There are four main characters and multiple supporting players. The archive is larger and of more dubious origin, composed of a mixture of covert surveillance tapes and intercepted video calls. In Her Story, the video archive you were searching collected a series of police interviews with a single subject. There's a traditional narrative journey to go on here - it's just that you don't have a map for it. These are mystery thrillers in which the player is cast as a detective, digging for truth. Yet the effect Barlow is aiming for isn't some surrealist collage. In theory, the clips can be viewed in any order you could stumble into the denouement with your first search.

In both games, a film made from Barlow's script is atomised into dozens, maybe hundreds of short video clips, which can then be searched like a database by the player using dialogue keywords. Sam Barlow, the writer-designer of Her Story and now Telling Lies, is doing something much more intentional, tackling this quirk of the medium head-on with his experiments in interactive fiction. Availability: Out 23rd August on PC, Mac and iOS devices.That's where the element of chance comes in. Depending on the game design, there might be no telling when and in what order players encounter these, or whether they encounter them at all. As well as scripts, they build worlds and storylines out of huge databases of NPC barks, flavour text, lore snippets and branching conversations. There's a sense in which most video game writers are using cut-up technique by default - even when they're trying to construct a linear narrative. It's sometimes called aleatoric writing, which means there's an element of chance involved in the creative process alea is Latin for dice game.

Cut-up has its roots in Dadaism and was used by boundary-pushing artists like William Burroughs and David Bowie. There's a writing technique called cut-up, in which a text is broken down into small component parts and then rearranged, somewhat at random, into a new text. The creator of Her Story explores its ideas further in a broader, deeper, more unruly video mystery.

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