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“Her Story” was a very different game from anything I’ve ever played before. It was a rocky start as you are thrown into the game with little direction and no guidance. After reading the brief instruction of how to work the database, I started typing in random words having to do with the first set of videos that appeared originally. I typed in “Simon” first, after Simon was brought up in the first video set and seemed to be the theme. From here, I got information on Simon and figured out that the woman talking with Simon’s partner. “Eric” was my fourth search as he seemed significant, and he turned out to be Simon’s boss. He works for a glass company? Doing “the more complicated stuff”. The game was a bit frustrating as you just kept going and going searching different words, but doing so did not necessarily get you anywhere. After a while of searching words, and with no progress in figuring out anything substantial, I gave up. (Searching “I give up” and “done” did not get me anywhere either).
As far as the format goes, it was very interesting to “read” such an interactive piece. It was really fun until it got frustrating, and I couldn’t believe how many videos came up for so many different words. It must have been quite the process to create and produce this game.
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The first thing I did upon opening Her Story was to explore everything I could on the desktop. In addition to the database window itself and the pop up that displays videos, there are seven other windows that can be opened. I explored all of these, and while I found little tid bits in each of them, the most valuable by far was the database checker. The database checker reveals the clips you’ve already seen. Though it doesn’t tell you what they are – that’s on you – it does show what video you just watched. After rooting through the other resources for keywords to search for such as “mirror,” “mum,” or “hack,” I would for clips fit in the database using these words and tag them with a coordinate pair to locate later. I used coordinates as opposed to a number because it was easier to just go row by column. As far as the content of this game, I managed to unravel a great deal of it after a few hours of searching. I won’t spoil anything but some of the most revealing parts of the game for me were the guitar song, the lie detector test and, more importantly, the reflection on it. The other part I found particularly intriguing was the occasional dimming of the screen accompanied by sirens and blurry images that occured after certain, particularly revealing clips. When I think of this “text” if you will, in the context of our class, I think of how it changes our interaction with it. We are no longer reading front to back, we’re searching in the dark for any part of it, examining what we find, and trying to place it into the bigger picture. This fits remarkably well with the theme of investigation, crime and mystery.
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The experience of the game HerStory felt like I was constantly shifting between being completely immersed in the narrative to being hyper-aware that a creator built that narrative. The game is comparable to “House of Leaves” in that its story is very malleable depending on which elements of the narrative the player(or reader) chooses to focus on. The game itself focuses on searching through an archive of clips that center around the interrogation of a woman named Hannah and her twin sister, Eva. The method in which the player finds these clips is through keywords you hear after the initial set of videos is given to the player at the start of the game. This first set is labeled “murder” and depending on which rabbit hole one decides to go down, the more meat is given to the narrative. I find it very interesting in the skillful way the creator of the game could predict and recenter the story. After the first play through, I found it uncanny that the methods in which the story unfolded could’ve been done in infinite ways. However, I think that the story unfolds more similarly than one would think. I can especially feel this when searching words that led to toungue-in-cheek videos metaphorically wagging its finger at me when I jumped to my own conclusions.
The player is picking apart the story, but not creating it at the same time; an overarching narrative still has the largest influence. Its honestly really comparable to the Youtube suggested bar, as far away from an award winning game as it may seem. Something the platform’s users realized was that if someone uses the suggested bar to get closer to a seemingly completely disconnected topic, they would get to it. And this would be done within at least 5 clicks or less. I think this explains a certain algorithm within people themselves in being able to search for the narratives they want to get to, whether intentional or not.
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I found it very interesting to explore this game. At first when I opened it, I watched the videos that were already there with the word “murderer”. In those Hannah spoke about Simon and I therefore looked for his name right after. I continued making researches typing words that she would mention in her interview. I picked certain specific words that seemed relevant to me, but another player probably would have picked others. Noone can have the same experience of this game. Even if two players would see exactly the same videos they would still not live the same experience because the order in which the videos are watched matters in our perception of the story.
It makes it very confusing not to have an order and I automatically tried to make one. There is this option “add to the session” in the game and I tried to add videos from the same interview in this section. I tried to reconstitute one interview. Audiences are used to see a story with a beginning, a middle and an end thus, I think that it is instictive to try to put everything into order again.
I searched for words during an hour. I was really lost in the story and found myself searching for random words just to see if there could be a connection and I was surprised to find videos for the words “princess” “fairy” “doll” in an investigation about a murder. Once again it reminded me of all the possibilities that this game offers and made me think of it as infinite. I wanted to finish it but I also knew that there would always be more words and more videos.
The form of the game is also very interesting. As a player you’re watching on a computer or smartphone another screen. I was surprised to see that there was a game in the rubbish bin (“mirror game”) but it was a nice way to take a break after watching several videos without being able to put a story together. It added to the reality effect because a lot of computers have easy games on them. A realistic feature was also the lights reflecting on the screen of the computer that we could hear. It added to the ambience of the game. Making it a little bit frightening.
The player has here the control. He decides what he sees and he creates the order of the game. However, in this interactive game the player also has no control. Indeed, it is hard for the viewer to collect all of the informations that he gets and he cannot really choose the order. Every player makes his own way through the investigation without really knowing where to go.
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“Her Story”’s content and creation is fairly undervalued. For the sheer fact that I never knew about this app, is scary. The creation of this is almost ingenious in the sense of design and along showing particularly how you would find certain footage. With the background of a glared, old computer, you are already placed in a world of a police officer type narrative- only to find later you are playing the character of Sarah, her daughter. Through finding video from keywords- you truly have to hunt and dig for even the most basic of information. For example when physically typing and searching “name,” you come with seven entries of only five you can ‘access’. In one- the protagonist/antagonist tells you her name is Hannah while in another she says that it is and sets the lie detector test off, which you can find out is the only answer she got wrong. You find yourself and pressed between two characters- Hannah and Eve- whom seem to have split personality disorder and share one physical body. This ‘split’ surround the theme of the tapes- in which Simon (the victim/missing husband). In tapes in which Hanah seems more “present” -she promises she loved Simon and wouldn’t ever hurt him. While Eve seems to believe that he is the reason, she has to live in the attic with all these rules even though she is the stronger/dominant personality, though not the host. Eve even admits at one point that she killed him with the mirror, that’s often seen on the table of the interviews, and knew she could get away with it. Hannah seems to be somewhat aware of this and even asks, “how can you arrest someone that doesn’t exist?”
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Her Story is the first work we have engaged this semester that really shifts narrative and rhetoric away from traditional methods and form. One thing that struck me in particular is the way the game is visually presented: the visuals take up the whole screen, and are made to look like a computer monitor (complete with the glare you see on older computer screens). As a result our computer, that we are playing on, becomes the computer in the world of the game. As a result, the player is implicitly placed within that virtual world. The player can also interact with the computer, using it just as we would our own (just as we are using our own in that moment). There is a collapse of virtual, fictional space and real space that occurs when we open and play this game. The two are flattened by Her Story’s interface.
Another unique aspect of Her Story is how the narrative can reveal itself to the player in different ways depending on their choices. While playing, I was constantly concerned with what the proper “order” was to watch the clips, and if the order I was choosing told a different story separate from the “truth.” The concept of truth itself is also interesting with regards to this game. The game itself is ultimately a search for truth, as that is the objective we are tasked with. However, unlike most other narrative structures, the experience of the game is not a mere revealing of the truth or story, rather it is the player’s effort to uncover that truth. What this goes to say is, actual narrative “truth” may not exist for each experience of this work.
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“Her Story” is categorized in the app store like a game, which is something I felt was a mistake based on my experience with this app. I was confused from the beginning because of the lack of direction. The creator of this game fails to input a menu that consists of typical things such as settings, missions or goals, sound effects, etc. I could not figure out what my objective is while playing, other than to recover as many files as possible while trying to piece together a murder case, to which I could easily stumble upon and the game would be over. In terms of how I watched these short videos, I thought that reading them would be much less interesting. The background music was a great way to create an ominous feeling while watching, while the sound of the camera’s and tone of “Hannah” was utterly creepy and off-putting. Reading the two files to the side was somewhat helpful, which was one of the many things I did before accessing the files. I struggled with the form of this text because unlike a book, I found that its accessibility left me feeling more powerless than if I did not have the ability to open and look through whatever I wanted. I felt like this the most when looking through the files trying to search for terms. For instance, I searched the name “SIMON,” to which I found 271 clips that used that word. However, I only had access to five of them, so not only was I cut off from 266 other clips, but the “game” made sure that I was aware of how much I was being cut off from. Once I came to terms with this, I had realized I still was not sure what I was supposed to be doing in this game, to which I then concluded that it did not matter how much I was being left out of because I don’t even have the power to know what I am supposed to do. I basically felt as though I was given the power of independence, with respect to looking through the information presented to me, but I was left powerless in that I was not left to all of it and did not truly understand what my objective was.
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