Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Narrative Finds a Home in Games!

The nature of narrative in games is a queer thing.  Conventionally our culture engages with narratives in a didactic fashion: someone tells us a story and we listen to it.  If we're prompted for input, we provide it, but most of us, when we think of experiencing a story, think of receiving that narrative from a speaker (or writer).  Games aren't terribly good at delivering that kind of experience, or at least they're not better at it than the mediums that developed those didactic storytelling techniques.  There's no real advantage a game has over a book at presenting text to a reader or any advantage a game has over a movie in presenting moving pictures to a viewer.  Yet we're drawn to this medium, to the manner in which it tells stories, for some reason.  We're drawn by its interactivity, often graceless and unrefined in its application, often absolutely disconnected from the didactic narrative throughline of the work itself.  We play games because they let us participate in forming a story, and we participate in forming these stories even when it seems like we're relegated to contributing to them outside of the area of the story that is being told.  The end result is that the story of most games isn't the story the developer wanted to tell; rather, it's the story we're telling alongside the developer's story.  The action within the cutscenes and the action sparking in our imagination exist separately, sometimes even directly in conflict with one another.

It's notable then when a game accepts the fluidity of player input in its narrative structure or, even better, builds its narrative around this fluidity.  It's rare to see that in big box releases.  Epic open world games like the Fallouts and the Elder Scrolls games permit you to do this to some extent, but they've always got those pesky central plotlines running through them, yipping at you like dogs, often irrelevant to the story you've been building on your own.  Bioshock built a story that fit masterfully into notions of these mechanics of interactivity, and simultaneously building in a narrative of imposed activity and a framework for its subversion.  But I'm hard pressed to assemble a list of relevant titles that extends much further, and the reality is that I can't really say that indie games do much better.  It remains an exceptional event when I see a game that blends story with gameplay in a way that truly feels whole and meaningful; it's unusual to see stories told in video games that cannot be told more aptly in other mediums.

Enter Gone Home.

Gone Home appealed to me at first for, of all things, its soundtrack.  I'm a big Riot Grrl fanboy, with burning crushes on Carrie Brownstein and Allison Wolfe and an inappropriate amount of lo-fi music with ladies screaming vocal fry over heavy bass lines on my i-Pod.  The social movement and ethos represented by the Riot Grrl has always been appealing to me, representative of that rarest of unicorns: a sex positive women's rights revolution that produced art worth listening to on its own merits.  But Riot Grrl music, like cake, is best in bits and pieces.  Gone Home gets that, really gets that.  It gets how soundtracks should work in games, as elements of emotional catharsis and counterpoint, and as aspects of the environment rather than impositions of a supersystem managing every affair the player is engaged with.  Hell, Gone Home gets everything about how to tell a story within a game, from how to blend play into narrative, and how to permit play to influence narrative.

Normally, some sort of plot summary is necessary to effectively disseminate information about a game, but Gone Home presents a particular challenge, since the play and the story are so thoroughly intertwined that to reveal the narrative to anyone is to compromise the experience behind the game itself.  This is no grand series of systems that you'll interact with for the simple joy of play, this is a means of communicating a narrative.  Spoilers, often irrelevant when discussing modern games with derivative stories you can figure out from their intro cutscenes, would actually compromise the experience of Gone Home.

So, no plot summary, no hints beyond the boiler plate: you're a young woman returning home to a sprawling house that your family moved into while you were studying abroad for a year in Europe.  You're effectively an outsider in this new place, and something of a stranger to your family.  The game unfolds as you explore the empty house, looking for an answer to the question of where is everybody?

There have been a number of solid reviews praising the simple, human storytelling, and Gone Home ties quite neatly into my discussion two weeks past of female characters and notions of how we understand relationships in video games.  That word, human, is perhaps the best way to describe why Gone Home is not only unique within, but crucial to the medium: games are great at presenting us with sweeping, epic narratives and permitting us to enact power fantasies, but they're often quite bad at dealing with issues of every day life and of commonplace, important questions about who we are as people.  There are moments in games that run counter to this, certainly: the story behind the ancient guardian of Zion Valley in Fallout: New Vegas' Honest Hearts DLC, the Father of The Sorrows, comes to mind.  But even within that framework, that human story about loss and love is at most a tertiary concern within a downloadable content package for a much larger game.  We, as gamers, are used to seeing things with big stakes that deal with big issues dissociated from our daily experiences.

Gone Home is unbelievably relevant and significant to the experience of existing as a person in the world today.  It captures more honestly, and perhaps more perceptively, the experience of both being an outsider in your own home, of being a young woman discovering herself, of being a failing an unhappy creative, of being a part of an unhappy marriage, than any game I've ever seen before.  In fact, I'd say that it outdoes Franzen's The Corrections in its exploration of the pabulum dysfunction of the American family.  The Corrections presented sweeping, epic bombast at the heart of its dysfunction, bringing in big social questions of feminism, genocide and war, and senility as it investigated richly drawn characters.  Gone Home is exclusively concerned with its minute cast of characters in its parochial setting.  The understanding you develop for them emerges as you explore the space they inhabit, piecing together the framework of their lives from the scraps of their daily business so that you can understand both who they are and how they're changing.  The end result is something that speaks to the core of what it means to be a person in the modern world without ever heightening the stakes: Gone Home is a game about an experience you might very well have in your lifetime.  This is what games allow us to do that other mediums do not: they present a framework for narrative formation through participation unmatched by other mediums.  Poems come closest, but they maintain crucial elements of authorial "purpose" or guidance (with some notable exceptions).  Only games truly allow "readers" to map out their own narratives, and it's a shame that more of them don't take advantage of this freedom, this necessary aspect of their construction.

There's something remarkable about games that we seem to have trouble really discussing, something powerful and important about the interactivity that qualifies the experience of playing a game as being truly game-like.  It's rare to see that interactivity developed effectively into a means for telling a story, and even more uncommon to see a story so important, so relevant, and so given to discussing oft ignored groups in a real, human, low stakes way.  Gone Home is not bombastic or epic.  It isn't sweeping, and it won't shake your world to the core, but it is important in a way that few games are, in part because it tells a story about the people who are usually don't get to see in games: normal people, especially women, who make up more than half the cast of Gone Home.  It's a real and grounded piece of storytelling in an industry that seems obsessed with ever increasing bombast.

Gone Home shouldn't be so singular in the landscape of games, but it is.  Like a good short story or a good novel, it evokes something with its simplicity, and it does so with an ease that makes me shiver.  It's a good game, a very good game, that showcases what games can be, what they offer to the artistic conversation that is culture that no one other media does.  I wish Roger Ebert were alive to play Gone Home, to see if some part of him sparked at its cautious, engaging, simple exploration.  I'd like to think that he'd finally understand something about what it is to play a game, to meaningfully inhabit another's skin for a few hours and to come away from the whole experience with a greater understanding of oneself.  But I am nothing if not a bombastic, optimistic mouthpiece for the storytelling potential of games, so take that fantasy with a grain of salt, or ignore it altogether.  As long as you play Gone Home, we're cool.