Medium Expectations: On Gome Home (2013)

Sam's bedroom

Five minutes: that's how long it took Gone Home to let me down.  It wasn't a big thing, really.  The game starts you off at the front door of a house, luggage at my feet and a locked front door beckoning.  I was Katie, a young woman back from a trip to Europe, and I'd arrived at night, with darkness enveloping everything beyond the porch.  A steady torrent of rain beats down, punctuated by occasional thunder and lightning, which lent a sense of urgency to the proceedings: don't you want to get out of the rain and cold?  I'd just figured out how to unlock the front doors, and now I was inside the lobby.  It was an actual relief entering the house and putting walls between me and the raging storm outside.  I took a look around, the first glimpse at the eerie, creaky, antiquated house that my younger sister Samantha (or Sam) and my parents were living in, although most of that was probably was the dark stillness, and the house would be more welcoming in the morning.  None of them were here apparently for my homecoming; the note on the door from Samantha had said as much.  My parents were on holiday, my sister had something to deal with.  So, I contemplated the wooden staircase in front of me, and the doors to either side.  Then I turned around, went back outside, and tried to pick up my bags, still on the porch, to bring them inside.  No dice.  Trying to pick them up had been one of the first things I'd tried to do when the game started, but left-click had done nothing, and neither did the spacebar, e, or u keys.  Perhaps now that I had the front doors open, Katie would logically have a better reason to want to pick them up, and the game would let me move them inside, away from the outdoors, but unfortunately, the bags still proved unresponsive.  The game wasn't able to interpret what I was trying to do, what I felt was a logical thing to do, and what I felt was a logical thing for my character to do, and that brought me out of the moment, if only for a bit.  This was a small thing, of course, that I was being bothered by, and you can forgive small things.  But it’s often these small surprises and disappointments that can stick with you, long after you finish a game.

Gone Home is an indie game by Fullbright Games released in 2013.  It has been lauded by many game publications for how it defies expectations, and it landed on several Game of the Year 2013 lists (Polygon, Adam Sessler, IGN, Giantbomb) as a result,  not just because of the merits of the game itself but because of the way it uniquely placed itself in the gaming landscape by the things it tried to do differently.  It's a game without guns, a game that approaches the concept of games and game narratives differently.  Many reviewers noted that they expected a horror game, because the game sets that expectation up with its setting and tone, and they were pleasantly surprised when they realized that it wasn't.  Instead, it's a game simply about exploring this house and looking at the documents and items you find there.  The most important artifacts, the one the main story is mostly derived from, comes from Samantha's diary.  Gone Home is not reflex-based, it does not require timing or coordination, and it doesn't expect you to use your brain to solve any puzzles.  Even its story reveals itself to be more straightforward than expected.  For all of this, for subverting the expectations within the medium, within its setting and its genre, this game garnered critical acclaim.  The game's official website lists Gone Home as a “Story Exploration Video Game” and that's an entirely appropriate description.  In most other games, the story is used merely to prop up the gameplay, to grant motivation, successive goal markers, and some sense of progression to the shooting, or hitting, or strategizing, or driving that is at its core.  Gone Home by contrast serves primarily as a vehicle to tell its story, or, I should say, to tell its stories.

Besides Samantha, the game also tells the story of your other family members.  In Gone Home, the character you are playing a not an active participant in this story.  You cannot change what happens, because nothing actually happens: the game is all backstory (/ies), all things that have happened in the past, that the game hinges itself on and delivers fragments of throughout, that you can then piece together to form a cohesive timeline of events.  It's not unlike the relationship you might have when reading a book, except a step removed; you are not only discovering and experiencing this narrative and trying to figure out what happened, but you are also controlling a character that is ostensibly doing the same thing.  This is the extra step that can separate games from other media such as literature, films, and television; you are the driver of what is happening.  You can imagine yourself in the protagonist's shoes, you can decide where to go next, you can experience the world as they might.  You move within this unfamiliar house and you find hidden away letters and journals and clues to the lives your parents and your sister have lived in your absence, as you wander around in this space they've occupied.  And here, this, bigger than the luggage issue which I quickly got over, there was a disconnect; the game casts you as a voyeur, riffing through the locked locker in your sister's room, the dirty magazines your father has hidden away, the hidden letters of correspondence between your mother and past acquaintances.  Was I really playing the type of character that would so cavalierly invade my family's privacy like that?    The game never indicates such.  Early on, you find out some things about Katie, your avatar in the game.  You're a young free-spirit independent type who decided to up and go off to explore Europe.  You're close to your younger sister, who looks up to you.  And beyond that?  There's not much else in the house that tells you any more about Katie.  In a story about self-discovery, you actually discover very little about your “self,” the character that you control.  The story, the main story at least, is instead squarely about Katie's sister.  You are not asked to think much about Katie, and she very quickly fades from importance.  Back from a long trip criss-crossing Europe, a plane ride, a drive or ride through a thunderstorm to this unfamiliar address, what do I imagine Katie would want to do?  Maybe familiarizing yourself with the layout of the house makes sense, taking a peek inside some rooms, but really, considering how exhausted Katie should've been, I imagine she would've taken her bags inside, gone upstairs, and found a bed to flop down in.  In the morning, after a night to recuperate, in the light of day, maybe then she would look around some more.  Maybe her sister would've returned from wherever she'd gone off to by then.  Samantha's bed, though, the one the note on the door says is for Katie to sleep in because the guest room one isn't ready yet, her bed is just as non-interactive as the luggage, allowing no option to sleep.  To continue the game, to progress the story, you have to keep exploring, keep invading your family’s privacy.  And what does that say about Katie?

In many games, there exists a gap between what you, the player, want to do, and what the avatar you're controlling (probably) would want to do.  In Final Fantasy, I may be in a burning building, and in every screen there might be NPCs fleeing for their lives to the left, but on the way out I'm still going to mash the use button while skirting the edges of every environment, seeing if there are hidden items or chests anywhere.  In Half-Life II, I might throw boxes at other people's heads when they're talking to me, or I might try to burrow into the corner outside the sight lines of the monitor from which that scientist NPC is sprouting off expository dialogue, while waiting for the door to unlock so I can continue playing.  In those cases and others, though, I'm fully aware of what the game actually wants me to do, so it's easier to divorce this, what I’m actually doing, from the “true” story.  Those actions aren't actually part of the game's narrative that I'm constructing in my head as I go along, not unless the game actually acknowledges them.  When I steal a police car and go catch crooks in GTA IV, It's not actually as if Nico decided to temporarily moonlight as a vigilante force for justice between taking on missions for mobsters; if I leave the game unpaused in Uncharted, I don't believe that Nathan Drake chose to stand around for several hours in an underground tomb contemplating his place in life.  I only really expect the “true” narrative in GTA to continue when I hit another main mission marker on the map, or when I solve a puzzle and continue into the next room in Uncharted or Final Fantasy or Half-Life.  In Gone Home, though, the gulf doesn't only exist between what you're doing and what your character would do, there was also a disconnect between what I believed that character would do and what the game wants you to do.  The game wants you to explore, and I didn't believe that exploring was what Katie would want to do in that situation.  And this disconnect took me out of it, more than in any of those other cases. 

In many games, there exists a gap between what you, the player, want to do, and what the avatar you're controlling (probably) would want to do.  In Final Fantasy, I may be in a burning building, and in every screen there might be people fleeing for their lives to the left, but on the way out I'm still going to mash the use button while skirting the edges of every environment, seeing if there are hidden items or chests anywhere.  In Half-Life II, I might throw boxes at other people's heads when they're talking to me, or I might try to burrow into the corner outside the sight lines of the monitor from which that scientist NPC is sprouting off expository dialogue, while waiting for the door to unlock so I can continue playing.  In those cases and others, though, I'm fully aware of what the game actually wants me to do, so it's easier to divorce this, what I’m actually doing, from the “true” story.  Those actions aren't actually part of the game's narrative that I'm constructing in my head as I go along, not unless the game actually acknowledges them.  When I steal a police car and go catch crooks in GTA IV, It's not actually as if Nico decided to temporarily moonlight as a vigilante force for justice between taking on missions for mobsters; if I leave the game unpaused in Uncharted, I don't believe that Nathan Drake chose to stand around for several hours in an underground tomb contemplating his place in life.  I only really expect the “true” narrative in GTA to continue when I hit another main mission marker on the map, or when I solve a puzzle and continue into the next room in Uncharted or Final Fantasy or Half-Life.  In Gone Home, though, the gulf doesn't only exist between what you're doing and what your character would do, there was also a disconnect between what I believed that character would do and what the game wants you to do.  The game wants you to explore, and I didn't believe that exploring was what Katie would want to do in that situation.  And this disconnect took me out of it, more than in any of those other cases.  There are, of course, many games where you do something similar.  In many RPGs (Final Fantasy, again, comes to mind), you can walk into people’s homes, taking potions from their chests and money from their dressers, sometimes right in front of the homeowners, and no one ever blinks an eye at this behaviour (Here’s the TV Tropes page on it, even: Kleptomaniac Hero).  The difference?  Expectations, basically.  I grew up on these RPGs, and so it’s almost expected behaviour for the intrepid protagonist hero to steal from villagers’ homes.  With Gone Home, there are no such genre conventions, and with a game that wants to veer more towards realism and less towards video-gamey logic, it’s harder to shrug it off.  In RPGs, the main story does not take place in those houses: that’s not the “true” story, but in Gone Home, there’s nothing else.  If Samantha isn’t going through her family’s things, then there’s no story at all.

Playing through Gone Home, I felt a steady sense of unease, something the game uses several sources to achieve: the nighttime setting, the thunderstorm outside, Samantha's love of the occult, the dark and foreboding house, flickering lights, and the Great-Uncle who dies under mysterious circumstances in this very house.  It uses stereotypical horror movie trappings, making it so that every time you go into a bathroom and flip on the lights you half expect a dead body in the bathtub, and when you enter the basement you brace yourself for a ghostly apparition to show up.  There's a sense of ever-present tension, in a game where you can't die or fail.  The horror setting and the expectations it set up was one of the most mentioned aspects of the game in the reviews of it I’ve read (most of which I read after I played it).  The game basically performs a bait and switch, setting up and then subverting your expectations for what the game is going to be.  As I began the game, the setting, the first person perspective, and the lack of weaponry made me expect either a puzzle adventure game, an indie horror game, or a mixture of both, and then you keep playing and no ghosts are showing up, no blood on walls, and there weren't any 15-tile puzzles, classic adventure game inventory puzzles, or lock-picking mini-games, either.  Gone Home, instead, is simply around walking around a house, finding things and uncovering a narrative.  The setting is tonally completely irrelevant with what the game actually wants you to do, which isn't a complaint so much as an observation.  Would the game have been as effective set on a sunny afternoon?  Perhaps not.  In fact, I think probably not.  But at the same time, the setting, the ominously empty house, the night time setting, it doesn't actually tie in to what the game or the story is about.  I suppose you could say they're both about fear of the unknown, and about finding the courage to continue on?  Maybe, maybe. 

Meanwhile, I collected documents and try to piece together family histories expecting some bigger revelation, but in the end, instead of weaving all the disparate stories and profiles you've unearthed about your family members together into some bigger mystery, or hitting some revelation about some unearthed family secret, Gone Home strips all that away as it reaches the end, and shines the spotlight on a single narrative thread, that of Sam's.  I expected the game to expose more about the relationship between Katie and Samantha, and instead what you learn early on about them is all you really learn about them.  This isn't a story about a family so much as several stories about the people that happen to be related with each other, with one of those stories getting greater spotlight in different rooms.  There is little about their relationships with each other: a book given from father to daughter, notes on a bulletin board, the postcards Katie sent home, but nothing much deeper than that that I saw.  Were there nights where the parents stayed up and worried about Samantha fitting into school?  Did Samantha want to write stories because she watched her father writing stories when she was younger?  It remains up to the imagination of the player, although the game gives enough around the edges to let you fill in some gaps by yourself.  Maybe this is trying to say something about the separate lives we live outside the purview of even our own families, and the private spaces we box those lives away in.  From the documents you uncover, you can piece together these people’s backstories, and you can imagine their circumstances, but it's mostly personal histories more than in-depth character work, and they remain mostly isolated from each other. Which, looking at what the game is trying to accomplish, is fine for everyone else, but for Samantha?  Samantha is given more focus in Gone Home than any other character, by a wide margin.  But a lot of what we see about her comes off as hobbies and interests.  We see an interest in punk music, in fanzines, in creative writing, in the occult and Beverly Hills 90210.  We hear fragments of her fears, and hopes, and confusions, but in a narrative presented almost entirely through documents, everything is still presented in a mostly objective viewpoint.  We don't see these characters through each others' eyes, we don't see their interactions, and we never see much in the way of deeper conflicts or struggles outside of pat issues with authority.  Which the game wasn't going for, necessarily; it was going for something simpler than that.  But again, small disappointments.  Sam's story is, for what it’s worth, pretty effective, and especially well presented; her diary segments are read out loud and both the voice acting and the music selection is superb, and each piece of her story is well paced out; you can rush through the game to get every entry, but playing the game at the languid pace its meant for, with the specific placements and the amount of things to look at in between, each encounter with her story built up the end quite well.

And all of the smaller disappointments I noted quell but don't completely erase how effective some of the bigger subversions are; it wasn't a game I loved, but it was a game that was... pleasant.  It was different.  It was, in its own way, surprising, even though in other ways it wasn’t surprising at all.  I compared Katie's place in the story with a reader's relationship with a novel earlier.  The thing is, despite not being games with their interactivity, novels are not objective, static affairs either, existing as a singular piece that all readers will experience the same way.  How does knowledge about Orson Scott Card's conservative politics colour a reading or re-reading of Ender's Game?  How does watching the movies first influence reading Lord of the Rings?  How does reading Harry Potter impact your expectations going into J K Rowling's future novels?  Nothing exists in a vacuum.  Many of the people that reviewed it perhaps went in without too much of an idea of what they were in for; I didn't go in with too much information either, but I did do so aware of the accolades it had received, and I knew it wasn't an action game, although that didn't mean it couldn't contain horror or mystery elements.  And how much you know about a game can’t help but shade your experience with it.  I can’t imagine that going into Gone Home expecting it to be Game of the Year material or even Game Story of the Year material would be remotely helpful for how you perceive it.  Those reviewers that went into the game with no perceptions, they had an experience with the game that no other people are likely to ever have, ever again.  Gone Home is considered revelatory, specifically because it's a game, and the themes, narrative, and emotions it is trying to tackle are rare for its medium.  If you pull its narrative out of its game-y moorings and try to examine its originality against what's found in novels, say young adult novels, as Ian Begost does here(http://bogost.com/writing/perpetual_adolescence/ ), it doesn't stand out as much.  But that's not completely fair to it, to examine it outside of its intended context.  It is a game, it’s being experienced as a game, and the expectations it both subverts and doesn’t would work differently in a different medium.

So, if Gone Home is important and interesting and good, then it's not just because of what it is, but what it isn't; Gone Home surprises and delights, but moreso if you are fully aware and maybe even a bit tired of the games being released around it, a landscape of guns and swords, sci-fi and fantasy, killing and corridors; well, then, what does Gone Home do exactly, in the medium from which it subverts so many expectations, and gains so much symbolic importance to reviewers and (some) gamers?  How effective would the same story would be, if all of the documents were bundled into a physical book instead, or what if all it was like an old radio play, and all of Samantha's diary entries were instead read out loud, one after the other?  The game, presents so much of its story through written documents and notes, after all.  You'd miss some of the contextual clues and environments in the house, but you could get a focus on that single story, easily the strongest part of the game.  This is what Gone Home gains, as a game as opposed to as something else: it imparts a sense of discovery.  It's a mass of strings, all knotted up, and as you untangle all the threads you find some of them are worn out, and some of them are too short, and when it all comes down to it you’re only left with one string that's really useful.  Still, there's a sense of satisfaction untangling all of the threads can impart, a sense of participation, discovery, control.  All of the stories outside of Samantha's are optional, pretty much, and remain mostly separate to Samantha's story; her narrative, meanwhile, is presented in ways that are difficult to miss, or at least the major beats are.  The game gates a couple of sections of the house off, with keys you have to find first, with lockers you have to find the combinations to, and so forth, so the developers retain some control over the order you will find things in.  Still, though, even though each diary entry is obviously placed, and their order is mostly set, you are still the one controlling the pace, with background details get coloured in along the way.

Choice is often a difficult element to present in a video game narrative; there are only so many finite, binary choices a game developer has time to implement, after all.  Much easier, and much more common, are games which allow the player some freedom of exploration, instead of the ability to affect the story.  In the earliest Mario games this exploration took place over levels, but as games and game technology has advanced, we have more modern titles like Skyrim and World of Warcraft and GTA presenting exploration over vast, open worlds.  Video games have been growing outwards in scale, over interconnected kingdoms and forests, over cities and highways, across mountains and oceans and seas.  Gone Home is a game that reverses thus trend, with its more modest scope; the spaces you're exploring are instead across rooms: hidden under false drawer bottoms, discarded behind couches, packed away in boxes in the basement.  Choices are something that developers, too, have to make, and the choice Fullbright Games made was to intentionally limit their game: to set it in an empty house with no NPCs to interact with, to not bother with puzzles that would have only served as filler, and to tell a story that is, at heart, simpler than you might think. There are things that I wish it had done better or differently, but it's an understated experience, and its modest aims are rare within the increasing bombast of the AAA games industry or even the nostalgic back-to-basics that some indie games are going for these days.  It chooses to forge a different path, and it doesn’t expect too many to follow, either games or gamers.  But some of them will, and some will be disappointed, and some will be pleasantly surprised.