Creating Freedom of Movement Within Narrative Walls: An Interview with Tim and Lynda of D’Avekki Studios

For the longest time people have been crafting stories. Novels, comics, films, television series, radio plays, video games… Where there’s a medium, there’s likely been a story. Some long, some short, some linear, some branching. Some—intriguing combinations of their more homogenous, long-familiar cousins. One interesting hybrid is the ‘Full Motion Video Game’, or ‘FMV’, a medium that combines the interactivity of video games with the ‘lifelike graphics’ of film.

But for every medium, format, and genre, there are rules and there are possibilities. So, how do you combine the possibilities of two different mediums without writing yourself into a corner or pushing your audience out of the narrative? How do you navigate the narrative walls of a pre-programmed story without either side getting lost, frustrated or bored? And what about the unexpected wood chippers that might lurk ahead?

D’Avekki Studios have been making best-selling murder mystery dinner party games since 2004 and are creators of critically-acclaimed FMV titles including The Infectious Madness of Doctor Dekker (Guinness World Record for Most Full Motion Video in a Video Game), Shapeshifting Detective (TIGA nomination for Best Game by a Small Studio), and their latest endeavour, Dark Nights with Poe and Munro, released in 2020. The duo has gone from playing video games huddled up on a dorm room sofa together to writing, producing, casting, filming, editing, and marketing one of their own.

I discussed the many unique challenges and rewards of creating FMVs with Lynda and Tim Cowles, the husband-and-wife team behind D’Avekki Studios.

Julija Kalvelytė: As longtime fans of Full Motion Video (FMV) games, how would you summarize the history of the genre and its main appeal?

Lynda Cowles: FMV games made a big impact on the video game scene in the early 1990s. Touted as ‘the future of gaming,’ it’s hard to overestimate the giant technological leap they represented back then; thanks to faster, better processors and the appearance of CD-ROMS which could store massive amounts of data, you could have actual movies playing on your home computer (albeit grainy, pixelated ones) and not only that, you could interact with them!

Games like Myst, Return to Zork, and Phantasmagoria helped to attract a lot of money and interest to the genre. These were followed by high-budget releases such as Ripper, which starred Christopher Walken and Paul Giamatti, and Wing Commander IV, which had a $12 million budget and a cast that included Mark Hamill, Malcolm McDowell, Tom Wilson, and John Rhys-Davies. FMV games seemed set for glory.

Unfortunately, the genre’s popularity soon led to a glut of low-budget, poorly-executed games designed merely for a quick profit, and these contributed to a growing perception that FMV games were a flash-in-the-pan novelty, not to be taken seriously by “real” gamers. Alongside this, technology kept on improving, meaning it wasn’t long before fast 3D environments and “realistic” computer graphics overtook FMV as “the future of gaming”.

Still, for many people FMV games offered an experience like no other. Tim and I were dating in the ’90s and played every PC FMV game we could get our hands on—both good and bad—starting with Tex Murphy Under a Killing Moon in 1995. For us, huddled around a PC in the dark of Tim’s dorm room, FMV games were a kind of magic that allowed us to experience the intimacy and glamour of interacting with movie characters and influence the story as it played out.

Flash forward 20 years and FMV games have made a resurgence, thanks to technology that can now play full-screen HD or even 4K video seamlessly, even on a phone. The budgets may not be as high, but the appeal for many is the same and there’s a growing catalogue of FMV games or “interactive movies” blurring the lines even further between games, TV and film.

For us, huddled around a PC in the dark of Tim’s dorm room, FMV games were a kind of magic that allowed us to experience the intimacy and glamour of interacting with movie characters and influence the story as it played out.

Julija Kalvelytė: You’ve revealed that one of your games takes some inspiration from the tabletop RPG Call of Cthulhu. Which narrative elements of it appeal to you and why?

Tim Cowles: I started playing Call of Cthulhu when I was about seven or eight, with my older brother in charge of the stories. Things got pretty dark, but they always tended to be character-driven plots where you’d investigate towns and townsfolk to try and solve supernatural mysteries. Quickly dispatching Nyarlathotep with a well-placed bullet was never going to happen, so when monsters appeared, I generally ran! In essence, a lot of our games follow that same ideology. The only monsters we create are in people’s minds. Some characters believe what they’re experiencing is real, whilst others seem to be making things up to suit their needs—you’re never entirely sure who is doing what. That gives an uneasy backdrop to all of our worlds, and allows you to choose whether you want to believe in what’s happening too. In terms of specific narrative elements, madness is fairly prevalent in Call of Cthulhu, and even has mechanics built around it such as the Cthulhu mythos and sanity point system. We have a similar idea in Doctor Dekker, that if you ask too much you’ll slowly lose your mind, and trigger one of several additional game endings based on your final insanity score. Much like the Necronomicon, it’s never a good idea to know everything there is to know about the patients! 

JK: FMVs have a somewhat unusual combination of passive storytelling and interactive play. Do you think certain stories are easier to use as their basis, or can any story be turned into a good FMV?

Tim Cowles: I personally think any story can be turned into a good FMV game, or video game in general. FMVs are often kludged together into a single genre, but full motion video is just another type of media that can be used in video games. Add a live-action drill sergeant telling you how you did at the end of each Fortnite game? Technically that’s an FMV now! In its most basic form you can compare FMV to cutscenes, which is something that has been used for decades to tell stories in video games, whether they’re platformers, first-person shooters or point-and-click games. All that said, I’d probably avoid anything that’s action intensive as it’s more expensive to film, and generally gets shot third person, which isn’t as intimate as we’d like. There are some “action” FMV games out there, but they play a lot like “on rails” movies where you’re just guiding the protagonist from afar, with the exception of The Quiet Man which switches between action video game and FMV cutscenes. It wasn’t well-received, but I still massively applaud the developers for taking a risk. For ourselves, we love character-driven stories in particular, where emotion and performance can be captured on film quickly and effortlessly. We’d need huge budgets to recreate the nuanced performances we get from FMV actors if we tried to replace them with computer graphics. It’s actually a very worn-out industry joke that FMV games always have “lifelike” graphics.

JK: You have some experience in film under your belt. How has that influenced the narratives you create nowadays?

TC: When you’re writing, directing, and producing the material, it’s definitely a blessing and a curse! Most of the time you want to sit down and let the writer run free. Hounds of Tindalos chasing a tube train on the London Underground? No problem, that’s a great opening scene. Then the director kicks in—do we have the CG capability for that? Do we have the “actual” Hounds of Tindalos? Will we be able to set up a shot on the rails? Then the producers cap it off—that’s way too costly, a health and safety nightmare, there are scheduling issues… and so on. So a lot of the time the narratives are constrained by other factors. Our first couple of games were mainly just one person sitting down quietly, but our last game had multiple actors and locations, and proved we could shoot multi-camera on very tight budgets. At this point we feel pretty free to let the writer parts of our brains tell the stories they want to tell without much restriction, but ultimately how much freedom we get will be based on the financial success or otherwise of our most recent game. If Poe and Munro does badly, we may well retreat back to character-driven, single-person, direct-to-camera games.

JK: What works on the page vs. on the screen or what works on a cinema screen vs. on a computer screen have long been one of cinema’s biggest conundrums. Why do you think that is? Having some knowledge of how notoriously difficult to adapt video games are, what makes for a good adaptation?

TC: We’ve not really had to adapt any existing work, other than our own, so it’s a difficult one to comment on. Doctor Dekker was inspired by some of the short film scripts I’d written for a “Cthulhu” TV series, but mainly we just took the character ideas. That show had patients visiting a psychiatrist so it was basically a very easy shift from there to the Dekker couch in the video game. Dark Nights with Poe and Munro started out as a short TV series pitch for Amazon Prime — actually most of episode one in the game is completely lifted verbatim from the TV pilot. We adapted it for the video game by adding additional narrative branches so that players could decide some aspects of how the episode plays out. Film, TV and FMV games all share the same medium, so other than expectations of interactivity and length of experience, they’re more interchangeable than taking a video game franchise like Resident Evil or Assassin’s Creed and trying to cherry pick parts for screen.

JK: In general, how important is tone and atmosphere for your narratives and how do you get it right?

TC: Tone and atmosphere are massively important. That’s true for the narrative but also for game design, music, menus, and the edited films. Without any tone or atmosphere we’re just a bunch of videos, like an eclectic Youtube. Keeping things dark, mysterious, intimate and foreboding are the kind of notes we aim to hit when delivering our narratives. We’re trying to create worlds, with interesting characters, that stick in your mind long after playing. When we’re developing FMV game ideas it’s not just the story and characters we flesh out—we try to imagine ourselves immersed in the world. What would it look like? What would the players see? What could they do, or want to do? How will it make them feel?

JK: How do you think games differ from other types of narrative media? And how does the element, or, as some would argue, the ‘illusion’ of choice factor into that?

Lynda Cowles: People enjoy different mediums in different ways. Even though, on the surface of things, the experience might appear quite similar: after all, whether we’re reading a novel or watching a film or playing a narrative video game, we’re being told a story. And I think there’s this common misconception that all of these experiences are passive ones—because if you look at someone reading or watching or playing all you often see is someone sitting, passively, doing nothing! But what’s really going on when we read a story on the page, is our imaginations are working to help bring the story to life. We’re visualizing characters and scenes and constructing timelines and making connections. When we’re watching a film, we’re doing the same, except the visualizing has already been done for us. But we’re still putting A and B together and making C, using our brains to connect what we’re shown with what we’re not shown—the hidden story—and the best stories leave plenty of room for us to do that. And with narrative video games, that same process of working out what’s really going on and putting the pieces together is simply made more overt, and is turned into puzzles or decision points that the player has to interact with to get the story to progress.

By necessity, the consequences of those decisions are often limited—‘the illusion of choice’—especially in narrative games where a choice can only lead to pre-scripted outcomes, no matter how many of those outcomes there might be. But the best games allow players to play within those limitations and give them freedom of movement within those narrative walls. We tried to do this with the free typing element in Doctor Dekker, and in The Shapeshifting Detective by allowing players to follow their own impulses and thought processes to choose who they shifted into and who they spoke to at any given time; whereas Dark Nights with Poe and Munro is more linear. That was a game where we were really experimenting with the TV format rather than the gameplay.

Games allow space for the player to form a whole story from incomplete parts. There’s no use telling a complete story which leaves no room for the player to form their own theories, otherwise you’re just asking a player to ‘click to proceed.’ And in video games, you also have to leave room for the player to experiment with those theories—to try “wrong” theories, or alternate theories that are equally “right”—and that in itself can determine how the story plays out, which might not be the way the game’s creators would have it play out.

Games allow space for the player to form a whole story from incomplete parts. … in video games, you also have to leave room for the player to experiment with those theories—to try ‘wrong’ theories, or alternate theories that are equally ‘right’—and that in itself can determine how the story plays out …

JK: What do you look for in your actors and creative collaborators?

TC: For acting roles we always hold auditions. We try not to hold preconceptions about characters beforehand, so we can enjoy an actor’s interpretation of a role without prejudice. Actors need to switch emotions on set really quickly because of our branching mechanics, and they also need to deliver believable performances with material that is supernatural in nature. If they can’t find some truth in the script, or believe what their character believes, performances can hit campy comedy in no time (which isn’t always what we’re looking for)! Casting is still one of my favourite jobs—it’s when we first see our writing physically come to life, and finding new talent is an absolute privilege. 

In terms of other collaborators, Lynda and I do most things ourselves but we have worked with external programmers, video editors and musicians to help release games more quickly. We tend to keep a tight leash on the core creative aspects of our games, as they all begin as passion projects and we fund them ourselves—so they are (and always will be) our babies. It feels like we’re constantly collaborating anyway, as there are two of us here bouncing ideas off each other, and we always edit each other’s work. In fact, Lynda has probably edited this response already. (LC: It’s true—but only for typos!)

JK: What are the peculiarities and challenges of having your characters portrayed by ‘traditional’ actors, unmediated by animation, motion capture and similar tech that’s often used in games?

TC: I’ve spent more time working with actors than I have with 3D graphics, so for me, it’s far less peculiar than animating sprites or dealing with motion capture. The main downside is that you cannot quickly or easily change anything without having costly reshoots. But the upsides, in my opinion, are massive. Trying to capture the expression and emotion of a human being in computer graphics is extremely hard and expensive, whilst filming them in real life is cheap and easy by comparison. It would be great to have unlimited time and budget, to constantly revise performance and camera shots on set, but we have to draw the line somewhere. And once we’ve done that, it is very hard to reshoot. In fact, we’ve only had to do a reshoot once for the character that plays Bryce in Doctor Dekker, because we had problems with audio on the day. Ironically, when he came back the second time he had to compete with a wood chipper next door! They refused to stop, so every five minutes we’d have to get a bit of filming done, then wait for the glorious wood chipper. So I guess that’s another benefit of CG characters—fewer wood chippers.

JK: How important is dialogue in your work and how does it differ from other types of dialogue-heavy forms of narrative media?

LC: We have very little in our games that isn’t dialogue so I suppose you could say it’s critically important. We don’t have the same level of environmental storytelling that you might find in a 3D adventure game, where you can move about a location and examine or collect objects, so dialogue is really the driving force of the whole narrative. 

Compared to other types of dialogue-heavy narrative media, and with the exception of Dark Nights with Poe and Munro, our games mainly feature direct-to-camera dialogue between characters and the player, which we feel brings a higher level of intimacy and involvement. The characters are looking at you, talking to you—not an on-screen representation of you—and you’re talking back, or clicking back. With a film or a play, you’re usually watching the characters have conversations; you’re not part of the conversation yourself. But this kind of first-person interaction is fairly common in video games because of course, without the player, there is no game.

JK: Would you say your work is more character-driven or event-driven? Why did you choose that option over the other?

TC: Our work is definitely more character-driven. When you know from the outset that you’re not going to have big budgets, multiple locations or masses of cast and crew, it’s an easy decision to be character-led. We simply wouldn’t be able to pack in lots of events anyway, and characters are far more interesting and complex than events anyway, so it’s a great choice for the worlds we’re trying to create.

LC: Writing the characters, finding their voice, is really one of the most satisfying parts of creating our games. Our background is in making murder mystery dinner party games where we have to write 12 or more original characters for each game—and they all need to be distinctive in voice and personality as well as story. Those characters aren’t always particularly deep on the page but they are well developed and we try to populate our FMV games with the same kind of unique, highly stylized characters, with compelling stories and larger than life personas. And we have a really basic rule when writing characters, which is that they must be likeable, because they have to be people that players want to spend time with. That doesn’t mean they have to always do the right thing (in fact, it’s better if they don’t!), but you can’t really care about the story unless you care about the characters.

Writing the characters, finding their voice, is really one of the most satisfying parts of creating our games.

JK: How does people’s eternal aversion to reading instructions factor into the narratives you create? After all, they have to be believable and engrossing, but people do need to know which buttons to press as well. 

LC: We’ve been guilty in the past of giving players too little instruction, specifically with The Infectious Madness of Doctor Dekker where early feedback told us we needed to be more explicit, for example, about how to respond when the patients turn the tables and ask the player questions. As a result of that, we ended up adding more tips to the in-game notes as well as creating a help video that played after the opening credits.

The truth is, a handful of people will be committed enough to put time and effort into figuring out what to do, but we learned very quickly that you can’t expect the majority of players to care enough to figure it out. There are too many other, easier, ways for them to spend their time. So making the gameplay as intuitive as possible is a must. And while inserting instructions into the narrative can be a good way to maintain immersion, there are few things more likely to pull me out of a story as when an in-game character in a medieval fantasy tells me to ‘right click to check your spells!’ So we learned a lot from making Doctor Dekker, and that affected how we integrated future mechanics such as the ‘delete’ button in The Shapeshifting Detective, where the purpose of the opening scene—in fact, the very first line and very first action the player has to take—is to teach what that button does and what it means when you use it.

That said, I don’t think it has a massive bearing on what kind of narratives we create, only on how we create them. There’s a stage very early on in developing any game idea where we’ve got a concept and an outline of a story, and we’re thinking about what the player’s role is in that story and that’s really the stage where you have to also start considering what the player needs to know to perform their role, and how you’re going to communicate that to them. If you can bake it into the design at an early stage or develop the narrative around it, it’s going to be a lot less intrusive. 

JK: How has the state of freedom of expression and sharing experiences in the video game industry (piracy, streaming, justified and unjustified copyright claims) influenced your works? 

LC: While piracy has been a constant thorn in our side since release day for Dark Nights with Poe and Munro, I wouldn’t say it influences us creatively. We’re still going to tell the stories we want to tell. Whether it’s had an impact on sales is another matter—and one we’ll probably never know the answer to. Those who choose to play a pirated version of the game were probably never going to buy it anyway, but any revenue lost means less budget for our next game.

Streamers, on the other hand, are definitely on our minds when creating games because essentially, first and foremost, they’re players. And not only that, they’re players who provide a massive amount of feedback through their streams. You can watch them play and see firsthand how they react, where they’re confused or unsure how to proceed, what grips them, what they find the most fun, etc. So they are immensely valuable, not only in helping to promote our games to a wider audience but also in helping to shape future games. We make single-player games and so our main focus is on the person playing on their own, but we also get to create shared experiences for streamers and their chat audiences—whether that’s adding in decision points with more choices which allow streamers to poll their viewers or just making it possible to freeze timed decisions so streamers have time to discuss the next step with chat.

JK: Where do you draw the line on streaming and showing elements of your games and do you think it depends on the genre and style of game?

LC: We’re actually very streamer-friendly and we don’t have any restrictions on how much of our games can be shown. It may seem counterintuitive for narrative games, because anyone who’s watched someone else play the story out is unlikely to buy it themselves; however, as a small indie, word-of-mouth is vital for getting the word out about our games and studio and we think, in the long run, the benefits definitely outweigh the risks. We often hear from people who’ve bought all our games and become fans of the studio because they watched a stream, which is really nice because watching streamers play games is also a social experience and it means lots of people got to enjoy our games and chat about them at the same time. And of course, many of the streamers themselves are massively supportive. At the end of the day, sales are nice but if we were doing this for the money we’d have quit a long time ago! We’re just happy if as many people as possible can get a kick out of the stories we tell.

JK: How does the nature of writing and editing differ in the making of your style of games vs. films or theatre productions? In all cases, there’s a script—then what?

TC: The biggest difference is our games are interactive and often have branching narratives, whereas films and theatre productions tend not to be. When you’re writing a screenplay for film or theatre, it’s generally linear, so you have complete control over how characters and events unfold. When we write, we have to make allowances for players doing things in different orders, and try to pace character and plot development simultaneously regardless of the route a player takes. That’s infinitely hard, but because we use an interactive fiction tool we can do a lot of playtesting and editing before we go into production, and experience a lot of the scenarios to see how the game is shaping up as a whole. That’s the broad overview anyway. In practice, when there are two of you editing and writing you tend to split things up by character, so we’ll agree on a certain amount of the world story and plot points at the beginning, and then separately start writing characters before returning for feedback and edits later. That’s also how we write our Murder Mystery Flexi Party games.

When we write, we have to make allowances for players doing things in different orders, and try to pace character and plot development simultaneously regardless of the route a player takes.

JK: Are narratives made in the writing room, the editing room, or somewhere else entirely?

LC: Definitely in the writing room. Writing takes up the biggest chunk of development time, often with both of us working full time on scripts over the course of three or four months. Beyond the initial development, we don’t tend to outline the stories very much so we’ll both just write and rewrite and go where the ideas take us, which we think is the most fun way and is the reason why so many of our stories go in some very weird directions. There’s usually a lot of back and forth—we’ll read each other’s work and bounce ideas off each other. I’m very frequently tying myself in narrative knots—especially with all the different branches there can be. Tim’s a programmer so his brain seems to cope better with keeping all the different threads straight!

JK: You’ve noted that one of your games, The Shapeshifting Detective, is advanced not so much by picking the right dialogue option, but by being the right person when you pick it. Can you elaborate?

LC: A lot of narrative adventure games rely on you speaking to other characters to reveal information but in The Shapeshifting Detective, you have the added twist that the player has the ability to change their appearance to look and sound like anybody they’ve met. Not only do you have to think about who you want to talk to and what you want to ask, but you also have to pick the best identity to assume to get information you might not otherwise get. Choosing one form over another may let you in on an intimate conversation between friends or co-conspirators, or can reveal a relationship you didn’t know existed. It can also go horribly wrong—causing suspects to clam up or become suspicious, which in turn puts pressure on you to effectively bluff or be exposed even further. There’s no fail state, so it won’t end the game, but it can definitely complicate your investigation.

JK: What are your future projects?

LC: We have a few games in various stages of development but at the moment, production is on hold until we can ensure it’s safe for cast and crew to be on set. The Infectious Madness of Doctor Dekker 2 is certainly on the table, as well as two or three other dark mysteries that we’re not ready to talk about yet! In the meantime, we’re working on releasing Dark Nights with Poe and Munro on consoles and using this time to plan, develop, and write new games.

JK: Where do you see the future of your genre of creative work? What could creators from other genres of narrative media learn from how it evolves?

LC: I can’t help feeling that FMV and interactive movies are at a critical point, similar to where they found themselves in the late 1990s. There’s a danger that interactive video—such as the formats Netflix has been experimenting with—could fall out of favour again if studios rely too much on the novelty of the technology and fail to tell compelling stories and provide meaningful interactions that give you a reason to interact. As far as FMV games go, more and more are being released which is great on one hand as it reinforces the genre as a valid and exciting part of the video games marketplace. However, the quality has to be there—otherwise we could see another rush to pump out quick, cheap, low-quality FMVs. Video games are telling more and more sophisticated and impactful stories, and there’s no reason why FMV games can’t be part of that movement, but that requires investment of both time and money, as well as the industry as a whole taking FMV games seriously—something that, sadly, still doesn’t seem to be happening in certain circles. 

But there’s still masses of potential to explore and one advantage we have now over the 1990s—apart from the technological advancements—is there are many more spaces for FMV and interactive movies. They’re not just confined to the personal computer or the Sega anymore—you can experience them as apps on your phone, as TV shows on streaming services and as installations in public places such as museums. This opens the genre up to a much larger audience and provides the opportunity to tell a much wider variety of stories. So there are lots of opportunities to further the use of FMV and interactive videos but we have to make sure those opportunities aren’t squandered.