Our Highest Rec: Gone Home Transcends the Video Game Medium
Our Highest Rec is when the staff proposes something they find underappreciated, undervalued, or underrated. It's an excuse for us to push our opinions on you.
It’s really easy to sound overblown when talking about a great videogame. To say that a game was “powerful” or “engrossing” or—heaven forbid—“profound” gives the impression that we’re trying to make the form something it’s not. Videogames when we’re young are for sleepovers and after-school Fridays, and when we’re older they’re for too-small house parties and over-planned drinking games. To describe a videogame as impactful in any way comes with the admission that it was played with the intention of having an individual, personal experience, and that feels like a dangerous thing to admit.
Right now a large conversation surrounding videogames meets at the congested cross-streets of What Games Are For and Why We Play Them. If games are for multiple players, they should be dynamic and exciting and fast-paced and addictive—rotate people in, create competition, move things along. If games are for individuals, they might be more ponderous, more scenic, quieter. Each perspective scoffs at the other, and if you stand outside the videogame bubble, the community itself becomes as unappealing as the table on the far side of the lunch room—you wouldn’t interact with those people for all the Gogurt and Lunchables in the world.
Videogames thus operate in a world excluded from the mainstream, so when a game breaks out of that niche—Pokemon, Guitar Hero, FIFA—it feels surprising and fresh because those games don’t feel directed toward the stigmatized community of ‘gamers.’ You don’t have to be a gamer to enjoy them or be good at them. You wouldn’t even call yourself a gamer if you did enjoy them or were good at them. You just sort of have this thing you’re into, and that’s cool—there’s no harm in just being into things.
It’s in front of this curious backdrop that Gone Home resides. Gone Home is a computer game from 2013, developed by a company called Fullbright. It wasn’t very popular, and if you scan some screenshots nothing special is going to jump out at you. The premise is simple: You play a young woman who returns home from her study abroad program to find her family missing and her house empty. No explosions or monsters. No worlds to save. Just you and your house. It’s one of the most brilliant concepts imaginable. Brilliant for its simplicity.
People who are paid to write about videogames often distinguish the medium for its unique component of direct consumer interaction. When you play through these narratives, the only thing that compels the action forward is you. You can’t see things you don’t choose to see—youhave to run through the levels or kill these certain bad guys or go left instead of right. To the possible detriment of the medium, most materialization of this dynamic results in something akin to those laser-fire amusement park games: There’s one path through an area and monsters appear in predetermined spots and you point your weapon at them and you blast away until they disappear and your point total increases. That’s probably most people’s impression of videogames. Literally mindless.
Yet, the beauty of Gone Home lies in its ability to take the intrinsic autonomy of the player and wrap it into the experience. Walking into an empty house—real or virtual—feels off-putting. If we expect someone to be there and they’re not, we’re suddenly alert and analytical. The familiarities of our home lose their comforts and become, if not hostile, at the very least secretive and conspiratorial. It’s the classic instance of not knowing something that’s frightening. As soon as we see the note on the counter or the voicemail on our phones—relief and restoration, or on the flipside, greater foreboding.
To hint at any of Gone Home’s mysteries is a betrayal to the experience, but the elevator pitch looks something like this: Gone Home is not a blockbuster. It doesn’t try to wow you. All you can do is walk around and pick things up and look at them, but for two to three hours, as you explore this house and uncover the secrets of the family—your family—this videogame achieves a depth of emotion that would be the envy of most movies and television shows. The characters are complicated and surprising. The setting feels textured and tangible. The revelations are (here it comes) simply profound. And your involvement—your insistence on going to the next room, your courage in choosing to look under the bed or turn on the light in the closet—matters so much to that feeling. Gone Home is not just a great videogame. It’s great because it’s a videogame. There’s little else like it.
When people talk about videogames that “anyone can play,” they usually speak to something party-focused: Easy to pick up and laugh over and put down. Those games are important and fun, no doubt. But to say Gone Home is a game anyone can play is to say that anyone can have a deeper connection with it, and that speaks to the believability of its characters and the poignancy of its story. This is an artifact that reimagines what a videogame can be; it reimagines What Games Are For and Why We Play Them. It’s a type of storytelling that feels innovative and fresh, but also rooted and natural. This sort of thing is essential. An essential experience, no matter what side of the lunch room we’re sitting on.