Her Story: Sam Barlow如何改写游戏剧情的创作原则

原作者：Simon Parkin 译者：Vivian Xue

2014年初的一天，Sam Barlow在英国南岸家中的餐桌上放了一张纸片。几周前他辞去了Climax Studios游戏总监的高薪工作。工作十年来他制作的游戏赢得了诸多奖项，然而再多的荣誉也无法使他摆脱对游戏剧情创作感到的失落。那些家庭生活式的剧情、那些无关主角天马行空的理想与冒险的剧情，或是那些无关销路好的性别和种族的剧情，都哪去了？最重要的是，剧情中最宝贵的潜台词哪去了？

Barlow拿起一支笔在纸上简单列出了游戏剧情创作在自由度方面尚待突破的地方，以及一些他希望替换它们的特质。

“我将追求深度的剧情，挖掘真实的角色，”他写道。接着，这位故事创作者为了让内容更丰富些，接着写道：“我的第一部作品将会是：

一个无显著剧情变化的游戏

一个无“存在”的游戏

一个关于潜台词的游戏

Barlow总是喜欢斜着眼睛观察世界。当他还是个孩子时，有一阵子没有人发觉他需要戴眼镜。这要归咎于他四处漫游的童年。他在约克郡出生，但是他的家人时常搬家，包括Barlow五岁时在坦桑尼亚短暂居住了两年。在迁移过程中，Barlow的父母或老师都没时间注意到他视力不佳。“他们从没觉得我特别聪明或者擅长学术，”他说。当Barlow最终得到了一副眼镜后，这一切都变了。

眼中的世界聚焦后，Barlow成了一个书迷。当地的图书馆为他打开了通往不同世界的大门，离开坦桑尼亚后的Barlow被其深深吸引，特别是当他发现世上的食物、地貌、语言和宗教信仰并非是一成不变的。Barlow是如此沉迷于阅读，不仅自己的借阅量达到了上限，连哥哥们的也被他借满了。“我喜欢法国短篇小说，”他说。有一次他借了一本Delacorta的书Luna，一本薄薄的惊悚小说，关于一个男人绑架了一名少女并且想要把她变成一只蜻蜓来实现自己的幻想。“我曾经一度觉得这个故事是我在梦里梦见的，因为这种书怎么会出现在学校图书馆里呢？”

Sam Barlow（from pcgamer.com）

阅读输入很快转化成了输出。Barlow开始创作一些粗糙的娱乐故事“terrible Hobbit rip-offs”，后来他把这些故事变成了错综复杂的文字冒险游戏，并逼迫朋友们玩这些游戏。“通常他们不得不忍受一些尴尬的情景，”他回忆道。Barlow和他的朋友都是英国情景喜剧《低级两贱客》（Bottom）的粉丝，这部剧以低俗而粗鲁的幽默出名。这些早期故事都受到了这部剧的影响。“我们会让彼此失恋失恋再失恋。我感受到了作者和玩家间的对立关系。但是我从未想过将来成为职业的故事创作者。我想“故事创作者”并不在学校为我们规划的职业选择中。”

然而，故事创作者却成了Barlow现在的职业。这个月早些时候，这位设计师的第一部独立制作游戏，《她的故事》（Her Story）赢得了英国电影学院奖“最佳处女作游戏”、“最佳手游和掌机游戏”和“最佳创新游戏”三大荣誉。除了这些奖项外，Barlow三月在旧金山还拿下了独立游戏节最高奖项Seumas McNally Grand Prize。

在这部游戏中，玩家将调查一起1994年谋杀一个英国男人的案件，通过三百个警方审讯录像来了解案件始末，不过你无法按照时间顺序观看这些录像，而是需要亲自在数据库中搜索关键词来查看含有关键词的录像。这种形式不具有欺骗性，但会让人感到困惑，因为剧本的走向不是预先设定好的，玩家们的探案过程各不相同，对案件的理解将被一次次推翻。

《她的故事》是一个无法复制的创意游戏，但它建立在打破游戏标准叙事形式的基础之上。然而，在Barlow得以改写这些创作规则之前，他首先掌握了这些规则。大学毕业后，Barlow进入了一家American dot com软件公司（“我有足够的素材创作搞笑的真人真事小说”），后来行业萧条了，于是Barlow带着一份毫无光彩的简历回英国寻找新工作。“当时我的一个朋友在一家游戏公司做程序员，他鼓励我去应聘游戏美术设计的工作，”Barlow说，他正好熟悉CG工具并且懂得绘画。于是他开始向游戏公司广投简历。只有两家给了他答复，其中一家就是Climax。Barlow加入了Climax朴次茅斯公司的《英雄萨姆》NGC版本制作部门，随后从美术团队被转移到了策划团队（“很大程度上是因为一旦轮到我来谈某件事情该怎么做时，我永远无法保持安静。”）不久后他被提拔为设计总监。

Barlow的早期游戏大多属于雇佣作品（work-for-hire projects），“这些工作要求非常多，并且都在艰难的条件下进行，”他回忆道。“它们是极好的锻炼机会，并且我们团队的很多成员后来进行大型游戏开发时，都应用上了这些前期积累的技巧。”然而，Barlow为自己只能使用有限的题材和人物类型感到失落。“大量重要的、受欢迎的类型都因 ‘主流’游戏的盛行被无视了。”

Barlow在Climax工作室的最后一部作品，《寂静岭：破碎的记忆》（Silent Hill：Shattered Memories），从某种程度上缓解了他的这种失落，这是Konami心理恐怖系列中一部创新性的、深刻并且令人不安的作品。“我们付出了很大的努力确保游戏在点点滴滴中走向结局，”他说。“在听到玩家们诉说自己如何被那一刻触动后，我觉得我们做到了。”尽管游戏的宣传不佳，但我感觉能在2009年制作一部关于少女心中伤痛的3A游戏已是一个伟大的成就。如今来看一些像《到家》（Gone Home）之类的作品以及游戏所容许的尺度，感觉当时的我们已经处于某个顶峰了。”

尽管游戏取得了成功，Barlow还是认为繁荣的游戏市场正在逐渐收缩，游戏越来越少、定义类型游戏越来越多，并且叙事元素也减少了。“大型预算游戏在短期到中期内不再考虑追求叙事艺术，”他回忆道，“同时我发现独立游戏领域的一些小团队制作出了一些很棒的作品，通常是手游。”于是Barlow决定离开Climax出来单干。“这是制作我喜欢的游戏最简单的方法。”

“我想提一点，我们不仅可以做一个包含潜台词的游戏，”Barlow在年初的游戏开发者大会上谈到，“我们还能让游戏围绕着潜台词。”他认为玩家的想象力能够让剧情更加丰富强大。“游戏的艺术不在于展示。如今的游戏过分执着于时间和空间的连续性。所有的剧情节奏都交给玩家来掌控。缺乏了歧义。在这种游戏中，我们的想象力发挥的作用越来越小。”

在Barlow把那张纸条装订起来后，他开始思索一些能够激发分歧和想象力的剧情。他很快想到了警察审讯。在观看了Sharon Stone为电影《本能》制作的试镜短片后，他决定用警方的录像带作为剧情的传播机制。接着他花了六个时间观察警方审讯过程，阅读审讯记录、学术作品，观看实时的短片、电影，研究真实的案例。“在研究完这些后，我已经勾画出了详细的人物经历和时间线，唯独没有对话，”他说，“当人物形象饱满后我开始创作对话，我坐下来按照时间顺序编写了采访稿，以一种表演性的、‘从里到外’的方式。”

为了确保玩家能够通过关键词搜索到所有的录像带，Barlow创建了一张电子表格和一套简单的公式来分析用词以及文本之间的联系。电脑会指出录像中哪些地方的用词不够具有指向性。“这就像雕塑一样，”Barlow说，“我后退一步，然后电脑会告诉我需要修改地方，然后我上前调整一点，接着再后退。”在录像拍摄完成后，Barlow向十五个朋友展示了这个游戏。“他们都很喜爱它，不过他们中大部分人是这种类型的玩家，因此我认为这不能说明什么。”几个星期后，Barlow把游戏带到EGX游戏展进行第一次公开展示。“三天内成百上千的人玩了这款游戏，”他回忆说，“又一次，我们不得不让人们每隔45分钟进行轮流。我感觉自己好像做的还不错。人们似乎能理解这个游戏。”

尽管取得了初步的成功，游戏正式发布的前一晚，Barlow还是感觉没什么把握。“在和大团队合作这么久后，我有点倾向于自我否定，或者说自我质疑，我不确定自己是否真的能让这个无名的游戏获得成功，”他说，“即使Steam和iTunes似乎都准备妥当了，我还在等待那个会让游戏全盘崩溃的最终错误……”但是这种疑虑在第二天一早就消散了，因为他看到了第一批评论，销量随之上升。几周之后，游戏就收支平衡了。

接着，各种会议随之而来。“游戏吸引了不同的叙事行业的关注——图书出版社、电视台、电影公司，”Barlow说，“这些人都在关注着数字化和交互对世界的改变。《她的故事》比起其他游戏，似乎更能戳中他们的需求点，使得他们能够很好地理解它。他们能够理解这种类型和游戏的机制，并且他们对这种交互体验感到兴奋。”Barlow收到了一封来自交互视频开发公司Interlude的CEO Yoni Bloch的面谈邀请。“他对于交互叙事和流媒体视频的看法与我相当一致，并且对听众说我通过《她的故事》发现了其中的真谛，”Barlow说。

三月，Barlow从英格兰南部搬到纽约，加入了Interlude开发一个19世纪80年代电影《战争游戏》的衍生作品。“就形式和内容的结合来说这是一个伟大的项目——思考21世纪的黑客和数字化世界以及现代战争，并从中提炼一个故事。它建立在我对互动故事中玩家和主角之间关系的诸多思考之上，”他说，“它是一个深刻、丰富而富有情感的故事——就像你会期待的付费电视节目——但能够让你进行亲密的、个人的互动。”

人们或许会认为当Barlow重新开始制作大IP后，他会再次面临创作障碍，就像一开始他离开选择独立制作游戏一样，Barlow对这种想法表示不屑。“成为独立制作人是为了脱离创作内容和方式的限制，”他说，“现在，像《战争游戏》这样的IP并不存在这种限制。它是向数字化时代的观众讲述故事的方式上的一种新突破，并且它力图不失掉任何媒介在传播故事中的宝贵品质，可靠与真实。”

尽管Barlow满怀激情，一些人还是会认为互动电影的之得乃电子游戏之失。Barlow却对此充满希望，他认为他在《她的故事》中倡导的制作技巧可以被主流游戏开发所吸收，”他说，“在游戏中，想象力是你的引擎，在其他媒体中也是一样。我们可以通过做减法，而不是把所有元素都堆砌到荧屏上，来使故事更具沉浸感和代入感。这似乎是有违常理的，因为玩家操控游戏时理应得到所有的信息，对吗？但是我认为你必须承认这一切都发生在玩家的想象力中……而实现它的最好方式就是给玩家留下想象的空间。不要过分执着于连贯的空间和时间线。”

本文由游戏邦编译，转载请注明来源，或咨询微信zhengjintiao

One day in early 2014 Sam Barlow placed a scrap of paper on the kitchen table at his home on the South Coast of England. A few weeks earlier he had left a lucrative job as game director at Climax Studios. The games that he had made during his decade spent at the studio had won awards and yet, no amount of accolades had managed to shrug the nagging frustration that Barlow felt about storytelling in the medium. Where were the stories about domestic-scale drama? Where were the stories about characters who aren’t ‘aspirational’ in some fantastical way, or stories about supposedly less marketable genders and races? Where, for that matter, was that most valuable tool in any fiction writer’s pocket: subtext?

Barlow took a pen and began to write a simple manifesto, one that outlined all of the assumptions about video game storytelling of which he wanted to be free, and the characteristics with which he wanted to replace them.

‘I will go deep on story, explore authentic and true characters,’ he wrote. Then, with a storyteller’s flourish: ‘For my first trick I will make:

A game with no meaningful state change

A game without ‘presence’

A game about subtext.’

Barlow has always enjoyed an askance view on the world. When he was a boy, for a while nobody realised that he needed spectacles. Such are the perils of a peripatetic childhood. Life began in Yorkshire, but his family moved frequently, including a two-year stint in Tanzania when Barlow was five years old. In the displacement, neither parent nor teacher had time to notice Barlow’s poor eyesight. “I was never considered particularly bright or academic,” he says. That changed when, eventually, Barlow was given a pair of glasses.

Prior to Her Story, Barlow lists Silent Hill: Shattered Memories as his proudest achievement, a game that, as he puts it, ‘earned its ending.’
As the world flicked into focus, Barlow became an ardent reader. The local library provided a portal into alternate worlds, which Barlow found alluring after his time spent in Tanzania when, he says, he saw that food, landscapes, language and religion were not constants in the world. Such was his reading habit that Barlow maxed out not only his own library card but also those of his brothers. “I had thing for short French novels,” he says. One day he borrowed a copy of Delacorta’s Luna, a slim thriller about a teenage girl who is kidnapped by a man who wants to turn her into a dragonfly to enact his fantasies. “For the longest time I thought I’d dreamed it, because what the hell was that doing in a school library?”

Input soon translated to output. Barlow began to write “terrible Hobbit rip-offs” which, in time, evolved into intricate text adventures that he forced his friends play. “Usually they would involve having to endure embarrassing scenarios,” he recalls. Barlow and his friends were fans of the British sitcom Bottom, with its scatological brand of irreverent humour. Bottom’s influence infused those early stories. “We’d force each other to fail and fail and fail again in love. I got a taste for an adversarial author and player relationship. But I never connected the dots to wanting to tell stories professionally. I guess ‘storyteller’ wasn’t on the list of careers that they handed out at my school.”

Storyteller was, however, Barlow’s vocation. Earlier this month, the designer’s first independently produced game, Her Story, won three BAFTA awards, for ‘Debut Game’, ‘Mobile and Handheld Game’ and ‘Game Innovation’. These trophies complement a clutch of existing awards, including the desirable IGF’s Seumas McNally Grand Prize for ‘Best Independent Game’, which Barlow collected in San Francisco in March.

The police procedural, in which players investigate the 1994 murder of a British man, is told through three hundred video clips culled from police interview tapes, which, confusingly, cannot be watched in chronological order. Instead, you use search terms to query a database. Clips that feature the queried word are then presented for viewing. What could have been a bewildering format instead beguiles, with unscripted revelations that subvert your understanding of events in a pattern that is distinctive to each player.

Barlow cites 30 Flights of Loving as the perfect example of how video games can employ jump cuts between scenes and time in order to tell a brisker story.

Her Story is an un-replicable novelty, but one founded on principles that subvert the standard format for video game storytelling. Before Barlow was able to rewrite the rules, however, first he learned to master them. After graduating college, Barlow joined an American dot com software company (“I have enough anecdotes for an amusing Roman à clef”). At some point the boom busted and Barlow returned to England in search of a new job, burdened by the suddenly unenviable C.V. of a ‘dot com person.’ “I had a friend who was a coder at a games company and he encouraged me to try for a job as a game artist,” says Barlow, who knew his way around CG tools and could draw. Barlow applied to every video company he could find. Only two replied, one of which was Climax. Barlow joined the Portsmouth-based company to work on the Gamecube version of Serious Sam before switching from the art team to the design team (“largely because I wouldn’t keep quiet when it came to expressing my opinions on how things should be done”) where he was soon promoted to lead designer.

Most of Barlow’s early games were work-for-hire projects. “Those kind of gigs ask a lot under difficult circumstances,” he recalls. “They’re a fantastic training ground and many members of my team would go on to work on major games, leveraging the skills they learned at the coalface.” Still, Barlow was frustrated by the limitations on the types of stories and characters available to him. “There’s a huge number of key, popular genres that just don’t get a look in as far as ‘mainstream’ games go,” he says.

Barlow’s final project at Climax, Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, an inventive, poignant and unsettling riff on Konami’s long-running psychological horror series, provided some room to ease those frustrations. “We put a lot of effort into making sure we ‘earned’ the ending,” he says. “After hearing from players about how that moment of catharsis hit them, I always felt like we nailed it. For all that the game was mis-promoted, the fact that we got to make a ‘AAA’ game about a teenage girl’s conflicted grief in 2009 felt like an achievement. When you look now and see titles like Gone Home and the breadth of what is permissible in games, it feels like we were on the cusp of things opening out.”

Despite the game’s success, Barlow believed that the blockbuster video game market was contracting, with fewer games, more defined genres and a swing away from storytelling “Big budget games as a narrative art form was not on the agenda for the short to mid- term,” he recalls. “At the same time I was aware of some really great work being done by micro-teams in the indie world, and often on mobile.” Barlow decided to leave Climax and strike out on his own. “It seemed like the easiest route to making the kinds of games I wanted to see,” he says.

“I wanted to make a point that not only could we have a game that involved subtext,” Barlow said at a design talk delivered at the Game Developer’s Conference earlier this year, “but one that revolved around subtext.” When a player’s imagination adds the detail, the story becomes a lot more powerful, he argued. “The art is in not showing things. Modern video games are obsessed with continuous time and space. All of the story beats are controlled by the player. This removes the ambiguity. We have less and less of a role for the imagination in this kind of game.”

After penning his manifesto, Barlow began a search for a premise that would encourage ambiguity and imagination. He soon settled on the idea of a police procedural drama. After watching Sharon Stone’s audition tapes for the film Basic Instinct, Barlow decided to use police tapes as a delivery mechanism. He spent the next six months reviewing police interviews, reading police handbooks, academic research, watching real life footage, movies and going through real life case studies. “By the end of the process I had some detailed character histories and timelines, but no dialogue,” he says. “Once the characters were ready to talk I sat down and wrote out the interviews in order, in a very performative, ‘inside out’ way.”

In order to ensure that players were able to find all of the clips via search engine terms, Barlow created a spreadsheet and a simple formula to analyse the word-use and interconnectivity of the script. The computer would point out clips where the word choice wasn’t unique. “It was like sculpting,” Barlow says. “I’d take a step back, the computer would highlight where I needed to make a change and I’d go in and chip away, then step back again.” After filming was complete, Barlow showed the game to fifteen friends. “They all loved it, but most of them were all gaming narrative people, so I was reluctant to read too much into that.” A few weeks later Barlow took the game to EGX Rezzed for its first public showing. “Hundreds of people played across the three days,” he recalls. “We were having to ask people to move on — in one case, after 45 minutes. I felt I had something. People seemed to be getting it.”

Despite this early success, on the night before the game’s launch, Barlow felt weary and uncertain. “After working on bigger teams for so long, I had a slight whiff of imposter syndrome, or scepticism, that I could actually take a game from nothing to ship all on my own,” he says. “Even when the Steam and iTunes setup seemed to be ready to go, I was waiting for the last minute error that would bring it all crashing down…” Doubts disappeared the following morning when the first reviews appeared and sales soon followed. Within a few weeks the game had broken even.

In March Barlow moved to New York City to begin work on an interactive reboot of the 1980s film War Games.

Then the meetings started. “The game started to attract attention from all sorts of different storytelling industries – book publishing, TV, film,” says Barlow. “All these places where people were trying to get their heads around what digital and interactive was going to do to their worlds. Her Story, more than a lot of other games, seemed to hit this sweet spot where they could understand it. They got the genre; they knew what they were looking at; they could understand the game mechanic, and they got excited by how the interactivity made them feel.” Barlow received an invitation to meet with Yoni Bloch, founder and CEO of Interlude, a technology start-up developing multi-path video narratives. “His vision for interactive storytelling and streaming video really resonated with me and spoke to the audience I’d discovered with Her Story,” says Barlow.

In March Barlow moved from the South of England to New York, to join Interlude and work on a reboot of the 1980s film War Games. “It’s a great project in terms of a marriage of form and content – think 21st Century hacking and the digital world and modern warfare and exploring a story in that world. It builds on a lot of my thinking about the relationship between a player and the protagonist in an interactive story,” he says. “It’s trying to tell a deep, rich, emotive story – the kind of thing you’d expect of a premium cable TV show – but with this intimate, personal interactivity.”

Barlow is dismissive of the idea that, in returning to work on a major IP, he may bump up against the same constraints that caused him to go independent in the first place. “Going indie was out of a frustration about the kinds of stories I could tell and the ways I could tell them,” he says. “Right now, something like War Games does not have those restrictions. It’s breaking new ground in how to tell a story to a digital native audience, and it’s trying to do that without losing touch of what makes a story special in any medium – character, authenticity, truth.”

Despite Barlow’s enthusiasm, some will argue that interactive film’s gain is video gaming’s loss. Barlow remains hopeful, however, that the techniques he pioneers in Her Story could be absorbed into mainstream game development. “I hope that people look beyond the specifics of Her Story and connect with the bigger picture learnings,” he says. “In a game, imagination is your engine, just as it is in any other medium. We can make stories more immersive, more involving by taking away – by not trying to put everything on screen. It seems counterintuitive – if the player is in control, they need all the info, right? But I think you have to acknowledge that it’s all happening in the player’s imagination… and the best way to make that work better is to give the imagination work to do. Don’t be so in love with contiguous space and continuous time.”（source：Eurogamer  ）