His Story: How Sam Barlow rewrote the video game script

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One day in early 2014 Sam Barlow placed a scrap of paper on the kitchen table at his home on the South Coast of England. A few weeks earlier he had left a lucrative job as game director at Climax Studios. The games that he had made during his decade spent at the studio had won awards and yet, no amount of accolades had managed to shrug the nagging frustration that Barlow felt about storytelling in the medium. Where were the stories about domestic-scale drama? Where were the stories about characters who aren't 'aspirational' in some fantastical way, or stories about supposedly less marketable genders and races? Where, for that matter, was that most valuable tool in any fiction writer's pocket: subtext?
Barlow took a pen and began to write a simple manifesto, one that outlined all of the assumptions about video game storytelling of which he wanted to be free, and the characteristics with which he wanted to replace them.
'I will go deep on story, explore authentic and true characters,' he wrote. Then, with a storyteller's flourish: 'For my first trick I will make:
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