Life is built on lies. You’ve lied to people, and so have I. Maybe it was to spare their emotions or keep them from being hurt over something we did. Maybe it was just to keep them away from doing something or finding out something harmful. People lie to protect and manipulate, but people can also lie about who they are.

Lying about who you are is more common than any other type of lying. The small ways we lie so it seems like we know as much as our friend.s The big ways we can misrepresent who we are to grow closer to people we don’t know that well. We call someone “two-faced” if we feel like we’ve specifically been wronged by the way another person lied to us about who they are. Either through their behavior or directly through words.

I’ve been stuck lately on the games that you can lie in: on the ones where “roleplaying” sometimes means being someone who lies to the people they’re supposed to trust and that are supposed to trust them.

One of our primary outlets realized through videogames is violence. Hotline MIami always springs to mind, with it’s colorful celebration of the blood and gore of grindhouse cinema and old japanese exploitation films that swam in shlock and brutality. There’s seeing something happen in a movie like Female Convict Scorpion: Jailhouse 49 where violence is dressed up in psychedelia and symbolism, versus actually holding a man down and pushing a drill through his skull in Hotline Miami.

Maybe I’m just caught up in wondering what it would be like if lying was sensationalized the same way we sensationalize murder. There are a handful of games where you’re directly lied to. You could even raise the idea that Her Story is a game about the act of lying itself distorts the truth for the people telling lies and the people hearing them.

This is short, sorry.