{"id":4089,"date":"2013-10-02T11:00:10","date_gmt":"2013-10-02T15:00:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/?p=4089"},"modified":"2013-09-23T21:27:02","modified_gmt":"2013-09-24T01:27:02","slug":"family-history-source-analysis-in-gone-home","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/?p=4089","title":{"rendered":"Family history: source analysis in Gone Home"},"content":{"rendered":"

The following is a guest post from\u00a0Richard Bell, a graduate student studying history at Stanford University interested in the political culture of early modern Britain and the history of imprisonment.<\/em>\u00a0Note<\/strong>: <\/i>Gone Home<\/a> is a game of investigation and discovery, and as such is best experienced with as little foreknowledge as possible. While I have tried to avoid spoilers<\/strong> here, most of the articles I have linked to contain significant plot details. If you have any interest in the game, I\u2019d urge you to play it before reading anything about it. It\u2019s worth it.<\/i><\/p>\n

Gone Home <\/i>is my new favourite history game. It\u2019s a compelling period piece following the experiences of Kaitlin Greenbriar, a 20-something woman returning to her family home in Oregon on June 7, 1995 after a year in Europe. Arriving to an empty house on an ominously stormy night, you are left to work out where your family has gone, picking your way through a quintessential 90s middle-class home. Indeed, The Fullbright Company has put significant effort into creating an authentic microcosm of 90s life, down to X-Files<\/i> and Twin Peaks<\/i> references and riot grrl mixtapes (interestingly, the only fictional pop culture references, as far as I can remember, were the video game cartridges<\/a> scattered about one room). Yet it isn\u2019t nostalgia that makes Gone Home <\/i>stand out as a game about history (as an early modernist, I struggle to think of any era I lived through as history). Rather, I found myself inspired by the game\u2019s narrative structure as a way of exploring historical method in video games.\"gonehome02\"<\/a><\/i><\/p>\n

At its core, Gone Home<\/i> is about investigation and discovery. It is a story told without dialogue or any direct interaction with other characters (although some diary entries are voice acted), leaving the player to piece things together by sifting through the traces left by Kaitlin\u2019s absent family. As Steve Gaynor, co-founder of The Fullbright Company, put it in a revealing interview<\/a> with Jason Johnson of Kill Screen<\/i>, while \u201cnovels excel at expressing the characters\u2019 internal states\u201d, in Gone Home <\/i>the player starts \u201cby only seeing the evidence of these people, the impression they left behind. You don\u2019t have direct access to the internal state. You\u2019re projecting how these people feel. There\u2019s no way of knowing it directly.\u201d Of course, some pieces of evidence, such as diary entries might get you closer to that \u201cinternal state\u201d than others. Nonetheless, the true depth of Gone Home<\/i>\u2019s narrative relies on the player sifting through a familiar array source types \u2013 letters, wills, portraits, diary entries, calendars, cassette tapes, pamphlets, etc. \u2013 and collating those snippets of information in order to understand a deeper narrative.<\/p>\n

\"gonehome04\"<\/a>As I played, the similarities between this process and the kind of questions I ask of sources as an historian became increasingly apparent. Players are required to consume and evaluate the varying accounts and information presented to them, piece them together, and make educated inferences in order to bridge gaps in their knowledge. Questions of perspective and purpose need to be addressed: private letters between friends convey something different to a will, but only when read critically and alongside numerous other sources does a deeper narrative emerge. This is where Gone Home <\/i>differs from something like Dear Esther<\/i>. Rather than reading between the lines of a single ambiguous narrative voice, here we are encouraged to piece together a narrative encoded in numerous objects. Where Dear Esther <\/i>invites the kind of textual analysis at which students of literature excel, Gone Home <\/i>demands something more akin to source comparison.<\/p>\n

\"gonehome08\"<\/a>This process creates an almost historical account of its own: the player uncovers (even creates) a narrative in which short-term events can be placed within a series of more obscure long-term contexts. Once understood, these deeper narrative strands offer better understanding of the ways in which certain events came to pass and why they had certain repercussions. As the threads trail of further into the past, their direct relevance becomes less clear, but no less real. An otherwise simple yet utterly moving story becomes part of a wider family history stretching back through three generations, the past and present interacting. Confronted with a range of evidence, the player can piece together the lives, thoughts and relationships of a cast of absent characters, as well as understanding their (occasionally complicated) relationships with history and the past. The game never entirely spells out deeper explanations and causal connections, leaving the player to tease them out from the careful comparison of sources. There is no game mechanic for this process; certain parts of the narrative trigger as you explore, but there is no clumsy means of slotting together the pieces of the puzzle, and no real win condition. On a first pass, most players (including me) won\u2019t put together all the clues. Indeed, some of the most (and I provide this link with a huge spoiler warning) convincing interpretations<\/a> involved pieces of evidence that passed me by completely, while the comments sections of numerous blogs and gaming sites attest to the range of potential readings.<\/p>\n

While Gone Home<\/i> is clearly an outlier when it comes to video game narratives, it nonetheless plays with medium\u2019s tropes<\/a>. The setting may be different, but while gaming most of us have spent time digging through draws and hacking computers for supplies and information, or reading the numerous tomes that litter virtual bookshelves. Modern game developers have devoted huge amounts of time to creating detailed histories and lore for their worlds, expressed through peripheral information available to more intrepid players. Accordingly, there are deep readings to be made of AAA games like Fallout<\/i><\/a> <\/i>and Bioshock<\/i><\/a> (tellingly, The Fullbright Company has a strong heritage in the Bioshock <\/i>series). Yet in Gone Home<\/i>, this process is not simply about set dressing or creating a more immersive experience. Instead, it\u2019s the entire experience. This knot of narratives is held together, and made compelling as a gaming experience, by a set of engaging (yet absent) characters and the eerie tension of an abandoned yet familiar house. It\u2019s a game that plays on the emotions: an emotive hook drives the process of source analysis, as each new item brings with it compounding revelations. Yet conversely, the story gains this emotional momentum precisely from its peculiar narrative structure, affording the whole thing a kind of voyeuristic intimacy that invests the player in these stories \u2013 something that would be hard to achieve were the characters present. At times, it becomes so intimate, as Naomi Clark points out<\/a>, that the game even recoils from it. If nothing else, I found it a sobering reminder of just how personal the kinds of sources we use to write history can be.<\/p>\n

\"gonehome09\"<\/a>Naturally, there\u2019s a degree of artifice to all of this. Most objects convey conspicuously deliberate and particular meaning, and at times one might question why a letter from the 1970s has been left lying about. I also wonder just how far interpretations of the narrative can stretch; while we are offered the perspectives of a range of characters, each seems designed to give a sense of a single coherent plot. Of course, this makes perfect sense, given that the creators\u2019 primary aim is to tell a story. Yet I wonder how far the concept could be taken if multiple competing narratives were introduced, leaving the player to weigh up the evidence a little more. Few games ask their players to engage in the kind of critical inquiry that Gone Home <\/i>encourages, yet The Fullbright Company\u2019s deceptively simple innovation is still full of untapped potential.<\/p>\n

What really struck me when playing Gone Home <\/i>\u2013 and I\u2019m sure I\u2019m late to the party on this one \u2013 is how wrongheaded I\u2019ve been in my approach to the relationship between history and videogames. Previously, I was concerned with how the stories of the past could be told in an interactive manner. But now that I\u2019ve spent some time at the Greenbriars\u2019 home, Trevor Owens\u2019 call to \u201clet go of narrative and start by asking themselves different kinds of questions<\/a>\u201d strikes me as all the more apt. Video games that model the kinds of experiences and choices that make up historical contingency, such as the recent Papers, Please<\/i><\/a>, have the potential to convey an understanding of the past that goes beyond narrative. Yet what if, as well as games that model the experiences of historical actors, we explore those that convey the practice of history? This comes back to another point Trevor Owens made here a while back: games can \u201cprovide captivating space to develop the kinds of critical tools for thought that historians develop<\/a>\u201d. Yet Gone Home <\/i>challenges Owens\u2019 conclusion that we can\u2019t simply say \u201chey, lets put a bunch of text documents in something and call it a game.\u201d Because that\u2019s precisely what The Fullbright Company have done, albeit in an inventive and engaging manner. While it\u2019s certainly a niche game, and one that is fuelling the often vitriolic debate of what a game even is, it has been received with widespread critical acclaim<\/a> and a devoted fan base. There\u2019s an audience for this kind of experience.<\/p>\n

As I\u2019ve mentioned, Gone Home <\/i>is remarkable because its condensed document-centric gameplay is precisely what creates the kind of engagement that other games have to foster through multiple hours of exhilarating gun battles or stealthy tension. Not only that, but it does this on an emotional register that we rarely experience in video games. Perhaps, in the debate over the role of games in museum collections and historical teaching, The Fullbright Company have given us even more reason to be as bold Rebecca Mir would like us to be<\/a>. While Kevin Bacon\u2019s Murder in the Mansion<\/i> may not look much like Dear Esther <\/i>in its final iteration<\/a>, it shares a lot in common with Gone Home<\/i>. With Gone Home <\/i>as a working example, could we imagine more games that encourage this kind of historical analysis built around selections from actual collections or archives? Or ones that, even if fictional, make explicit the promotion of kinds of critical skills that we teach as historians? These expertise are undoubtedly the most important thing we have to offer our students, and Gone Home <\/i>has made me excited about the different ways we might convey them.
\n<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The following is a guest post from\u00a0Richard Bell, a graduate student studying history at Stanford University interested in the political culture of early modern Britain and the history of imprisonment.\u00a0Note: Gone Home is a game of investigation and discovery, and as such is best experienced with as little foreknowledge asContinue Reading<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":16,"featured_media":4090,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"coauthors":[216],"class_list":["entry","author-pastplayer","post-4089","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-articles"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/09\/gonehome01.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4089","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/16"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4089"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4089\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4145,"href":"https:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4089\/revisions\/4145"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/4090"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4089"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4089"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4089"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcoauthors&post=4089"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}