PERSPECTIVE
Unreliable Narrator
Exploring stories in games and the art of telling tales
SAM BARLOW
This is my last column for Edge, and I am ready to pass the torch and head off to break the Internet with my new game, Immortality. Such an occasion makes me feel reflective, and I wonder if I should dig for some deeper truth that I have yet to impart. This column is supposed to be about storytelling in games and I think I have been fairly true to that, even if I’ve meandered a little here and there. I could be cute and point out that, consciously and subconsciously, Immortality is my fullest effort at a deeper inquiry into storytelling. It’s a project that interrogates why human beings even tell stories to begin with and deconstructs the 20th century’s great art form, movies. It also mechanically pushes extremes. It is more nonlinear than anything I’ve done and it’s by far the most subtractive piece of game design I’ve attempted. We’ve focused the player’s input into a single, magical tool. So it’s also a suggestion for how we might go about telling stories across the 21st century.