Tag: dear esther

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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