While playing Gone Home over the weekend, my roommate walked into my room to ask me what I was doing. I explained that I was playing a video game in which I explore the house of a young woman who comes home to find her family gone. My roommate responded as some others have to the game’s design: “Is that even a game? What do you do?” The website for Gone Home describes the game as a “Story Exploration Video Game” (“Gone Home”). Indeed, one of the creators of the game asserted it was a game because “it is a story told within an interactive environment which allows the players to decide how to tackle the unwinding of the game’s fiction and its interpretation” (“Gone Home interview with Steve Gaynor”). Yet there are still countless articles asking if Gone Home is even a game.
At some points, the game felt similar to a movie. You’re slowly discovering the story of what has happened at the house, the storytelling is almost linear in nature because some rooms are locked and kept from you until you go to different rooms first, and the journal entries that appear once you reach certain areas of the house play and you cannot stop them. Even the credits of the game seem similar to the ending of a film. The game tells you who “starred” as Katie and Sam and who played a role in the creation of the game. The ending screen of the game is a heart locket with the S+L pieces connected, which made me feel like I often do at the end of a film because the story was affecting. The story is at the forefront of the game play. All of these elements feel very cinematic.
And yet, the only cutscenes of the whole game that I remember come at the very beginning and the very end. And yet, you take direct action in order to drive any storytelling along for nearly the entire game. And yet, you decide whether or not you want to go into a room or explore a particular object. And yet, there are secondary storylines you can only unlock if you choose to explore certain objects or revisit a room you’ve already reached. In his essay, “Game Design as Narrative Architecture”, Henry Jenkins details a divide between scholars who want to analyze video games exclusively in terms of game play or exclusively in terms of narrative. “Divergence from a story’s path is likely to make for a less satisfying story; restricting a player’s freedom of action is likely to make for a less satisfying game” and “the narrative tends to be isolated from or even against the computer-gameness of the game” are some of the arguments that he details (Jenkins 1). Jenkins introduces, as a more middle ground approach, the concept of game designers as narrative architects. He argues that some video games play with narrative as “spatial exploration over causal event chains or which seek to balance between the competing demands of narrative and spectacle” (Jenkins 3). They design a world in which there is a story that a player must uncover by exploring the world and the objects and people inside it. In the case of Gone Home, we only explore an enclosed space and have access to certain objects. We interact with a small world in order to determine what the narrative will be. Arguably, the only goal in the game is a narrative one: find out what happened to Sam and where Katie’s parents are. And yet, we aren’t just following a narrative, we are exploring a space, which is a way of telling stories very distinct to games as a medium.
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