Gone Home (

2013

)

A young woman named Kaitlin arrives at her parents home unannounced in the middle of a storm, only to find the house deserted. There's no trace of her parents, or of her sister Sam and it's clear that the house has been ransacked. There's also a few disquieting messages left on the answering machine, a stranger's voice desperately calling out Sam's name. As Kaitlin progresses deeper into the house she begins to find clues not just about her vanished family, but about what has been going on in their lives in her absence. Now that sounds like a pretty good set up to a horror game, and indeed very sensitive individuals may even be creeped out exploring some of the house's hidden corridors as the lights flicker and the storm rages outside. Indeed, the first 20 minutes of Gone Home feels like an unusually cozy, but nonetheless scary game; one that recreates the feeling of walking through your own home late at night. Don't be fooled though, Gone Home is pulling a fast one on you, this is actually a love story, not a horror story. The main narrative quickly shifts focus from Kaitlin's investigation into what happened to her family and begins to revolve around Sam's friendship and burgeoning romance with a girl named Lonnie. This bait-and-switch plot-line probably pissed off a few gamers who were looking for a spooky story, but I found myself more amenable to the twist. Despite watching roughly 100 horror movies a year, I'm secretly a big softy that is regularly reduced to tears by love stories. Too bad that Gone Home fails completely as a love story.

Part of the problem is the lovers themselves. Sam is a boring, perfect protagonist, the sort that used to only exist in the unpublished stories of teenage girls, but who has been showing up with greater and greater frequency in mainstream fiction. She listens to cool indie/punk bands exclusively. She writes fiction, but its all very cool and flattering stories, not the abysmal dreck that most of us fledgling writers churned out by the notebook. She has no shortcomings, no insecurities, and no real conflict in her romance with Lonnie. It leaves you wondering what the hell this girl is so angsty about. Sure, her parents faintly disapprove (thinking it's just a phase, but not disowning her or sending her to a conversion camp) but that can hardly be said to be a personal shortcoming. That Sam comes across as a credible character at all, is solely due to the superb voice-work done by Sarah Grayson. Lonnie is even less well defined than her counterpart, being a generic punk girl who is also, for some reason, an enthusiastic member of the ROTC. The game tries to hand-wave away her contradictions by saying “Lonnie doesn't even get Lonnie” but paradoxically this only calls more attention to the flawed writing. Indeed, the only reason that Lonnie is in the ROTC because the game needs a reason to have her and Sam split up at the end, and the creators were unwilling to make it an external influence (like disapproving parents for instance) for fear of being cliché. That's got to be a first in the history of the world, where someone wrote a love story and had one of the lovers leav suddenly to join their regiment in order to prevent the story from being too cliché! The story would have worked better with one punk girl and one straight arrow ROTC girl. Not only would the characters make sense, but they would have distinct personalities from one another, something which Sam and Lonnie struggle with, as they are both currently generic "cool girls". Hell, they might even have some internal conflict in their relationship. I'm fine with a game chucking out all of its gameplay in order to tell me a specific story (why else would I play visual novels), but if you're going to do that then expect to be held to a higher standard when it comes to crafting a story and characters who populate it.

After listening to most of the game's commentary tracks I'm prepared to lay all the blame at the feet of designer Steve Gaynor, who was responsible for most of the writing in Gone Home. In one commentary track, he confesses to feeling unsure of his ability to write a female, teenage, lesbian as an adult straight man. Fair enough, fledgling writers are often unduly worried about writing characters that are unlike themselves, at least until they learn to approach their subjects as human beings and not a list of superficial traits. However, it seems that Gaynor has overcompensated a bit by making his teenage, lesbian characters infallible and obnoxiously twee, lest he offends anyone's lived experience. This is the danger of the whole “only punch up” doctrine currently in vogue among creatives and academics; it severely limits the kinds of characters and stories that can be told about protected classes, particularly when non-protected classes are writing them. Lesbian romances are not that different from any other kind of romances; they can be sweet, bitter, cheerful, fucked-up, and even abusive. Gaynor doesn't feel comfortable making any conflict between Sam and Lonnie, lest it be interpreted by oversensitive viewers as a criticism of all lesbians everywhere. This would be bad enough, but it reaches a fever pitch of absurdity when the game ends and Sam and Lonnie run away together. Two seventeen-year-old girls, who have been dating for less than a year, having just finished high school and with no visible means of supporting themselves (once all the swag they've stolen from Sam's house runs out anyway). Best case scenario: a lifetime of grinding poverty; worst case: Sam and Lonnie will be drug-addicted sex workers by the end of the year. The fact that the game tries to pass this off as a positive development, with the sweet swelling music is just downright insulting.

The gameplay is easy enough to sum up, as there is none; just walk around and occasionally examine an object (you can pick it up and spin it around like you're in an early 3D game that expects you to be absolutely floored by this radical new technology). Occasionally there will be a locked safe that you'll need the correct code to open. However, instead of there being actual puzzles to solve, you will just need to find the code written somewhere and plug it into the correct place. This is especially egregious at the start of the game when you are trying to open your father's locked file cabinet. Here would be a great chance to reward players for closely observing the father's office, as his to novels are about a time traveler foiling the Kennedy assassination. So the logical choice for password would be either 1963 or 1122; instead, they just have the passcode written on a folder in the next room 0451, which is just a lame reference to Deus Ex [2000]. What a missed opportunity.

I should note that the game is very short, my playtime reflects the fact that I listened to every diary recording, handled every object, frequently paused the game to take notes, and played all the audio commentary files. There were times where I was just pacing back and forth in a room, tossing random brick-a-brack into a trash-bin or cardboard box while I was waiting for the developers' commentary track to end. A normal person playing this game will probably finish it in about an hour. Great if you want to improve the finished:backlog ratio in your steam library, not so great if you're looking for bang for your buck.

Few games have gotten as complete a tongue bath from professional reviewers as Gone Home. In the case of mainstream publications, this is probably just because the reviewer has never actually played a video game before (the New York Times reviewer claims it took him 3 hours to finish the game, something which could only be possible if he spent the first 30 minutes figuring out that WASD was the movement controls). However such excuses do not cover everything, like the journalist at NPR who claims to have played games for 25 years and praises Gone Home for its three, well-rounded female characters: Kaitlin, Sam, and Lonnie. As I've mentioned above, Lonnie makes no damn sense as a character and Sam is a cliché that reads more like a bad self-insert authorial avatar than a real human being. At least those two are open to debate, his inclusion of Kaitlin on the list that really makes me wonder because Kaitlin has no personality whatsoever. Likewise, when Giantbomb (a site which should know better) praises Gone Home for not “hitting us over the head with big plot twists and character moments” I have to stop and wonder if they've actually played the game. The environmental storytelling in Gone Home is not ambiguous or even subtle. We know that Terry is a failed novelist who drinks too much and is haunted by the criticism his father gave him when his first book was published, there is no room for interpretation. Likewise, we know that Jan is bored in her marriage (possibly because she is now the principal breadwinner) and contemplating an affair with a dashing young co-worker. The fact that all these secrets are so openly displayed only makes them more absurd. In the case of Sam and Lonnie, the game developers are absolutely terrified that the player will miss out on any detail of their twee romance, so they regularly stick extra-diegetic voice-over tracks into the game that explain their courtship. This absolutely kills the possibility for individual interpretation of the story, which was simple and cliched enough that we probably would have been able to guess all the plot points from the word go. Leaving out the tracts would at least give the player a chance to interpret the clues for himself, and playing the audio at the end would give him a chance to compare notes and see what he got right and what he missed. Compare this to the environmental storytelling in Dark Souls [2011] which is so intricate and ambiguous that a whole class of veritable bards makes their living spinning tales from the clues left behind in the game's item descriptions and environments. So not only is Gone Home's brand of environmental storytelling not particularly original (indeed it's at least as old as Portal [2007]) it's not even as impressive as the work done in a JRPG from two years earlier. This is the work that critics lauded as revolutionary?

I suspect that praising the game's environmental storytelling is something of a mask, most reviewers really liked it because they felt a nostalgic connection to the characters and setting of the Pacific Northwest. Far be it from me to forbid critics to rely on their subjective experience to evaluate a work of art, as a quick perusal of reviews will reveal plenty of examples in which I do the same thing. Indeed, the best reviews are subjective, but if you're going to do that you need to be honest about it. Don't heap undeserved praise on the mechanics if it's really the atmosphere that captivated you. As for me, I came of age in the early 2000s, was a goody two shoes who always did what his parents wanted, and prefer heavy metal to punk; so I don't have much of a subjective connection with Sam or Lonnie. I suspect that is why I had such a different reaction to the story, and why I am less blind to its obvious faults than some of my peers. Though, I suspect that the praise is also motivated by the fact that the game revolves around a gay romance. Identity politics, one of the more absurd doctrines of the modern age, holds that the mere act of representation is of vital importance. It doesn't matter if the characters are well-written or if the story is interesting, only that it depicts the protected classes in a flattering manner. Obviously, there is nothing wrong with being gay, or having gay characters in your fictional work, but it is absurd to suggest, as some critic do, that the mere act of having homosexual characters somehow improves the work. If the characters are boring, flat, immersion breaking, or absurd they're bad characters, and their sexual preferences don't really enter into it.

Gone Home, when taken on its own merits can be safely denounced as a failed experiment; a couple of good ideas with a poor implementation. Strip out the audio diaries, tighten up the characters a bit, add in a few actual puzzles and you would potentially have an interesting little game on your hands. Something that could be challenging not only in the usual game-play mechanics sense but challenging as a story. It would still be nowhere near as original as the press suggested it was, but it would be nonetheless interesting. However, Gone Home's significance in the recent history of the medium is important for reasons outside of the game itself. As I mentioned above, when this game was released it was greeted by waves of critical euphoria that bordered on absurd. Gamers were already beginning to suspect that the corps of professional reviewers had incompatible views on the medium from them, based on the rave reviews given to excretable Dragon Age II [2011] and the open apology for Mass Effect 3 [2012] atrocious ending. However, when AAA publisher Electronic Arts releases got special treatment by the press, it was assumed that this was merely for financial reasons, IE if the journalists wanted a cut of the ad revenue then they had best play ball with the big boys. Corruption was at least a motivation that gamers could understand (I know I would be tempted if EA offered me a $1000 for a good review of their latest FIFA game), if not necessarily approve of. But the rave reviews of Gone Home suggested a more fundamental split between the game reviewers and their audience. Their rampant praise for what amounted to a sub-par visual novel suggested that video game reviewers were not especially interested in reviewing games, full stop.

It makes a degree of sense, game journalists have long looked with envious eyes at their peers in film criticism, who only have to sit down for an hour and a half and passively absorb their content before writing about it. Video games actually require some skill and effort to complete. It's no secret that games journalists are rubbish at video games, we see it whenever they are careless enough to release footage of themselves playing the games. It makes sense that they would love walking simulators which are impossible to fail at, and short games that could be completed in a single sitting; as these things make it easier for them to do their jobs. But people reading their reviews have a whole different set of criteria for what they value in a video game, many are seeking challenge and most are looking for value (if you can only buy 1-3 games a year you don't want any of them to be over in 2 hours). In 2013 when Gone Home was released, many people still thought that review sites were trustworthy, and when they saw the veritable blizzard of perfect scores they quickly scooped up the game, only to find they'd purchased a lemon. Tellingly, Fulbright's followup to Gone Home, Tacoma [2017] sold a fifth as much as Gone Home; apparently, there were a lot of unsatisfied customers. The attempt by the press to wave away any criticism of the game as homophobia only further incensed the audience; we hate boring non-games, not homosexuals. The whole affair primed gamers to look at professional games journalists with suspicion and loathing. It was hardly the only warning sign on the road to gamergate, but Gone Home and the press' reaction to it were a significant development nonetheless. It was the first time that gamers realized how far they had drifted from the hobby's media, and how different their views had become.