Here are some disorganized thoughts about the game Gone Home, by The Fullbright Company, which was released recently.
Please don’t read this if you haven’t played the game. It’s a great game, it’s not expensive, and you can beat it in about three hours. And you should.
Spoilers follow.
1. There’s a certain group of objects that caused some major emotional moments for me, though it’s easy to miss them.
When I first bust through the front door all gung-ho and ready to play this exciting new videogame, I beelined to the right – where my progress was abruptly stopped by a locked door. Nearby, on the bookshelf, were a set of trophies. I checked them out. I can’t remember what they said, but they were mine (Katie’s). At this point, I knew nothing about my parents and nothing about my sister. I thought: cool! I guess I’m a cool kid! Made my parents proud! Yeah! (I myself never won trophies as a teen and didn’t start making my parents proud until I graduated from college, so this was a novel feeling.)

I didn’t see them again until I re-emerged into the foyer, bleary-eyed, having just completed a circuit through dad’s wing of the house, my heart heavy with what I was starting to piece together. I now knew who Sam was and (partially) what she had been going through while I was gone.
When I saw the trophies again, I felt a wave of guilt. I imagined my mother unpacking them lovingly, polishing them on the shelf, remembering her oldest daughter fondly, casting a worried glance at her youngest. I imagined my sister seeing them every day as she made her way to the dining room, feeling insecure, feeling inadequate. I hated myself for being an overachiever and then bolting for Europe when my sister most needed my support. I felt that Sam’s tribulations had been compounded by the fact that I, with the best intentions, had set a normative standard (to which my parents now held her).
The last time I saw the trophies was when I emerged from the dining wing, having unlocked the door from the inside. By that point I was sick to my stomach. I’d been in Sam’s room, I’d been in the basement, I’d seen the zines. I had seen the zines in boxes, half-assembled, and I had seen one lying on the dining room table next to a gross admonitory note from the school. I wanted to grab my parents by the shoulders and shake them and yell at them and tell them that they shouldn’t be proud of me, the princess, the nice normal kid, they should be proud of Sam – boundlessly creative and amazingly compassionate Sam, writing stories, sewing costumes, printing zines, so brave and so beautiful, and why didn’t my parents understand that? Her zines should be on the shelf along with my trophies.
I like the trophies as an object because they sort of skilfully convey the concept of blind privilege – that the negative connotations of a certain symbol simply don’t occur to the people in power, the people who meet (and set) the standard. I, as an all-star older sister, found nothing problematic about my trophies until I’d dug deep into all the wretched bullshit going on in this house.
And all this happened while forming a weird mix of revulsion and sympathy for my parents, who were in the wrong in so many ways, but also suffering.
2. I like that the distribution of certain objects formed an arc to the stories of the parents. Early on in the game, dad’s situation seemed really dire, positively desperate, and mom’s as well. It’s not until you get to that right wing of the first floor that you realize: both stories end with a kind of redemption. Dad is writing a new book, his old books have cool new covers (drawn by Zach!), and mom’s crush got married to someone else (not redemption I guess, but at least closure). The two are off at counseling and are (supposedly) going to come clean with one another for once.
Normally, narrative progressions like this take place in real time – you complete a stage, you get a cutscene, you talk to an NPC, things happen and you’re right there along with them. Here, everything has already happened, and the release of information has to be controlled by distributing it in physical space. But it doesn’t feel contrived at all – it’s not progressing linearly through a series of rooms, it’s winding and chaotic, you go forward and backward in time, you gain context, old scraps have new meaning. You circle the past until it makes sense. Then you circle again and you find you were wrong. It was an incredible feeling.
3. The thing that made me most angry at my father was that he was so enmired in his own literary struggles that he never seemed to notice that his youngest daughter was a burgeoning writer as well.
4. In 1995, I was 7, and a little too young for a lot of the references to really hit home. Some other people have written more eloquently about the nineties setting and how it made them feel. I assume that the developers were 15-20 in 1995, and they wanted to target the people most likely to play it (folks in their late twenties). But there’s a bit more to it than that.
The nineties are a good era for a queer coming-of-age story. There’s just enough change in the wind to offer a way out, but not enough cultural acceptance to make it a smooth road. I get the impression that queer teens today have it a bit easier, as far as getting informed and finding support. Imagine Sam’s story today, with tumblr and It Gets Better and the repeal of DADT… obviously it’s still difficult and queer teens today face tons of abuse and alienation, but it was even harder back then.
When I was a teen, the only queer touchstones I had were Revolutionary Girl Utena and Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (which I found on a random bottom shelf of my mom’s study – she’s a literature professor). I remember Queer Eye for the Straight Guy hit when I was in 10th grade, and (as problematic as it is) it gave my gay male friends so much more confidence and bravery, and some of them even came out to their parents…
Anyway, all this is to say that while adults don’t necessarily need to see themselves in popular media in order to form their identities, teens often need a way in – a reassurance from the outside world that it’s okay to be the way they are. Even if it’s not a perfect mirror for their identity – just some sort of blanket encouragement to get them out the door. Teens can’t find obscure, specific communities the way adults can, because they don’t even know what they’re looking for yet. Progress in the mainstream makes a difference.
5. I just about lost my shit when I uncovered Sam’s sci-fi/fantasy story where the first mate transformed from male to female. This section is not going to be very articulate, sorry.
I thought of Sam, uncomfortably dealing with her childhood friend (the boy with the Nintendo), who clearly had feelings for her. I imagined her knowing something was off, not sure whether she needed to change or the world did. I remembered fifth grade, when it seemed like some virus had broken out, and suddenly all my friends were loudly and self-consciously talking about how cute the Hansons were. I tried to engage. I studied men devoutly. I parroted everything back. I began to form the crust of prickly resentment that I still sort of have to this day – the feeling that your desires are complicated, way more complicated than anyone wants to bother dealing with. More complicated than a demographic, more complicated than joining SAGA, more complicated than “it’s complicated” on Facebook, more complicated than you can explain in words to your partner. You fluctuate back and forth between hating everyone else and hating yourself, lashing out to change the shape of the world or wounding yourself to change the shape of your identity, but nothing ever lines up.
In Sam’s story it’s like a prism rotates in the light and suddenly everything makes sense. A simple adjustment and you’re whole, everything is all right, the conflict evaporates and your girlfriend is smiling at you.
6. In the last quarter of the game, I was nervously wondering what the ending would be. I had a few ideas.

The first idea was that the girls had summoned Satan in the basement and he’d murdered everyone in the house and I would find their disembodied limbs in the attic. I didn’t really think this would be the ending. It was more like “I bet that would be the ending if this were a shitty game and not an amazing one.”
The second idea was that the girls had formed a suicide pact because they couldn’t be together. It’s a super grimdark idea that perhaps occured to me because videogames so often go for the jugular in this way. As if the best way to elicit strong emotions is to simply do the worst possible thing to the best possible characters.
With grit teeth, I was praying that this would not happen. I was tearing through the house, ransacking everything, muttering to myself – they couldn’t. They couldn’t. They couldn’t do that. They wouldn’t, would they? “They” in this case refers both to the girls and to the developers.
I like that this is left open as a possibility right up until the very end. I like it because it’s exactly what Katie would think in that situation. And I like that the incredibly relieving ending, though it went against my expectations, involved no twist or reveal. When thinking back on the game, everything seems honest. There was no misdirection.
The fear of “the worst possible end” comes about because you (as a player and as Katie) stumble into this situation with very little context. And it happens to be night and it happens to be raining. All the forces are aligned to breed a horrifying situation. But at the end, when all the cards are on the table, you realize that you worked yourself into a frenzy for nothing. The rain was just rain, the night was just night. This isn’t a horror movie, it’s just an incidentally spooky house. You realize that even though you were berating yourself the whole time for being a horrible sister, for not being around to protect and support Sam, it turns out that she trusted you the whole time, and she’s not helpless. She’s strong and courageous. And she saved herself better than anyone else in the family could have done.
7. More than anything, the end of the game left me wanting to have had an older sister. I’m an only child, and I was reclusive by nature, and certain circumstances of my childhood and family life made me very, very isolated, to the degree that I’m still trying to shake my introversion today. So much of my angst about being queer would have been alleviated if a trusted slightly older girl had just said, “You’re okay.”
What I specifically wanted was to have had (when I was Sam’s age) an older sister who would be as compassionate towards me as I (as Katie) was towards Sam while playing Gone Home. Which is a strange Moebius-strip-like situation to find myself in – because once everything parses, what I’m left wanting is myself – or rather, the knowledge of my current 25-year-old self, but when I was 15. The perspective, the (comparative) level-headedness, the reassurance that the world is not as fucked up and ruthless as it appears from the hermetic dramatic world of adolescence, that there are good people and supportive communities and things get better.

8. I like that the title, like various objects in the story, takes on new meaning from the other side:
On the surface, Katie is going home (even though it’s her home in name only – she’s never been there before).
The player is going home if they’re the right age to identify with the nineties nostalgia, and even if they’re not, the narrative reminds the player what it was like to be a teenager – to have a home. I’m in my mid-twenties and have lived in seven different apartments since “leaving home,” so the concept of “home” to me still evokes that seemingly permanent house where my mom lives (and all the emotional baggage that goes along with it). Adolescence seems so stupid once you’re a few years clear of it, but when given the chance to take it seriously (the chance that this game presented to me) it feels just as all-powerful as it did when I was elbow-deep in it.
Lastly, the main character (Sam) goes home at the end even as she leaves her de facto home – in fleeing her family and that inappropriate mansion she is seeking a place of comfort, of acceptance, of safety – a place where her true self is considered perfectly whole and absolutely correct – the place that home should be.
Here are some other thoughts about the game that I really enjoyed:
http://mkopas.net/2013/08/on-gone-home/
http://iam.benabraham.net/2013/08/gone-home-jump-scares-and-ludonarative-harmony/
http://critdamage.blogspot.com.au/2013/08/notes-on-gone-home.html
http://thiscageisworms.com/2013/08/16/on-gone-home/
http://clockworkworlds.com/post/58411117679/the-transgression-you-can-do-better