Gone Home

This week I played Gone Home, a game that was considered ground-breaking when it came out in 2013. The game is set in 1996, with many artifacts and clues dating to the early nineties. The player character, Katie, has been backpacking through Europe for a year and returns to find a completely empty house. While she was gone, the famiy moved to an old, creepy house with a reputation for being mysterious--maybe haunted. 

The player is unfamiliar with the old house and doesn't have a key.The first challenge is to locate the key and get inside the house. As I moved through the house, I turned on every light as a trail-marker to let me know I had already seen that room and investigated the objects there. Although I discovered an electrician's report indicating the wiring is unreliable, I didn't have any trouble with the lights turning off spontaneously. Two lights didn't work.

Moving through the house and picking up objects like cassette tapes, notes, invoices, reveal different clues about the family and some of them trigger a journal entry from Sam, Katies teenage sister who should be home, but isn't. 

One of the first things that struck me was the technology that reflected the 1990s. No cell phones, but the cool kids have pagers. Physical answering machines are hooked up to cordless phones that still have a base plugged into the wall. VHS tapes litter the media room. Cassette tapes and players provide clues about Sam's interests.

I finished the game play in about 4.5 hours. There were lots of red herrings that didn't help solve the mystery of the abandoned home, but may introduce other mysteries. There's a locked filing cabinet and a locked safe that apparently have no bearing on the central story.

I found game play a little slow at first, but about an hour in, it piqued my interest enough to keep me going. There was a great staircase that should have had a hidden door in it. I kept checking for hidden panels or doors, but I wasn't able to locate it or unlock it until I got a note from Katie about its existence. If this happened in a novel, I would be really upset and I'm not sure how to feel about it in the game. It keeps the player from stumbling onto the final clue and finishing the game much faster without experiencing the full storyline. All the same, I felt like if I was smart enough to look for it early on, I should have found it. Or found it but it needed a key of somekind.

One of the things that makes this game ground-breaking is that it explores issues of sexuality before the Obergerfell decision in 2015 normalized same sex relationships. Setting the game in the mid 1990s also puts it in a time when sexuality was perceived to be a choice. The time frame needs to be considered to understand Sam's motive for running away. In that way, the story has less impact now than it probably did in 2013. A modern version of it would probably need to use gender identity as the motivating factor in order to have the emotional impact that the game had when it first came out. 

This is the first game of this kind that I completed. I played Titanic when it came out in the late 1990's but wasn't ever able to get off the ship and prevent WWI. When I play Minecraft, I'm more interested in the creative aspects of the game than in pursuing the end goal of defeating the dragon. If I recall the game was out for several years before anyone even knew there was an end-goal in the game.

I'm thinking that a game made with slides, kind of like a Choose Your Own Adventure might be a way an educator could replicate this kind of storytelling with gaming even though they aren't well-versed in UnrealEngine or other game development engines.