Her Story
Game
8 documents in the library are about Her Story, from writers such as DiGRA, Game Maker's Toolkit and How To Market A Game. Each has a summary and key insights with the page they come from.
Connections
Each row is a game or company named alongside Her Story, each column a document, oldest first. A mark means that document names it. Select a row to see those documents.
Documents about Her Story
The FMV Interval: The Long Dormant Period of Full Motion Video Games 1998-2015
This paper, authored by Scott Knight and Jakub Majewski, proposes the term "The FMV Interval" to describe the roughly two-decade period between the collapse of the full motion video (FMV) game boom of the 1990s and the genre's revival with Sam Barlow's Her Story in 2015.
- The paper coins the term "The FMV Interval" for the roughly two-decade gap (1998–2015) between the collapse of the 1990s full motion video game boom and the genre's revival with Sam Barlow's Her Story in 2015.
- Its central argument is that FMV development never fully disappeared during this period: releases fell sharply, but developers kept using the format, and FMV continued to appear in cut-scenes within non-FMV games.
- The late 1990s are framed as the twilight of the classic FMV era, with Riven (1997) and Tex Murphy: Overseer (1998) cited as signs of waning appeal and industry sentiment that "FMV was dead and 3D was the future."
How an itch.io Game Became a Million-Dollar Hit: The Roottrees are Dead
The success of the narrative puzzle game The Roottrees are Dead serves as a primary case study for utilizing itch.io as an effective incubator for commercial game development.
- The Roottrees are Dead demonstrated that itch.io serves as an effective 'feeder platform' to validate game concepts before committing to a full-scale commercial release on Steam.
- After an 11-month development cycle, the initial itch.io version—built with 'spaghetti code' and AI-generated art—generated $3,000 in tips in its first month, proving the core gameplay had market potential.
- The developer partnered with a publisher who recoded the game and replaced all AI-generated assets with professional illustrations by Henning Ludvigsen to meet the higher quality standards of the Steam audience.
GMTK Digest: January 2025
The January 2025 edition of the Game Maker’s Toolkit Digest serves as a curated industry update, focusing on emerging trends in game design and notable new releases.
- The detective and mystery genre is experiencing a design renaissance characterized by a shift toward player-led investigation and complex information synthesis.
- Recent titles like 'The Roottrees are Dead' demonstrate a growing market appetite for cerebral, non-linear gameplay that necessitates external note-taking.
- Modern mystery games are increasingly utilizing genealogy-based puzzles and analog-style interfaces to deepen narrative immersion.
What Makes a Great Detective Game?
The primary objective of this analysis is to define the core mechanics that constitute a successful detective game, moving beyond superficial thematic elements to identify systems that genuinely simulate the investigative process.
- The most critical design element in a detective game is the 'tester' mechanism, which must validate player conclusions without relying on multiple-choice prompts or leading questions that encourage guessing.
- Successful detective games foster intellectual achievement by requiring players to input their own findings rather than selecting from pre-determined options.
- Detective games are categorized into three distinct mechanical styles: deduction-style (e.g., Return of the Obra Dinn, The Case of the Golden Idol), contradiction-style (e.g., Ace Attorney, Lucifer Within Us), and investigation-style (e.g., Shadows of Doubt, Her Story).
Establishing Interpretation Design as a Game Design Method
This doctoral consortium paper, presented at DiGRA 2023, makes the case for establishing Interpretation Design as a formal game and narrative design method.
- Interpretation Design is proposed as a formal game and narrative design method, because designers of acclaimed open-meaning games such as Gone Home, Journey, Inside, and Her Story still lack concrete, practical guidance for creating such experiences.
- The author draws on interdisciplinary sources, including museum and exhibition practice, interaction design research on ambiguity and multiple meanings, and concepts such as interpretative agency, interpretative challenge, uncertainty, and curiosity.
- A prior master's thesis interviewed triple-A narrative designers and found that large productions tend to over-explain their stories, though a gradual shift toward enigmatic storytelling is emerging in titles like Returnal, Elden Ring, and Control.
Interpretive Challenges in Games
Jonne Arjoranta's paper argues that games contain a distinct category of mental challenge, the interpretive challenge, which is separate from the logical or strategic challenges usually discussed in game studies.
- Jonne Arjoranta's paper defines the 'interpretive challenge': a mental challenge in which a player must draw on knowledge outside the game (understanding people, cultural frameworks, background concepts) to progress or win, distinct from the logical or strategic challenges usually discussed in game studies.
- Most games involve some interpretation, but only a small number make successful interpretation a condition of play, which is why the category is useful for identifying a specific class of games.
- The paper's central case study is Her Story (2015), in which players search fragmentary video interview clips about a murder and revise hypotheses to connect vague statements to narrative events.
Archival Adventuring
Melissa Kagen's "Archival Adventuring" examines a ludonarrative mechanic in which players piece together a story by exploring static objects, papers, and environments, as seen in the physical installation House of Eternal Return and the digital games Her Story, Gone Home, Tacoma, and What Remains of Edith Finch.
- The paper argues that archival adventure games (e.g., Her Story, Gone Home, Tacoma, What Remains of Edith Finch) constitute a form of queer gaming because they reject competitive, achievement-driven, and masculine design conventions in favor of slowness, boredom, and purposeless wandering.
- The central theoretical move draws on Peggy Phelan's claim that performance exists only in the present and vanishes when archived, and on Rebecca Schneider's critique of the archive as a masculine structure that privileges solid documentation over ephemeral embodied practice.
- Kagen argues that archival adventures reverse the archive hierarchy by letting players restore 'flesh' to inert objects, papers, and environments through exploration.
Her Story dev Sam Barlow on how the innovative detective game found an audience
The detective game Her Story represents an experimental approach to non-linear narrative design, utilizing a police procedural framework to engage players through a database of real-life video footage.
- Her Story achieved a balanced revenue split of 60 percent from desktop and 40 percent from mobile by launching simultaneously on Steam and mobile platforms.
- The game’s search-based mechanic, which mirrors intuitive web browsing, made its unconventional non-linear narrative accessible to a broad audience beyond the traditional 13-to-17-year-old male demographic.
- Releasing the title shortly after E3 2015 allowed the game to capitalize on a media vacuum, driving organic discovery and social media engagement.