Tag: freewrite

Dear Esther and Gone Home

Richard Bell describes “Gone Home” as a game with a historical narrative and as a means from which we can learn from the past. On the other hand, Bell portrays “Dear Esther” as a literary source where the player must learn through the poetic literature presented in throughout the game.

I agree with this distinction having played both games and I find both ways to be effective because both games try to convey different techniques of gameplay. Although it was difficult at times in Dear Esther to know exactly who was narrating, that in itself was motivation to finish the game so that I could find answers at the end. Unfortunately, I was as confusing, if not, more confused after the conclusion of the game.

FREEWRITE: Dear Esther

 

I agree with the distinctions that Bell makes between Dear Esther and Gone home. Dear Esther encourages us to make sense of the story through literary texts whereas Gone Home is a more engaging game in that it lets us interact with intimate objects in order to piece the story together. Dear Esther is more of a game in which students with a strong literary background can excel, which makes it more of a contextual game than Gone Home. Even the formal texts in Dear Esther depicts a type of writing that is more advanced and professional. I personally like Gone Home in terms of the player’s interaction with the game and the objects within it. Anyone with any degree of common sense is able to piece together some part of the story whether it be about Katie, Sam, or their parents. People with some knowledge of the culture in that particular time era can better understand the game, which makes it more of a historical game. Both games are similar in the way they let the players explore the plot for themselves. Nothing is conveyed all at once.

 

Dear Esther

Gone Home and Dear Esther are similar yet different in many ways. Both games force you to draw conclusions of what happened where the player plays as the narrator, hearing or reading stories about others to create some image. Dear Esther seems to be more literature to me. It seemed to be more story telling than even a game actually. Players just explored the island and excerpts of the narrator’s thoughts and letters came up. There did not seem to be an objective really. However, with Gone Home the player had to uncover and discover parts of the narrator’s story. Gone Home was a lot more interactive than Dear Esther. Gone Home would be more historical the literary, since players had to uncover many things, draw conclusions, and several historical references were also made.  I do agree with Richard Bell’s distinction about the two games as literature and history. Honestly though, I do not see Dear Esther even as a game. Both games gave a gloomy and depressing vibe when first playing the game. However, I do not believe Gone Home ended sad, but Dear Esther continued to be haunting even till the end.

Dear Esther/Gone Home Free Write

Both Dear Esther and Gone Home are slow paced games which allow you to explore the setting around. The games do this in different ways. Gone Home allows you to examine the objects in the Greenbriar’s middle class home and use them to make assumptions about Katie Greenbriar, her family and her friends. You take the objects and learn what each character is going through and the history of that character. In Dear Esther, you are more guided down one path. You can explore the setting, but there is really only a few different paths you can go in each level, and every step to the next level is the same for everyone. Also in Dear Esther, there is only really one story. A man is hurt and stuck on a deserted beach and is trying to escape. In the end, he can’t take the pain anymore and frees himself from it by committing suicide. It is more simple than gone home because the clues to explain the plot are told to you or directly in your path.

New-Form Literature

Richard Bell, in Family History: Source Analysis in Gone Home, compares Dear Esther and Gone Home in the ways that they portray characters, narrate stories, and engage the player.

Dear Esther, in my opinion is clearly the more literary one, as Bell mentions. It isn’t as “engaging” in the sense that the player merely doesn’t have to do anything else except walk and listen. Gone Home, on the other hand, is far more captivating. We find ourselves solving puzzles, picking up every piece of the story (sometimes missing a few), and the story we get is directly related to our actions. But, for anyone who enjoys reading poetry, old novels, or any other work of literature, it is a great game to be exposed to a source that is considered an idiosyncratic source of literature.

Dear Esther Free Write

My first reaction while playing Dear Esther was that it was going to be exactly like Gone Home. I thought that I was going to need to be picking up objects and waiting for journal entries to come up. So, the first thing that I did was head into the abandoned house and look around. To my surprise, I wasn’t able to pick anything up, I was only allowed to walk. after a couple minutes of walking through the mountain, something similar to a journal entry from Gone Home came up. I kept on following the paths in the hopes that I was heading the right way. In the end, although I definitely enjoyed the sights more in Dear Esther, I was able to understand Gone Home’s story better. The problem I had with Dear Esther was that sometimes the “journal entries” were too far apart from each other, so sometimes I could’t quite remember the last thing he was saying. Also, the entries would just go away, you weren’t able to replay them which made it hard to piece everything together. 

Free write

While Gone Home allows you to create your own narrative by drawing assumptions from various notes and objects, dear esther differs by drawing assumptions straight from the text and images given to you. The basis if Ball’s historical argument lies in the fact that in Gone Home your not given a story but have to discover pieces of evidence yourself and use them in order to puzzle together your own depiction of the family. Similarly, historians look at various pieces of evidence in order to construct an accurate historical account. Dear Esther acts much more like a literary text as you are given the narrative and draw assumptions based off the main character’s passages. Both games definitely have the same eerie feel with the main objective to explore in order to gain more and more parts of the story. What I believe makes gone home better is the historical argument that Bell is making. You, the user, has to actually act like a detective finding various pieces in order to construct your narrative.

Dear Esther & Gone Home

My game play of Dear Esther consisted of exploring and finding clues, much like Gone Home. It’s undoubtedly similar in the sense that I play with a first-person view, through the eyes of another, looking for random notes and objects to observe. While the similarities hold true, Bell’s depiction of both games shines a new light on the purpose and class of the games. I, myself, think both games were similar enough to overlook the differences, but then again my opinion on my play through can be vastly different than another person’s.

Evaluation of Literary Rhetoric in Dear Esther and Gone Home

Despite the medium commonalities of Gone Home and Dear Esther, the carefully guided rhetoric constructs of the two games allow for some interesting insights that would be normally elusive. Whereas the “literary traditionalist” might dismiss the use of video games as a method of conveying rhetoric and message and deem video games an unworthy comparison to the conventional literary counterpart,  Dear Esther and Gone Home pervades through the preconceived boundaries of alternative media to convey an unique literary experience. In “Family History: Source Analysis in Gone Home“, Richard Bell compares  Gone Home to a historical archive and Dear Esther as a more classical comparison to literature.

 

Dear Esther Freewrite

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In “Family History: Source Analysis in Gone Home” Richard Bell compares the two games we have played so far this semester: “Where Dear Esther invites the kind of textual analysis at which students of literature excel, Gone Home demands something more akin to source comparison.” What distinction is Bell drawing between these two games — between literature and history — and do you agree with his distinction? What similarities do you see between the two games?

Just take 10 minutes and freewrite a response to those questions as a post on your blog. Just sketch out your ideas as quickly as you can, following to whatever is interesting for you and getting your ideas down into a post. Add the tag “freewrite” to the post, as a signal to readers that it’s an unpolished and perhaps unfinished piece of writing.

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