Objects and the Representation of Schema in Gone Home

by Marc Chen

Growing up, my parents never allowed me to have video games. There are many reasons I’m grateful for this and one of those reasons is that it just made me play all the video games I could get without their consent. This meant I was limited to only the games I could download and run on my modest Lenovo laptop. Triple-A games with high-powered graphics were never a possibility and so I instead lost myself in the worlds of games like Bastion, Braid, Swords & Sorcery, Portal, Papers Please and so on. Basically just indie stuff. Initially drawn to these games just because they were all I could run on my computer, I became fascinated in the proud artistry and innovative game mechanics of these games that only small independent studios could produce.

Fast-forward to winter break of my freshman year in college and I discovered a strange-looking game called Gone Home on Polygon:

“Gone Home is a master class on how to tell a personal, affecting story in a video game.”

-Polygon

Wow. I hope my computer can run this…

“There is no combat — or other mechanics aside from exploration and environmental manipulation.”

…and sounds like we’re in business.

In fact, there are no changing environments, moving characters, or special effects at all in this game. In essence, the whole game is a static environment with static objects scattered throughout. It’s perfect for running on a low-power laptop and as it turns out, it’s also perfect for telling this beautiful and complex story. It’s a story of a family gone missing and all the events that led up to that current circumstance. The player tries to make sense of it by sifting through all the many documents and objects in a house. Even if the game’s environments and objects are static, the stories contained within them are very much alive. To explore how the game creates this sort of story telling, we will begin by talking about schema.

schema

plural schemata • \sk-mə-tə\ also schemas

1. a diagrammatic presentation; broadly : a structured framework or plan :

2. a mental codification of experience that includes a particular organized way of perceiving cognitively and responding to a complex situation or set of stimuli

This wonky term is used a lot by developmental psychologists when they’re trying to make sense of the vastness and unpredictability of the human mind. Different people have slightly different definitions of the term but for our purposes, the important thing about a schema is that it refers to a single unit of thought, experience, or emotion in the larger superstructure of a person’s mind. By thinking about the mind in terms of schema, we can build a rough model of the mind and in the case of Gone Home, that model can be a virtually physical representation. Each object in Gone Home is representative of a schema held by one or multiple characters in the story.

Here’s an example. When exploring the room belonging to Sam, the younger sister of the family, you discover a bottle of red hair dye. One of the Sam’s audio journals is triggered to play at this point:

“Dyeing hair is weirdly intimate.” says Sam. “I’ve never touched someone’s scalp before.” The game places you in the very location where the events and emotions described in the journal happened. The hair dye itself becomes both the physical evidence of those events and the vessel through which the player encounters this part of the story. “I waited and the moment was gone.” The significance of this dawns on you: a tender moment in the girls’ blossoming relationship and you’re there to witness it. Almost. By interacting with the bottle of dye, you can touch the experience and schema that it represents.

There are also many documents in the game. Letters, books, notes, manuscripts, receipts, cassette tapes, concert tickets, and many other forms of written language inhabit the game and are rich in not only their content, but also form and context. Take for example this note:

There are so many attributes to this document that make it so much more than the text itself. Two colors of ink on a piece of paper ripped out of a spiral notebook indicate two speakers who are writing to each other because they’re in class. The text itself raises a lot of questions. That Sam is having difficulty adjusting to her new surroundings and feels isolated is clear. What raises questions is the dark family history the antagonizer is referring to. And then you can read the physical expression of Sam’s reaction: The note has been ripped and then crumpled. Must have hit a nerve.

This was just two artifacts out of the hundreds that exist in this game. (I keep calling it game but really I have no idea what I should be calling it.) The artifacts each tell their part of the story in a different way and relate to each other to create a rich network of interconnected schema that together, form a picture of the souls that once inhabited this old house. There are so many beautiful ways that these connections happen: one is pairing the objects with the audio journals as we just saw and another is juxtaposition to contrast and highlight the differences between the characters.

In this part of the game, you’re likely to discover either dad’s hidden stash of magazines or one of mom’s escapist romance novels. These artifacts suggesting a joyless marriage are placed exactly in the places you’re likely to find them while listening to the above audio clip, where Sam is explaining her passion and excitement about the person she is with.

As I’m typing, I’m almost frustrated that I can’t capture the full effect that these pairings, juxtapositions, and other connections have. But I suppose it’s just as well because it’s something meant to be experienced for one’s self and not just to read about or watch in a let’s-play.

If you’ve played the game, you could probably be shown any two artifacts from the game and then think of a way that they’re related and contribute to the overarching story. There is a deep intertextuality between everything. Fully detailing this here would take way too long and to be honest, is probably impossible because this is a story created using this brilliant network of detailed artifacts. It simply cannot be re-mediated as text. However, just one of the techniques used in Gone Home to establish connections between artifacts is its web of keys, codes, and locked containers.

There is an inherent meaning strongly implied if a particular artifact (read: schema) is locked up. The placement of artifacts or other locked device holds powerful meaning and we will discuss the parallelism between locked up objects and locked up thoughts in the next section. For now, let us notice that an artifact that holds the key to a safe establishes the connection between that artifact and contents of the safe. This is further enhanced by the association of the setting of the safe and setting of where the key was found. These connections can mean that a character had been in both physical spaces or was thinking about the locked up contents while handling another object.

Each of these objects take up space in the house, often referred to as “the psycho house” by characters in the story. Just as schema do not exist independently, but as part of a larger neural and mental network that creates consciousness and soul, these objects do not exist independently either. They exist in the context of the psycho house and all of its associations. Together, these hundreds of objects and their environments coalesce into a unified network of ideas, thoughts, pieces of character and narrative development, and quirky details. On a technical level, the game is just a static environment filled with static objects. Nothing moves. With the introduction of the player into this virtual space; however, the objects are brought to life as the player is left to unravel this network of related objects and contexts.

Part 2: The Parallel Spatial Structure and the Context of Emotion.