Firewatch Discussion Stuff

"Working as a Forest Service fire lookout this month, and there was one photo I HAD to take" https://t.co/WxDokCDorh pic.twitter.com/11PovQ0Yn1

— Campo Santo (@camposanto) August 20, 2016

In class on Tuesday, we’ll discuss Firewatch some more, so if you have not finished the game yet, make certain that you do so because we’re going to especially focus on questions about the ending of the game. I would also like for us to discuss further and more explicitly this particular game as literature — let’s compare the story it tells, how it tells it, and what sort of impact it has on us as players with how such a story would or would not work if it were a novel or a film.

The Ending

Duncan Fyfe, a writer for Campo Santo, has a fantastic piece up in the Quarterly Review (see below) called “The End of Firewatch“:

Some players admitted being taken aback by Firewatch’s it-is-what-it-is ending because they were anticipating a big twist. […] But I like Firewatch’s more prosaic take: that running away from your problems isn’t just a psychological flight of fancy explored in a daydream or a mind palace, but a real thing you can do, and if you do it, there are consequences. Firewatch is a story about real people who take the easy way out and end up making a mess.

Fyfe’s article is also interesting in the connections he makes between the game and the novel The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon.

via GIPHY
Even if you haven’t read the novel, pay attention to Fyfe’s argument and think about the connections he is making between game and novel.

Here’s a video playthrough of the game that I’ve set to begin with the closing credits so you can see the photos at the end. The vlogger is maybe a little annoying, but you an see the photo that the Reddit user in the photo at the top of this post, is referencing in the video:

The Campo Santo Quarterly

The company that produced Firewatch, Campo Santo, runs a faux (??) literary/academic journal called The Quarterly Review, which is chock full of interesting articles about Firewatch and other topics, and also interviews with other game designers and fiction. For example, check out this interview of Steve Gaynor (the creator of Gone Home) that Duncan Fyfe published.

Connections between Gone Home and Firewatch

According to Justin McElroy, Firewatch and Gone Home occur in the same gaming universe. Did anybody find the copy the novel The Accidental Savior by Terrence L. Greenbriar (the dad in Gone Home) in one of the supply caches?

And Steve Gaynor, the aforementioned creator of Gone Home, seems to be a huge fan of Firewatch based on his Twitter stream alone. When Gone Home was released to gaming consoles recently, Gaynor retconned references to Firewatch into the game.

Work Cited

Fyfe, Duncan. “The End of Firewatch.” The Campo Santo Quarterly Review. N.p., 1 Apr. 2016. Web. 23 Sept. 2016.