Telling Lies

A small look into how Sam Burlow's 2019 Masterpiece forces us into dilemmas, think about intention with morality, and take a deeper look inwards.

Telling Lies is Sam Barlow's second game after he became an indie developer. It was initially published in 2019 for PC and iOS and then in 202 for Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One

Telling Lies makes a player go through a vast collection of videos centered around 4 characters whose stories all interconnect and loop back into one another as they try to piece together what exactly is the mystery at hand and then going forward to complete the mystery as well.

The game frames itself with the playable character looking through the hard drive stolen from the NSA. You are given a computer layout in screen allowing you to use your own peripheral device to control this simulated computer. It wants to make interactions as easy as possible because the mechanics while immersive are just a tool to exploring this rich narrative. The main puzzle of this game is to go through various videos captured over a series of two years to put together pieces of a case and understand what exactly transpired between these four seemingly unrelated people. Its a fantastic game that really gets your gray matter up and running, with character motivations and ideals being built up and destroyed again and again to create some of the most engaging characters I've seen in a game. I highly highly recommend checking it out and playing a little bit before reading this because I am going to Spoil it down below.

Players begin solving this mystery by examining videos taken from the character's webcams and by cameras placed by the characters themselves. Players will try to figure out the order of the videos present in the game to come up with a logical chain of events that explains the entire situation and to discover what are lies and what is the truth. During the entire time of going through people's personal life and videos not directly related to the mystery, the game brings out one important question which is:

"How important is the intention when considering the morality of an action?"

Spoilers! Ahead!

David

David. David is the name of the man that glues all of these narratives together and is responsible for nearly 80% of the game happening. He's a super unique character that I genuinely enjoyed seeing in the story but is just such a morally weird character I wouldn't even know how to classify him.

Throughout the entire game we see the story of David. We see him being a part of the Organizing Group that seems to be a subset of a bigger group known as Green Storm.

David finds out that these group are standing against the company known as Prosperen, who seeks to create a pipeline that could contaminate a water supply. While they have good intentions at heart, David comes up with the plan to blow up a bridge that Properen needs to deliver material for the pipeline.

This is where intentions start to get a bit murky as in my playthrough I came across David talking about a plan as a way of stopping the company Prosperen from polluting the river and even though I felt it was too extreme of a solution I could understand the motivation and how it could be perceived as moral if I looked at it from a Utilitarian lens.

David however is a character is his own right and you as a player go through several emotions of liking him and hating him. He falls in love with one of the members of Organizing Group called Ava. When he finds out that one of the other members, Peter, has slept with her he loses his cool and tries to beat up Peter. He then uses an old contact to get Peter arrested on the account of drugs

It's not the best look for David and he comes off as very insecure and just childish going so far as to ruin someone's life over something as trivial as being an ex-boyfriend.

Except that's not the main reason David beat up Peter. He beats up Peter when he comes to know that Peter slept with Ava when she was underage, had drugged her, and filmed those relations. It makes David seems a lot more justified in his behavior and explains why he does that, but the previous reason still holds true as well. So are his intentions about protecting her or dealing with provoked? Or does it even matter what his intentions are?

This is where a small twist pops in. David is already married to Emma and has a daughter with her. She doesn't know that David is out with this other group or even what he's up to as he just mentions business trips. This puts a strange light on his relationship with Ava now and you think of him as a scumbag husband who is playing around with the hearts of two women.

Emma

However, if you play the game more, you realize David isn't actually a part of this group, but is an undercover FBI agent, sent in to figure out Green Storm's plan. The plan he suggested of blowing up the bridge was actually a way of trapping members of this group and prevent them from ever being able to pull off another attack.

It felt morally right for another reason as these people were going to commit a crime that had the potential to hurt people and damage a lot of property and it would be breaking of the rules which a Rule Utilitarian would say is the morally correct thing to do.

You then think back to both Ava and Emma. You understand that David was doing what he had to, but was it justified? He of course wanted to do what's best according to him and his handlers to prevent a terrorist attack, but does that make all the lying, sneaking around, and back- stabbing worth it?

He makes Ava fall in love with him, have a fake relationship, and even impregnates her to maintain his cover as he infiltrates the group. He then does nothing when she is arrested.

At the very end of the game, we find out that David blows up the bridge not for either of the reasons mentioned above, but for reasons that are entirely selfish. His intention to blow up the bridge isn't to help the city be free from polluted water or help the government catch domestic terrorists, but rather to give himself an out to deal with the problems he caused with his consistent lying. Blowing up the bridge is the byproduct of him wanting to make amends to the women he has hurt.

He does what some would consider the morally correct thing, but what about his intentions? Does morality only come from the end product of a particular action or does it come from the intention and attitude said action is done with? This is a discussion that has several ethical professors still debating based on which lens you look at it, but I think for a game to even start asking these questions is fascinating and amazing in its own right.

The Player - You

One dilemma that comes up is when to upload all the data to the Leaks site as if the player is able to find out what the mystery is with enough proof, they can submit the video proof and be done with it, however, the player is presented with a choice to either upload it or to do more research about these characters.

The game has told you have enough proof remember to solve this case. So what do you do?

If you continue to snoop through the lives of these people, it becomes less about solving the mystery, but more about what extents is a player willing to go to satisfy their own thoughts. The player does not have to go through any more videos and know more about these character's personal lives from the narrative or character's perspective, but this is solely for a player own whim.

Every video the player watches after being presented this option shows how insignificant the actual mystery was to the player and shows how much the player wanted to see each aspect of these characters' life instead. Their intention isn't to solve the mystery that just happened to be a byproduct in their want to go through and find out all the secrets of these characters. What was your intention while playing this game? Was it to genuinely help figure out this mystery or did you get caught up with wanting to explore each and every aspect of the characters presented to you?

As you look through these extra videos, you start to think are you really looking to understand the whole picture or just looking to dive deeper into the drama that David has caused?

Conclusion

The game in terms of its limited choices, narratives, and gameplay shows players the importance of intention behind a particular task. What one thing could be considered as moral could turn out to be completely immoral based on just a change in intention. The game does a good job of showing off actions and their consequences but also removes and adds context around these actions to make us doubt the morality that is present while committing these actions. Just because the actions resulted in something good or bad doesn’t mean that the action was taken with good or bad intentions in mind, but rather were just byproducts that occurred due to the actions being performed. A utilitarian would argue that those consequences are all that matters, but the game looks to dismantle that outlook by showing enough context to make players doubt if the action truly is moral or not.

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