We dive into the new interactive murder mystery series FoulPlay with BDaveWalters, who discusses the rise in popularity of DnD actual play, experiential storytelling's future, and the fun of teaming up with StrangerThings' Gaten Matarazzo:
Foul Play is a new kind of digital storytelling that puts the viewer in charge of their own experience. Created by Andrew Barth Feldman, Alex Boniello, and Matthew Barth Tinkelman, this five-part series follows a different whodunit murder mystery in each episode.
I'm like, "No, I'm sure your a lovely performer, Alex." They had an idea that they wanted to do a streaming adjacent narrative. Andrew had done something similar once before on a smaller scale and wanted to try and take it up a notch. And knew I had some experience with streaming and storytelling. And I was one of the people tapped to do it.
Which would come up a lot, because when you're just riffing it's like, "Well, if we make the key story point that someone is diabetic, but somewhere else, that same person is violently allergic to insulin or something. Well, that doesn't make sense. We gotta patch that up.
B. Dave Walters: Ideally, when you get to the ending of something, it is simultaneously inevitable, but surprising. [Foul Play] for instance, if you introduce the butler, of course, all eyes are gonna be on the butler.
I watch how many times they were cracking each other up all the way down to the big reveal with Andrew trying to get it out. It ends up being very fun and organic that way. It wasn't make sure you go in this room, make sure you go over to the door, open the door, and you follow her into the door. It wasn't that at all. They're just doing things and they're all pros.
How did your like tabletop experience come into play? Because it almost made me think of that D&D aspect, where you have a DM, who has roughly planned out the world and the story. Then you have the players come in, and they're like, "Cool, we're gonna do what we want, though." When we were telling that story, we were saying, "This one's really something. This could be a play. This could be a movie." Obviously, we're proud of all of them, but I think we wrote that one last. So I think we just hit our stride enough by that point that it was like, "Oh, wow, this one's cool.
The second level is the experiential aspect of it. It's that when people have never played D&D, or never played a tabletop game, I always explain it to them the same way. I'm like, "What's your favorite TV show? What's your favorite book? What's your favorite movie? How would you like to live it?" Now, with things like Foul Play, you feel like you're in the room. It's interesting to watch a Poirot murder.
B. Dave Walters: I myself am a VR enthusiast. I have been from from the early days of this technology with the Samsung Gear VR. I had those. I got an Oculus 2 now. I've had a bunch of these things. The issue with VR is there's one big gap. People want the Holodeck. That's what we want. We want to walk into a room and I'm in it. And there's a significant gap in technology between being able to put on a helmet and give you that.
B. Dave Walters: It's interesting because you get to tell a different kind of story. I've done both. I've done you open up standing over the body. And the story is as much about who was this person, and who would have had the means, motive, and opportunity to kill them type thing.
I died when they had them come back as the detective. The name itself, no one could get through the name. It was almost one of those moments where I'm like, I feel like I'm watching a Dungeons and Dragons actual play live stream, because no one is gonna let this person get away with the name. Yeah, the scattered part, threw me off a few times, because I'd be like, "I'm gonna go through to see what they're doing." And immediately they'd run out the door. And I was like, "Oh, no."
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