WarGames is weird, occasionally boring yet somehow always fascinating
At the end of the first episode of Sam Barlow's reimagining of WarGames, I got to look through all the choices I had made along the way. And the weird thing is, I didn't think I'd made any. I was thinking of choices that paused the action for a second and gave me a decision to think about and then act on. I was thinking of the big (literally) show-stopping moments in games like Life is Strange. What I should have been thinking about, perhaps, is a question of influence. You nudge WarGames around while watching it unfold. You nudge it through the very way that you watch it. It's fascinating stuff. It's also occasionally boring at times, and generally a delightful oddity.
Sam Barlow has form, of course. In Her Story, he broke a cold case investigation up into little chunks of video and let you discover it the way you might discover a cold case. You had a searchable database, but while each piece of testimony you returned filled in a spot on that database, you could not access the database itself in any more systematic way than by picking a path from one potentially promising keyword to the next. You could not be chronological, instead you had to dance around, driven by topic. This worked so well because it was novel, certainly, but it was also harmonious. It made you feel like an investigator because it made you work like an investigator. The database was actually a way of giving you a flexible half of the conversation: I want to know about apples, say, so by querying the database about apples and returning all appley clips, it's as if I had asked you, with the bonus delight that I might get something back in which apples are purely a tangential element.
WarGames works rather differently. You're introduced to Kelly and her hacker buddies. The game starts when Kelly wakes up, and then her buddies come online and after a while you're watching all of their separate live-screen feeds as they hover around in front of you. You also watch any web pages or video clips that they're sharing between them. Regardless of how many feeds you have open at any time, one of them will always be larger than the rest: while you can hear everything else, the large feed is the one you're focusing on, and you can shift your focus by clicking on another feed as the desire grabs you. (A timeline running along the top shows a representation of the choices you have made so far.)
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