Disagreeing on Gone Home

Some people have a hard time living with the fact that some other people like a thing they do not.

Gone Home is a great example. Some people genuinely love the game. But that is unacceptable to those who do not. They try to find all kinds of things that would explain how the love for Gone Home was faked. It’s because the reviewers and fans support the game for ideological reasons, not for its quality. Or it’s because the sheep listened to the reviewers. Or it’s because people cannot understand what they really loved was the idea and not the game itself.

I am sure some of that is true …like it’s the case with every work of art in existence. But a lot of people simply loved the game exactly for what it was to them: an unforgettable experience.

I am one of them. I expressed why in my essay here.

I don’t think Gone Home is flawless. The story and the one note exploration mechanics got tiring near the end and I started to rush things. But despite this and a few other problems I still love the game deeply. Gone Home was released nearly two years ago, I played it only once, and I still remember more from it than I remember from certain games I finished last month.

GB ‘Doc’ Burford is a game critic with whom I broadcast on the same wavelength disturbingly often. It was a refreshing experience for me, then, to see his review of Gone Home (through his The Gonzologist account) in which he makes it clear he did not enjoy the game. The review ends with “Glad that’s over with.” — that is a pretty dead giveaway.

Personally, I don’t care too much if a reviewer likes or dislikes the game. I care if they can tell me something I didn’t think of, give me a unique perspective, surprise me. So I have precisely zero point zero issues with Doc disliking Gone Home, especially considering he explained why, and considering that most of these explanations made sense. I enjoyed reading the review a lot, and you should do the same: it’s one click away.

There is a couple of things, though, that I cannot agree with. To be honest, those feel like written by someone who — as the people I mentioned in the intro — is more focused on “proving” that no one should enjoy the game rather than figuring out why so many people liked it.

There’s calling the story “simplistic” as if it’s a problem. It’s not — there’s nothing particularly complex about the stories of Lost in Translation or The Shawshank Redemption and both are amazing movies. Let’s not confuse a simple story with nuanced story-telling.

There’s calling the elements of the story “cliché” as if it’s a problem. It’s not — there’s nothing particularly original about the stories of Godfather or Heat and both are amazing movies. Let’s not confuse clichés with nuanced execution.

And then there’s having an issue with teenagers acting stupid out of love (it’d be more unrealistic if they didn’t) or limiting the role of the player/protagonist to that of a hero (Great Gatsby disagrees). But the one issue I want to talk about here is actually a tiny little thing on audio diaries…

Is voiceover supposed to be a good alternative for audio logs? The big complaint about audio logs is the question “who would possibly record their innermost thoughts and then just leave them lying around for others to hear?” While this is true, I think hearing someone else transmit their thoughts into your head is equally bizarre.

Actually, I think that Fullbright did a great version of the “findable diaries” feature, they came up with one of the best solutions I have ever seen. The fact that they still failed to make the feature immortal has not much to do with the execution, and all to do with the feature’s inherent faults.

A findable journal can be either something entirely written (pages in Gears of War 2), or fully audio (tapes from Batman: Arkham Asylum), or a mix of both (Gone Home). Each solution has issues.

a) Written text only. Often badly written and thus boring, often way too long. Both things are solvable with a writer who understands both writing and video games. What is harder to solve is the problem of emotional indifference towards the written word from someone we do not really know well. And if we do know that person well, then we’re probably near the end of the game already and that’s when we don’t need the findables anymore.

That can also be solved with an amazing writer — yes, you truly need someone special for that — which makes me believe that short, well written diaries are the best kinds of findable diaries.

Not a perfect feature, but good enough to use it in some cases. If you need something highly emotional, either hire the best writers, or sell the emotion in a different way.

b) Audio only. Here’s one definition of torture: being able to move around and play but not doing it in order to listen to the end of a video game audio diary. And moving around in the game — with all the needs for spatial orientation, looking out for dangers, analyzing visual and audio clues, etc. — makes it nearly impossible to both play and truly deeply digest the audio diary. So it’s either moving around and nearly ignoring the diary, or standing in place and listening to the diary while praying for it all to be over asap.

The plus of this feature is better emotional connection. Remember the phone call in the first episode of Telltale’s The Walking Dead? It was touching and disturbing and the fact we actually heard a human voice helped greatly.

But even when the writing and acting are top of the world excellence, most of the time we’d still rather be playing. Also, audio diaries are usually unrealistic, but to be fair the same can be said about the text only diaries (“Dear diary, monsters are attacking and I thought I’d share my thoughts on that. And then I will leave one page at every non-combat area for random strangers to enjoy.”)

c) A mix of text and audio. If we found a diary page in Gone Home and all we got would be a text to read, the emotional hit would be much weaker compared to what happens when we actually listen to Samantha’s voice. Transitioning from written text (the player unable to move, weaker emotional impact, lot to read) to audio (able to move, stronger emotional impact) was the right solution for Gone Home, one without any ludo-narrative dissonance (it’s no surprise the protagonist knows her sister’s voice, even if the player does not — but, for what it’s worth, that lack of recognition lasts only a few seconds anyway).

But the problem of “either play or listen to audio, cannot really have both” still remains and that when, in my opinion, Gone Home fails. Not because they did anything wrong with the feature, it’s just that the feature itself is quite possibly impossible to do right — even if the execution is state of the art.

It probably does not need to be said, but just in case… You know what is worse than a diary page full of text that is also read out loud by a game character? Not many things.

Our reading speed is much faster than the speed with which the character reads the text out loud, and that dissonance makes the entire experience a mess. Which is why I love that Gone Home’s diary pages begin with the text but then the text disappears and is morphed into audio that emphasizes the intimate connection between the sisters, and we get invited to be a part of it.

To sum it up, I think that what Gone Home pulled — the quietly welcomed voyeurism of experiencing two people’s intimate connection — is not “equally bizarre” as semi-randomly dropped standard audio diaries, one of the cheapest and worst ways to sell lore or emotions. On the contrary, I think it was a great example of how to make the best out of the findable diary’s inherent flaws.

Anyway, while I may disagree with good old Doc on a couple of issues, I still recommend heading to his Gone Home review now, if you have not done so already. It features excellent observations like…

People talk about Call of Duty as a power fantasy, but Gone Home feels more like a power fantasy than Call of Duty ever did. It’s a power fantasy for misguided teens who think they know anything about the world when they’ve barely seen a fraction of it.

…which is probably the best observation on Gone Home ever.

UPDATE: Doc wrote a reply, and I want to talk about one thing here (hopefully this is the only update before this becomes another The Manuscript Found in Saragossa).

Doc says:

If you’ve made a game that’s about unlocking a story that happened in another time and place, and what players do within it doesn’t really matter, then I have to wonder why you choose to make a video game at all when you could have written a movie or a book or something.

I get it. Games shine when they tell stories in a language exclusive to video games. That is very important to me:

In short, what it means is for a game to have most of the gameplay indistinguishable from most of the story, to merge both into one thing, and to allow only for rare exceptions.

If there is any story to tell, the 100% purity of the story/gameplay merge is never possible. The players will always sooner or later be forced to listen to the story the designers had in mind, even if the story had quite a few branches. But it’s still possible to maintain a great illusion of freedom: be it The Wolf Among Us, Far Cry 4 or GTA 5.

Now, is there any value in a game that tells a “there is only one” story through a very limited palette of player expressions? The almost-doppelganger of the 100% gameplay/story merge?

I believe there is. For example, I found at least nine things unique to video games, and one of them is Sense of Presence. It’s much stronger in video games than in books or movies. Why not use this to tell a story?

It’s not a new concept. Why make a movie out of a book that already exists? Well, because movies have certain things on offer than books do not (and vice versa, of course). But would we say that only those books were great that were unfilmable, and only those movies were great that could not be turned into a book? Of course not.

Same with video games.

And actually Gone Home does pretty well in the game language department. Imagine the game as a movie: I would probably die of boredom watching a girl sweep rooms of an old house for two hours. A book would be a little better but it’d not be offering me any choices, even if that choice was which room to examine first.

And yet as a video game — very tight, very disciplined, very bare minimum — Gone Home was engaging to me. I felt like an intruder who had the right to be there, like a voyeur who was forced to become one. I, not the protagonist. It’s not something I can experience in other mediums (at least not consistently enough or on comparable levels).

If […] what players do within [the game] doesn’t really matter

Everything I did in Gone Home mattered to me. I did not shape the world of the game in a way that was visible on the screen. But I did shape that world in my head, with every piece of information found, with every piece of connection made. And I did that (Engagement) being there both physically (Presence) and mentally (Immersion) — and only one of these things is consistently strong in good books and movies.