Who's Narrative Does Gone Home Capture?

I’d like to expand on the comments regarding narrative in Gone Home by posing the question: who’s narrative is this?

One might say that it’s Katie’s narrative, but I would disagree. I think Katie is one the people we learn about the least by playing Gone Home. As players, we learn much more about Sam and, if you look closely at every item in the house, there’s a significant amount to learn about Katie’s parents, uncle, and cat too. More interestingly, however, the space of Gone Home is designed such that playing the game blindly (i.e., without preconception of the game’s genre/themes) allows the player to learn most about themselves.

Despite the clear narrative presented throughout the game, in my blind playthrough I kept wondering what kind of game Gone Home was, largely because the open-ended player-environment interaction seemed to me fitting for a variety of genres. When I first saw the attic door with the “DO NOT OPEN WHEN RED LIGHTS ARE ON” sign, I didn’t even try to open the door, because at that moment I was convinced Gone Home was a choice game: open the attic door but ruin the photos inside.

Similarly, upon seeing a note from Sam’s mom telling Sam to stop leaving all the lights on in the house, I consciously started turning off lights as I left each room. “Maybe this has some effect on the game’s progression,” I thought. You know, it even occurred to me that if I turned off all the lights on the second floor and tried to open the attic door, it wouldn’t ruin the photos. In other words, the way I chose to interact with the designed space of Gone Home created for me a narrative beyond that of Katie and Sam: to me, the game contained my own narrative as a player, even though ultimately none of the peculiar actions I took made any difference. In this sense, I guess you could say I confusedly played Gone Home thinking it had an emergent narrative when actually it had an enacted/embedded one. Why did this confusion happen?

To answer this I’ll make a brief connection to an article I read for my architecture class. Beatriz Colomina, a modern architecture historian, writes in her article “Intimacy and Spectacle: the Interiors of Adolf Loos” that the relationship between the individual and the home is one of a theatre. She describes that a house, as a private space, used to be conceived of as “a box in the world theatre,” a retreat from the public world, but that it has since evolved to be both a box and a theatre, its inhabitants being both spectators and actors depending on their place in and interaction with the home (8). The idea with this latter metaphor is that some spaces are designed such that some spots in a house are “viewing boxes” in the world theatre while others are “the stage.”

For example, immediately after opening the front doors (after the porch) of Katie’s house, the player is in a “viewing box”: the doors open wide to reveal a grand staircase and wide entrance hall, and if there were people in the room, the player would certainly see them and be able to watch their actions closely. Throughout essentially the rest of the game, however, the player themselves becomes a subject as they explore Katie’s house and all its particularities.

One way to conceive of Gone Home is that the player is the spectator and Katie the subject, but I think it’s much more convincing and appealing to see the player as the subject and the lack of audience as the viewer. One comment that likely many people had in playing Gone Home is that it feels like a horror game. Are there people watching? Will we run into other people in the house? The dark corridors of Katie’s house and the raging storm outside contribute to the feeling that as players we are constantly being scrutinized by beings that may or may not actually be present, and this can lead us to be more conscious of our playstyle. In my case, at least, this was very much true.

Does the ambiguous genre and narrative type of Gone Home make it a bad game? Does my having been confused between the game being an enacted or emergent narrative make me a bad player? I can’t say. But I would definitely claim this ambiguity made the game more interesting.