Gone Home is a
strangely personal experience. Maybe it’s the nostalgic sense of place: an
American family’s home in the mid-90s, which was the golden age of my
childhood. A palace full of VHS tapes, music tapes, Nintendo tapes, and gaudy
colorful school folders and highlighters. There are references to Harrison Ford,
Street Fighter, and those little black
label message thingies. Or maybe it’s the way the main character, Sam (not to
be confused with the
player character,
Katie) reminds me of myself. No, I’m not a teenage girl, but I was once a shy
kid in high school, who frequently imagined my own characters and stories and
who still has old doodles and school assignments scattered around. I also had a
high school teacher who encouraged my creative writing and I ended up going to
college for it. Maybe it’s other small details: the reference to one of my favorite
films,
Pulp Fiction, or spotting a
host of books I studied in school and have fond memories of in Sam’s bedroom (
Frankenstein,
Treasure Island, Jane Austen’s
Emma…),
or that Janice Greenbriar has the same birthdate as my own mother…or perhaps
Gone Home would have just felt personal
anyway, even without all this, because it’s just an intimate experience by
nature. When I first walked into the empty foyer of the Greenbriar home, it was
just another location in a video game, but by the time I approached Sam’s
journal in the attic, after opening drawers, reading letters, listening to
music, picking up crumpled manuscripts, finding secret notes under the bed,
looking at newspaper clippings, looking at photos, and otherwise immersing
myself in a lived-in, inhabited space, I felt like I knew the Greenbriars intimately
and they felt like a family as real as my own. Like Sam could have been someone
I went to high school with and I just never knew about everything she was going
through.
It’s this sense of discovering a family, of discovering
people, via the traces of themselves and their experiences that adorn their
home that makes Gone Home special.
Not just learning about Sam’s experiences and her relationship with Lonnie,
which is the crux of the narrative, but learning about the marital problems of
her parents, the affair her mother almost had, and her father’s struggles as an
author of a series of bizarre JFK time travel novels. These people feel real,
and I feel like I know them personally even though I never actually met any of
them face to face in the game. Especially Sam, whose characterization felt so tangible (and the
music that accompanies her diary is so perfectly matched) that I couldn’t help
but tear up every time she sighed or expressed her frustrations and dreams.
Ironically, the only member of the Greenbriar family I learned
next to nothing about is Katie, the one who I literally stepped into the shoes
of. I learn she traveled around Europe and she occasionally has some reaction
text to certain objects in the house (“Gosh, Sam” she says when discovering her
sister’s issue of “Gentleman” magazine, the magazine for men, and “Oh, barf”
when finding a condom in her parent’s bedroom dresser), but the only
personality trait I really glean from her is that she is the “straightedge”
Greenbriar child: the athlete, the scholar, the “responsible” one. In other words,
pretty boring. One of the funniest moments in the game comes from discovering a
Sex Ed assignment in one of Sam’s school folders in which she took a hilarious
amount of creative liberty with a rather simple assignment (“See Me!” was the
grade she got from her teacher in bright red letters). Then later on I
discovered Katie’s own take on the same assignment, which of course was done
perfectly and properly and got a bright red “check plus”. But I suppose it’s
unfair to call Katie boring, because I’m sure that if I had the opportunity to
rummage through her own stuff (still packed away in boxes in the guest room of
the Greenbriar’s new home, which was to be her room when got back from Europe),
I would find a three-dimensional person with her own struggles and experiences.
Gone Home makes it clear that it’s not
about Katie though, but rather her family and principally her younger sister, Sam.
Sam is one of the most richly drawn people I’ve seen in a
video game (or, sorry, I guess I should say in an “interactive exploration
finding and reading stuff emotion story simulation experience”). I hesitate to
call her a “character” because she seems so real and authentic. Her voice
actress does an excellent job but Sam’s personality also shines through in the
pieces of herself she’s left lying around her house: in the scattered chapters
in the ongoing tale of Captain Allegra and her First Mate, in her Street Fighter cheat codes lying on her
bedroom floor (repeatedly crossed-out and revised), in her angry note to her
parents chastising them for not letting her go out with Lonnie in the city, in
her aforementioned unique take on schoolwork and the various scraps and doodles
and letters that all in all paint a very vivid portrait of a human being. Gone Home does a wonderful job of
setting up a series of mini-narratives that get told through pieces of the Greenbriar’s
life around their home (would Danny ever get his Nintendo tape back??) and I
enjoyed following all of these, but of course the narrative I was most invested
in was that of Sam and Lonnie. This is where Gone Home is also just a sweet story of young romance, one that
treats Sam’s homosexuality not like a twist or a discovery, but rather a given,
natural fact of her life, while still managing to address the very real issues
of what it means to be a gay teenager in high school (especially in the
mid-90s). This is a story that moves, but also aims to inspire empathy for a
life experience that some might regard as foreign and strange. A story that might
make some people realize that a gay relationship is in fact not these things,
but just as relatable and human as any other romance.
That is the key word: Gone
Home struck me in how human it
felt. It shines a lens on one family’s, and one girl’s, personal struggles, it
promotes empathy for our neighbors, for our friends, for complete strangers,
for those we might regard as pariahs; it reminds us that we are all human and that
we all go through shit. Speaking more personally, it allowed me, a straight
man, to empathize with a gay young woman and the pain of dealing with disrespectful
parents and peers; the fact that I have so much in common with Sam made it all
the more easy to relate to her. I can relate to being shy around people I like
(seeing that “gold star” around someone but not knowing how to talk to them),
and so much of what Sam experiences and says and writes and does reminds me of
myself and my own experiences, I can’t help but easily put myself in her shoes.
Perhaps it is because of all this that I really did not want to enter the attic
at the end of game. I felt a connection with Sam and I wanted her story to have
a happy ending, but the more the game went on, the more I got the idea that the
diary that I’d been hearing throughout the experience was Sam’s last words, and
I was afraid of what I’d find up there. When all I found was an empty sleeping
bag accompanied by a final, joyful diary entry from Sam about how Lonnie
decided she couldn’t live without her and the two ran off together, I was
ecstatic. A surprise happy ending, a joyful outcome when I expected a grim one,
is one of my favorite discoveries in fiction, and Gone Home’s conclusion left me in happy tears.
Gone
Home is the kind of experience I’ve been wanting to
play for a long time. It’s simple and really nothing extraordinary, but that’s
exactly what makes it special for a video game in a medium where interactive
experiences so often feel the need to couple extraordinary circumstances with
their pathos. In Gone Home, there are
no monsters (or more specifically, no ghosts), no combat, no big dire mystery
or circumstance. Why is the Greenbriar home mysteriously empty and seemingly
abandoned and what happened to Sam? The big, dark, earth-shattering answer: Mrs.
and Mr. Greenbriar are off at couples counseling and Sam ran off with the love
of her life. I’ve played a lot of games before where much of what I do is walk
around and read stuff that fleshes out a world or a narrative, but I respect Gone Home’s restraint in not shoehorning
unnecessary violence or fantasy elements into its plot, and still managing to
keep me interested in its characters and story through compelling writing, voice
acting, and world building. This is just a patient, grounded, human experience
and I appreciate it for that. There is still much room for growth when it comes
to interactive narrative, and Gone Home is
only one of many unique ways in which the interactive medium can deliver an
interesting experience, but for now I wouldn’t mind seeing more games like Gone Home. Relaxed experiences where a
character simply walks around, talks to people, look at objects, perhaps finds
clues and solves a mystery…or maybe just talks to a friend, buys a hot dog,
watches a sunset…stuff besides slaying monsters, going on adventures, and
saving the world, stuff that doesn’t need violence or combat or even esoteric
puzzle solving (as compelling, and often emotional in their own right, as those
experiences can be). Of course, this kind of experience can still involve an
intriguing mystery or something fantastical, but the point is that a video game
can still be something compelling without shoving ten hours of gunplay
in-between low-key narrative exploration sections (leers slowly in the
direction of BioShock Infinite). I
don’t blame someone for criticizing Gone
Home’s narrative as being too small, but I think that the game is quite revolutionary
for being a video game that is just about exploring a family’s home and
learning about their lives. I also think it’s just wonderful that something
like Gone Home and something like Shovel Knight can both exist in the same
medium, or at least under the hazy umbrella term of “interactive experiences”,
and I think this is a testament to the power, potential, and overall
amazingness of this medium.
