Playing through Gone Home, I felt a deep emotional investment in the game. This was due less to the story (which was indeed sweet, sad and moving as a domestic/queer horror story), so much as due to the game’s juxtaposition of spatial intimacy and temporal remoteness. Wandering through the family’s home, picking through their stuff in a manner that I would never pick through a friend or family members - stuff that in its way is an extension of each of the members as it is also a stand-in for them - produces a sense of being spatially very close to the family. At the same time, the absence of their actual bodies renders a sense of them being temporally distant - they once were where you now are. (Zoe spoke about this absence in a post this week, but where she found it off-putting, I found it immersive and motivating). This disjunction propelled me forward through the game, because at a visceral level I felt a strong need to see it resolved, either through an increased temporal intimacy (one or more of the family members returning home, or finding their bodies when, early on, it still felt like that kind of game), or through increased spatial remoteness (in the form of increased alienation from the objects in the home, or just running away from the home), or through some sublation of the two. By forcing me to resonate with these affects that were more the story than the story, Gone Home short circuited any impulse to rush and prioritize narrative over experience, while also making my body one of the mediums of its being.
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