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Gone Home
I think interactivity is often confused with challenge and (meaningful) choice.
Sure, it can be - but I’m stating it at a basic level - are my actions involved with interacting with the game. They are - at a basic level. Challenge and (meaningful) choice are up a level from these basics, for sure.
But a game, at it’s basic level, I think has to be enjoyable and interactive. Be it a card game, board game, parlor game, or video game.
Bt
At the same time, I think words like “interactive fiction” do a disservice to this game as well, because it isn’t a game that just jabbers at you with minimal interactivity. It requires you to be an active participant in discovering its story, but it allows you to do that relatively uninhibited.
Whatever the classification, there’s no doubt in my mind that squeezing traditional game elements in there, even adventure game ones, would’ve severely detracted from the experience and the story being told. I’m glad they stuck to their vision.
Could this style of game work as a longer form experience (longer than five hours)? I’m not so sure. At some point, the act of picking up notes and reading them gets a little tired, and starts to become implausible from a narrative perspective (there are only so many notes and documents in any given place).
I’m not sure the classification matters at all. What’s the point of trying to determine whether Gone Home is actually a “game”, or an “interactive story” or whatever label you can think of—-it doesn’t add or subtract anything from the actual experience you had with it. All it does is create expectations which will only get in the way when someone other tries to experience it as well. Being outraged about Gone Home (or Dear Esther) not being a game in the traditional sense of the word is quite ridiculous, in my opinion.
The implicit expectation that “Gone Home” has to be a “game” only exists because of the prevalent, yet mostly imaginary classification of creative works where something is either a game, or a movie, or a book—-which is doing us a disservice in cases like Gone Home, or Dear Esther, or Proteus, or anything that doesn’t necessary make us shoot a baddie or solve a sweet puzzle or compete against something or someone. It’s an experience which happens not to demand much mechanical dexterity or rational thought from the one who experiences it, but the ability to connect with what’s happening on the screen on an emotional level. It’s good. It’s a good thing.
Its not ridiculous, without the excellent voice actor reading the diary and the sisters lifestyle bringing reviewers own biases into their reviews, this “game” would have had middling reviews.
Its not ridiculous, without the excellent voice actor reading the diary and the sisters lifestyle bringing reviewers own biases into their reviews, this “game” would have had middling reviews.
It seems like the “game” didn’t evoke any emotional response from you. If it doesn’t do that, well, then it really is just a big, not too-well rendered house with a few boring letters in it.
It is quite well written though, and the story really is touching to many people. Maybe it’s not just the “feminists” that are to blame for the stellar reviews, as you seem to imply.
Also, you seem to have missed my point. I said that dismissing something only on the grounds that it is “not a game” is ridiculous.
Its not ridiculous, without the excellent voice actor reading the diary and the sisters lifestyle bringing reviewers own biases into their reviews, this “game” would have had middling reviews.
It seems like the “game” didn’t evoke any emotional response from you. If it doesn’t do that, well, then it really is just a big, not too-well rendered house with a few boring letters in it.
I think it is more. The things it does right that other games do wrong are plenty - for example each note or letter is unique, with real handwriting printed on a variety of materials, instead of generic paper and text. The little touches like that impressed me, aside from the story which I thought was very well told and revealed. The character you play makes sense - the fact you know as much as her (very little) about the house and the family situation, and the sense of discovery and care would mirror hers in such a situation. Also Katie’s thoughts when you hold the cursor over an item were a nice touch - it sure beats the “look at” verb we are used to in AGs.
Unlike most of you, I would have liked puzzles. They could have extended the game into a full-length experience, helped to break up the narrative and learn more about the family, as well as adding depth of interactivity and personality to the house itself. The ghost story was incomplete and could have provided the basis for a lengthy chain of puzzles.
Unlike most of you, I would have liked puzzles. They could have extended the game into a full-length experience, helped to break up the narrative and learn more about the family, as well as adding depth of interactivity and personality to the house itself.
They *could* have… or they could have made everything else feel less genuine. We don’t know. Steve Gaynor said this at GDC:
[If you add puzzles], now you’re in a place that isn’t like a place you’ve been before. [It’s still a house], but there are all these wacky puzzles, so there has to be a crazy guy who put all these puzzles in this house. It’s no longer just that the family lived in the house and I want to find out about that, it’s like, ‘Who’s the crazy genius professor?’ So it’s kind of a two way street, if you [the designer] decide to place yourself in a genre that’s about puzzle solving, or an RPG or an FPS with combat, that affects what kind of setting and what kind of fiction you have access to as a creator. We feel really fortunate to have the ability to explore a very specific fictional context that not a lot of games have really been able to address correctly because of the constraints of genre that they bring with them to the creation of the game.
I don’t disagree that there are other things they could have done with the ghost story, or the parents’ stories, or any number of other elements that, for reasons unknown to us, they chose not to explore. But I do get the sense that this team thought very carefully about what they were doing, what they wanted to do, where their strengths lie, what they could pull off well. Easy for players to say afterwards “they should have done X” but it’s entirely possible they discussed that and chose not to, and that the game is as good as it is because of that choice.
I do hope that Fullbright’s next game is more than just “explore this other setting to find out what happened to these other people who aren’t there.” It would be great to see them take the sort of gameplay they’ve established with Gone Home and expand on it. But I don’t want to see puzzles inserted just for the sake of puzzles… whatever that gameplay is would have to be organic and meaningful to the story.
Yes I can see that there are certain advantages to removing all challenge.
I don’t get the crazy professor example. Take Sam’s locker. She could have had a riddle to remind herself of the code, instead of the code being written on a piece of paper. That’s organic and meaningful. The ouija board we find could have been put to use in a challenging way, maybe to find out where our parents are or help the ghost find peace (cliched, I know). Or the map with the secret panels could have given clues instead of the outright locations, like Le Serpent Rouge in GK3. Those are just examples I came up with in 10 seconds, I’m sure I could have done better with months of preparation. I know that 7th Guest style puzzles would have ruined part of the experience.
Well, the answer was in response to me asking something like “was your ‘explore a spooky house game’ inspired by The 7th Guest?” so that’s why he brought up a crazy professor. 
But I think the point stands that if you’re going choose to focus on a certain type of gameplay, you need to go all in with a story and setting that supports that gameplay.
Your suggestions are interesting ones. Maybe it could work. But at the same time I think the game’s wonderful pacing is totally dependent on the fact that nothing stands in your way. As soon as you have to slow down and start figuring out riddles, there’s the potential to stop dead in your tracks, which would have been a turn-off for me.
(Or, have more puzzle-like bits that give you access to more of the story, but are totally optional. Like the two safe combinations that I didn’t find. I didn’t care that I didn’t find them, because it didn’t stop me from progressing, but someone who’s looking for more of a “figure stuff out” experience than me gets to choose to slow down and think about it until they get it. If there was more stuff like that that players like me could breeze past without feeling like we missed anything, but players looking for puzzles could grab onto, maybe that would satisfy both camps.)
Perhaps it’s not the product that’s at fault. Perhaps the word ‘game’ just isn’t good enough anymore.
Here we are with our silly notions of puzzles and multiplayer and kewl neat-o physics interactions. Along comes something like Gone Home, or Proteus, or Dear Esther, and they don’t want to participate in any of that nonsense; nonsense that we hold dear to our chests explicitly because it’s what games were when we were kids/younger. Oh, there is a time and a place for nonsense, but to fault a thing solely for a lack of nonsense is a sad pursuit. Deep in the back of our minds, all we want are toys; a thing to divert our boredom, or an interaction designed to placate an impulse or baseline skill. Nevermind the desire to graduate towards an emotional, perhaps even existential experience, one that heightens the senses and the intellect in a manner not possible through rote manipulation; the difference in feeling between completing a crossword puzzle and going for a walk in a place you’ve never been.
If Gone Home isn’t a game, all the better for it.
Your suggestions are interesting ones. Maybe it could work. But at the same time I think the game’s wonderful pacing is totally dependent on the fact that nothing stands in your way. As soon as you have to slow down and start figuring out riddles, there’s the potential to stop dead in your tracks, which would have been a turn-off for me.
Yes, pacing is the only thing I would be concerned about.
Perhaps it’s not the product that’s at fault. Perhaps the word ‘game’ just isn’t good enough anymore.
Here we are with our silly notions of puzzles and multiplayer and kewl neat-o physics interactions. Along comes something like Gone Home, or Proteus, or Dear Esther, and they don’t want to participate in any of that nonsense; nonsense that we hold dear to our chests explicitly because it’s what games were when we were kids/younger. Oh, there is a time and a place for nonsense, but to fault a thing solely for a lack of nonsense is a sad pursuit. Deep in the back of our minds, all we want are toys; a thing to divert our boredom, or an interaction designed to placate an impulse or baseline skill. Nevermind the desire to graduate towards an emotional, perhaps even existential experience, one that heightens the senses and the intellect in a manner not possible through rote manipulation; the difference in feeling between completing a crossword puzzle and going for a walk in a place you’ve never been.
If Gone Home isn’t a game, all the better for it.
Gone Home is definitely a game. I’m aware that some people distinguish between interactive experiences with puzzles and those without. But what’s the difference, really? Right from the start Gone Home poses a question: “what happened to your family?” It puts that question to you, and asks you to find an answer. That’s exactly what puzzles do. The whole game is a puzzle.
Humans are vain creatures. We get a boost from overcoming challenges, solving mysteries. Let’s not pretend Gone Home is any superior by removing puzzles. People have said the story in Gone Home isn’t that great, that it wouldn’t be anything special as a novel. It’s the fact I’m playing the role of a sister seeking answers that makes it special. The task the game sets before you is what helps you assume the sister’s role and care more about the family.
the difference in feeling between completing a crossword puzzle and going for a walk in a place you’ve never been.
I’d say all good games have a part of that second feeling, puzzles or not.
I feel like this is an interesting exercise in using the interactive medium to tell a story in a way that wouldn’t work otherwise. It places that as it’s top—and perhaps sole—priority, and I feel like that’s fine. Up to this point, designers have solved the problem of ludonarrative dissonance by writing stories around gameplay (or by simply not solving it at all) and Gone Home is a rare example of a developer solving it by doing only what best serves the story.
I think there is a place for that kind of experience, and I think we’ll see more of it. When VR like the Oculus Rift becomes more commonplace, I think people will appreciate immersion and realism and not feel as much of a need to be occupied by traditional game elements. If you really feel like you’re in another place, do you want to shoot it up? Do you want to labor over a puzzle? Or do you simply want to explore it and absorb it and feel like a part of it, without being constantly reminded you’re in a game.
Its not ridiculous, without the excellent voice actor reading the diary and the sisters lifestyle bringing reviewers own biases into their reviews, this “game” would have had middling reviews.
I kind of resent this. I think that detail worked well in that it establishes a few conflicts that might have been contrived to do another way (say race or class), but it’s hardly the basis for the game’s praise. It doesn’t break down any major barriers, it’s simply a realistic, heartfelt story. I’m a straight man with no particular experience that relates to that story or any kind of agenda and I just liked it because it was emotional and believable.
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