Tag: gone home

Gone Home

As the thunder sounds and the rain pours, the developers of Gone Home have, very successfully, used pathetic fallacy to create a distraught environment. At first, it appears as though the game would be a horror game, with a few jump-scares here and there, indicated by, mostly, the weather and thunder, and also by the scattered references to the “insane” uncle Oscar as well as the Ouija board and some notes. But, as the story progresses it isn’t difficult to realize that there is nothing to fear at all. The story is about a not-so-perfect family and the troubles many families actually have to face every day.

 

We find ourselves as Katie Greenbriar in 1995 (shown by the various notes, letters, and tags scattered around) in a not-so-recently moved-into house. The story unfolds as we find clues and objects around the house. Each clue triggers a “Journal Entry” read aloud to us by our little sister Sam who is a 17-year-old high schooler. This read-aloud style is the reason it’s seemed so easy to connect with Sam. You can hear the emotion in her voice when she is talking about people she loves and her new experiences. She isn’t just a voice; she is a person with emotions very similar to ours.

 

What is also interesting about the game is that, even though we don’t get to interact with any of the other characters, we are made aware of their lives as well. The mother working for the state forestry service and being rather successful, possibly having an affair with a co-worker, the father being a mediocre author and obsessing over the assassination of JFK, and Lonnie being a rebellious teenager who did what she pleased, are all brought out by letters and notes left around the house.

Gone Home—Telling story in a unique way

Weird music, along with intermittent bursts of thunder, Gone Home made my flesh creep when I first entered the game. As I cautiously opened all the wooden doors, fearing that dreadful creatures might suddenly appear, what jumped into my views were in fact letters, newspapers, piles of books, and bottles, pill cases, etc. Crumpled paper randomly thrown beside the wastebasket, video tapes labeled by names of films(?), lying there were just things so normally seen in everyday life.

Yet as I explored further, I realized that those I regarded as “normal things” were not normal at all. The letters, books, and small pieces of messages, were snippets of information which indirectly guided me towards the truth. By picking up randomly thrown paper, ejecting tapes of loud musics, little by little the figures of missing characters had been vividly completed. The books never sold, the message taped on the back of the book, the letters congratulating promotion, creepy drawings pasted on walls, and puerile handwriting on torn pages, together depicted the whole picture of the gone characters. They never showed up, but we peeped through the stories of their lives by observing what they left.

Gone Home—Telling story in a unique way

I guess this is what is unique about Gone Home: the way the game illustrates a rich story by providing scattered information, allowing us to piece together the plot, and at the same time fully immerse ourselves in the context.

As Sam’s voice, filled with sincere emotions, revealed her best wishes to Kate, I had to say this wasn’t a scary game at all. Contrary to the spine-chilling music and sound effect, Gone Home is a rather moving and warm story, but it wouldn’t be that moving if it wasn’t me who discovered it piece by piece.

 

PS: As someone who has been barely exposed to American culture, it was great fun discovering an American house in the 1990s. I feel like I know more about the culture after I played through the game.

Gone Home—Telling story in a unique way

Gone Home Observations

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As you play through Gone Home for class on Tuesday, please try to pay attention to your own thinking and emotional reaction as you play and take notes as you go. If we were a little later in the semester and you were more comfortable with publishing to your sites, I might have asked you to liveblog your game play — feel free to try that if you’re willing (see note below). Probably most of you will choose instead to play through the game, taking notes of the things you notice, and then when you’re finished write a blog post with 2-3 paragraphs worth of reflection on the experiences.

Pay careful attention to the start of the game. How does the game begin? How do you feel at the start? How does the game establish setting and time, both at the start of the game and then throughout? How does the game establish character? Especially think about how the game establishes character given that there is only one person present in the narrative and it’s the first person narrator — without dialog and other traditional methods of defining character, how do the game designers go about doing so? Finally, your first larger writing project will build from our discussion of Gone Home towards thinking about how games make use of objects and descriptions of those objects in order to shape narrative, so pay particular attention to all the various things that you pick up and examine and how the writing frames the meaning of those objects.

You do not need to address all of these questions. You do not even need to answer any of these questions, to be honest — if there is a different pattern that really captures your attention and you feel a burning desire to explore it in your blog post, then do that instead of answering the questions in the paragraph above.

Liveblogging

There are a number of different ways that you might liveblog game play. If you want to try it but aren’t sure how to pull it off, my suggestion is to open up your site in a tab and then launch the game. Just look around at the start point of the game for a minute or two, then write a blog post in which you announce your intention to liveblog your experience playing the game and then write a couple of sentences about the start point and publish the post. Then whenever you notice something interesting or worth commenting on as you play, leave a comment on your own post with your observation. Boom, liveblogging.

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