Sleuthing with The Smiths
Tim Sheinman’s musical detective game Family is a curious multimedia experiment worth listening to
Tim Sheinman — known on itch.io as Owl_Skip — hasn’t always been a game developer. Go back to the first title published on his profile and you might notice it was only uploaded on February 23rd 2020. Over the course of this year, Sheinman has developed no less than 16 short games, starting out with a variety of sci-fi word puzzlers or arcade titles inexplicably centered around guacamole. These early titles are comfortably mechanical by design, largely modeled on game jam prompts and riffing on genre cousins. They are by all accounts video games that relish the traditional act of play.
With his recent portfolio, however, Sheinman has assuredly begun venturing into more ambitious territory reflecting on his personal history and engagement with media beyond the interactive realm. Family represents a distinct design shift that synthesises his extensive musical interest, textual gameplay, and fascination with espionage. As its successor Rivals goes live, there is no better time to revisit this riveting indie curio and its creative inspirations with Sheinman, fictional Brit indie discography and all.
Broadly speaking, Family is a puzzle game revolving around a single conundrum. Much like its detective peers Her Story or Return of the Obra Dinn, Family introduces a central mystery requiring several stages of deduction to unravel whilst enveloping miniature narratives within its greater genealogical framework. Presented initially as a blank family tree, players are tasked with filling in a multitude of fictional bands with their members and respective instruments, revealing their friendships and rivalries along the way. Sheinman’s primary visual influence will be immediately apparent to a majority of musical historians, sketchily recreating the meticulously organised craft of Pete Frame’s Rock Family Trees from the 1990s.
Such a macrocosmic visualisation critically redirects the conversation from the individual music stems towards the music scene itself — the tree is more pertinent to preservation than the individual leaves. As Sheinman mentions in our conversation, Family is not as specifically attached to the ‘80s music scene as it is “to scenes in general and the eternal state of being a musician”. Whilst Family is soaked in aural nostalgia, its overall impression is not tied to the same specificity as its content, rather reflecting on the state of cultural retrospection in a digital age where tools like the Wayback Machine can preserve websites like artifacts in resin. The invitation to embody digital music archivists manifests a unique appreciation for culture and its participants: for names lost through the cracks, for anecdotes scribbled down in diaries, for bands and sounds that only exist when they are actively listened to.
Furthermore, Family leverages the attentiveness required to solve its puzzles to create a heightened sense of engagement with its media. Sheinman drops a multifaceted trail of clues to aid players in connecting musicians to their respective bands: gig reviews, interviews, conversations, or even the music itself. For decades prior to his investment into game development, Sheinman was himself a musician and his experience elevates Family from a rote mystery to a fascinating immersion into a forgotten time. Each band, from the synth-infused Klanger to the shoegaze blues of Dova Pavlova, comes equipped with their own original single bursting with individual character and style. Sheinman’s recordings are so much more than another soundtrack, however, asking players to “actively engage” with the melodies and distinct flavours of each group, instead of passively absorbing the information.
Gradually, Family transitions from a game about preserving music to preserving a mode of history through this profound engagement. Sheinman tells me that oral histories are at the heart of his inspiration; their components are a multimedia deluge of interviews, videos, recordings all in the name of reflection and retrospection. Often, these histories will arise from witnesses to that era or cultural product. In Family, we are treated to Ella Neil’s radio commentary, reminiscing periodically about each act with a first-hand perspective on the meteoric rise and inevitable decline of the scene. The radio lends Family another influential medium to its hand — the podcast. Sheinman cites heavy-hitters like Serial as instrumental to its storytelling; these true-crime podcasts are, if anything, aural histories.
Sheinman concludes our conversation by asserting that he is fascinated more by the “culture surrounding art…than the art itself”. If anything, Family is a mightily compelling argument that cultural postmortems create more engaging narratives than their subjects were ever capable of in their prime. Family is however much more than contributing discourse. Aside from being a rewarding mystery game, Family is a humble celebration of the multitude of ways we communicate and preserve stories, through a cocktail of music, journalism, and play. It is also an overwhelming testament that the greatest stories are not always the ones told; they’re the ones that need seeking out.
