Gone Home - Self-Discovery Through Nostalgia

So I played Gone Home, and it's a really nostalgic game.

Although Gone Home centres on the little sister Samantha and her struggles as a teenager, the game also represents a journey of self-discovery for the main character Kaitlin and, arguably, also the player. The game never informs directly about things that Kaitlin should and would know about herself, but it conveys completely new information about her and her family, or reminds her of things she could have forgotten along the way. For instance, after traversing through the halls and rooms in the house for a while, the player might come across a note from the parents directed at Samantha, telling her not to keep leaving the lights on in the house and that she is ”as bad as her sister” (Gone Home, 2013). At this point, the player has most likely been leaving on lights all over the house, either to mark off areas already inspected or to counteract the eerie atmosphere brought forth by the darkness, the loneliness and the storm outside occasionally ripping apart the silence.

     The player finds various letters sent by Kaitlin throughout the house, and upon further inspection they reveal the older sister as a jovial, adventurous, reliable person, but also as someone who was missing when her family needed her. As the player reads through these letters along with the diary entries and the notes left behind by Samantha, Kaitlin's own emotions about these discoveries are never expressed directly, yet one cannot help but infer a sense of sadness and regret about not being there for her sister. The only time Kaitlin seems to take action and bypass the player's commands is when she finds a note from her sister clearly not intended for her eyes, which contains very detailed, sexually explicit and private information. If the player attempts to pick up and read this note, Kaitlin intervenes and quickly closes it, refusing to let the player do anything but glance at the content.

     At the same time as enacting Kaitlin's self-discovery, the player undergoes a very similar experience. All the objects in the game, from music cassettes and old Nintendo games and other pieces of dated technology to photographs and phrasings in the notes, are structured so as to remind the player of their own childhood and cultural backdrop, assuming that they experienced the 1990's and feel a connection to the many referential objects and narratives. Through imbedded narratives encoded into the scenes, the player may relive and reflect on their own experiences, and the explorative, quietly paced nature of the game seems to encourage nostalgic indulgence and reflection.

     It follows that Gone Home will inevitably leave different impressions on players depending on their age, their cultural background and their ability to recognize and reflect on the references in the game. To Brendan Keogh, a media and communications PhD student and blogger in his late-20's, Gone Home instils a series of emotions, and apart from feeling the dread of anticipation evoked by the haunted-house trope of the game's setting, it makes him reflect on his own identity as a grown man, and how it is inherently rooted in the past:

I miss the 90s. Like, I really miss the 90s. To be certain, the 90s I miss is probably not the same 90s as those just a bit older than me miss. I was born in 1986. I was not old enough for half the 90s to really appreciate it at the time, but I built up a storage of memories of things that I saw and heard and, in more recent years, have made sense of those memories. Now I feel this strange, aching loss for the decade that I lived out for most of my childhood (if not my adolescence) (Keogh, 2013).

He goes on to contemplate the implications of his longing for this particular era, saying that:

It's something that I've been struggling with for maybe a year now, this strange kind of late-20s crisis of being old enough to contextualise my existence within a much broader history of humanity to realise just how small and fleeting I am (…) This is not to say that I am old. Everyone older than me would scoff at such a statement. I am saying that I am old enough for time to feel like it is moving pretty fucking fast and my childhood is something that doesn't exist anymore. It's a memory that's trapped back in the 90s, locked up with Sega Megadrives and Riot Grrls and Marilyn Manson and purple Hang Ten t-shirts. I'm pretty happy with my present life, but that realisation that the past is, well, past, hits pretty hard (Keogh, 2013).

So apart from feeling the joy of recognizing the period-specific references that are inscribed into the narrative architecture in the game, the recognition also forces the player to take a step further and reflect on his own place in a historical continuum. As he does so, he initially recoils from the weight of this knowledge, but he also inevitably comes to terms with his sense of self as part of a larger context, and that the things which defined him as a child may no longer exist in any other format than his memory.

     Keogh is very much susceptible to the references inherent in Gone Home, if nothing else then for his age, but because the 1990's are indeed located further in the past than one might anticipate, some who have played Gone Home are not necessarily within this specific target group. To a young adult in the late teens or a child, the videogame might present a narrative space of a more historical or curiously antique nature, not far unlike the contemporary popular TV-show Mad Men, which follows a group of individuals and families and their work at an ad agency, set in a rapidly evolving 1950's USA. In this case, Gone Home might evoke nostalgia in the sense that it is a reconstruction of the past. Although centred on fictive characters, the environment of the game is reconstructive in nature. For a younger audience, the game might therefore evoke the kind of restorative nostalgia expounded by Boym earlier in this paper.

     For others, the narratives presented in Gone Home might not evoke as strong a sense of nostalgia as the designers undoubtedly intended, even despite these players being the right age and having the right cultural backgrounds. For Maddy Meyers, another videogame blogger, the story of Kaitlin, Samantha and Lonnie are curiously devoid of crucial elements that defined her own youth. Like the younger sister and her romantic interest, Meyers states that she was in a high school band, yet her experience was very different:

We were the only band in our entire high school that had any women in it at all. We were also the only band that had a non-white kid in it. We were also all incredibly unpopular at school, (…) It's interesting to look back on those times with my new-found progressive knowledge and realize how terrible it was. At the time, I had no idea why being in a band was so difficult or why no one liked my band (Meyers, 2013).

When Meyers sat down to play Gone Home, she brought different expectations with her. She expected to find a story about harassment, exclusion and a looming structural environment with very few moments of social support and acceptance, if any (Meyers, 2013). Instead she found a story where the two troubled young females were hardly bothered by their peers, which are only briefly mentioned in the game, and where they ”seemed to live in a magical zone where patriarchy was a problem, but, like, y'know, not a biiiigggg problem,” (Meyers, 2013). Whatever actions the characters took, the game seemed for Meyers to be devoid of realistic consequences and threatening authority figures, a situation she herself could not relate to very well.

     However, in all intents and purposes the game also beckons Meyers to reflect on her youth and the places and events that shaped her as a person. Even if she deems the narrative content of the game unrealistic, the context remains highly relatable to her. Through the imbedded narratives, Gone Home evokes a type of reflective nostalgia in players that is at the same time conjoined with and separate from the actual narratives of the game. It is not the game itself that evokes nostalgia in the player, but the way the player interacts with the game, both spatiotemporally and cognitively.

     Nothing really suggests that gamespaces are more liable to inflict nostalgia in its audience than traditional media such as film and literature, but gamespaces set themselves apart in the way they are remembered as navigational repositories, and the way players interact with them and interpret them. In Gone Home, you walk around seemingly unguided, randomly picking places to investigate, and yet a coherent narrative takes shape during the time one wanders around. Although it seems like this narrative is constructed through a logical sequence of events, it is actually more likely constructed as one moves around the gamespace and pieces everything said and unsaid together, independent of any overlaying timeline. Like Abott suggests, the mind fills in the gaps in the narrative on its own (Abott 2010, p. 90), and orders the events in a coherent temporal sequence regardless of when each piece of information was actually accumulated. The timeline of the past events in the home are ordered effortlessly and subconsciously, while the investigation of the environment takes place with great deliberation and active interpretation. And simultaneously, the players may experience the narratives of their own past.

     Games like Gone Home can therefore evoke nostalgia in several ways. They can do so directly, through interaction with objects and places in the game that somehow denote a personal connection with the player, and they can do so indirectly, through contextualisation and cognitive association with a specific time, place or event in one's life. Through such nostalgic endeavours, either of restorative or reflective nature, players can analyse their own existential grounding as it was and as it is.

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References and Further Reading

Avedon, Elliot (1971): ”The Structural Elements of Games.” In: The Study of Games, ed. by E. Avedon & B. Sutton-Smith. New York: John Wiley.

Abott, H. Porter (2010): The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative, 2^nd ed. Cambrdge, UK; New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

Boym, Svetlana (2001): The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books.

Edwards, John (2009): ”Chapter 2: Identity, the Individual and the Group.” In: Language and Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Keogh, Brendan (2013): ”Notes on Gone Home,” From the blog: Critical Damage: Trying to Hear the Dumb Machine Sing. (August 16^th, 2013). At: http://critdamage.blogspot.dk/2013/08/notes-on-gone-home.html. An Australian analytical videogame blog. Last accessed: December 10^th 2013.

Meyers, Maddy (2013): ”Growing up Riot Grrl: The Nostalgia Lie of Gone Home,” From the blog: Metroidpolitan. (August 19^th, 2013) At: http://metroidpolitan.com/blog/2013/8/19/growing-up-riot-grrl-the-nostalgia-lie-of-gone-home. An American blog mainly featuring entries on videogames. Last accessed: December 10^th 2013.

Fullbright Company, The (2013): Gone Home. Released for: Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. August 15^th 2013.

Vella, Daniel (2011): Spatialised Memory: The Gameworld as Imbedded Narrative. Paper presented at the Philosophy of Computer Games Conference 2011.

Wildschut, T., Sedikides, C., Arndt, J. and Routledge, C. (2006): ”Nostalgia: Content, Triggers, Functions.” In: Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 91.

Zhou, X., Sedikides, C., Wildschut, T. and Gao, D. (2008): ”Counteracting Lonliness: On the Restorative Functions of Nostalgia.” In: Psychological Science, Vol. 19, No. 10.

Children and games

My niece have been using a tablet since she was 2 years old, she is now 4. First time I ever saw her going against her parents, was when the tablet she was painting popular children characters on went out due to lack of power. She threw a tantrum unlike anything I have ever seen, from her atleast. "Turn it back on!" she cried, while my brother and his wife tried explaining the concept of power on a mobile device. She was not listening she just wanted to play again.
Now she playing games on it, and she really enjoys it. Give her a tablet to play on an she will enter a different universe, one were you cannot directly contact her.
Recently the the media have caught this new trend amongst young children, and have had self proclaimed family gurus in talking about the phenomenon. And surprise surprise, it is a full scale demonisation of the media platform and games (like there is anything else).
The advises ranging from putting the tablets away for certain days/hours of the day, to rehab from the childrens tablet addiction.
And this really gets to me, psychologists examining this seems to have very narrow view on the subject. My niece paints, play games, listens to stories, and watches cartoons, when i was her age i had to do those things four different places. So because technology have made it easier for kids to do the things they have always enjoyed, it is a bad thing?
Do not get me wrong, I am not advocating that children should sit with a tablet all day long and do nothing else, that just would not be very stimulating to the young bodies. And the parent to children relation should have more presence, but that does not have to exclude the tablet. Parents can just as likely bond with their children over a tablet game, as they can at little legue soccer, maybe even more.
The point that needs to come through, also in the media, is that not everything should be spun in to a problem/conflict, but should be weigh in an objective manner that makes the recipient able to make up his or her mind on the subject.
But I guess that is not news worthy, and people would zap away.  

Randomness in CCG games.

Hearthstone is a new digital CCG which is now being used as a E-sport, but due to the randomness of the game it simply has to be done differently than and ordinary E-sport such as League of Legends or Starcraft. In a game of Hearthstone even the most skilled player can lose twice in a row, and then find him or herself out of the tournament, while that is not likely to happen in LoL. In Hearthstone there is always the luck of the draw involved, but over many games skill will show.
I know this since I frequently play Magic the Gathering tournament, where all players play several matches against more players, and the player with the highest win percentage proceeds.
So when i watch Hearthstone tournament currently at and a player loses twice, and I know that player is better than his opponent, I simply cannot help but laugh.
The E-sport scene has accepted Hearthstone into the fine games that is used for E-sport, but it is still under the premises that the game has little to none randomness in it. And that is a problem that needs to be resolved, since the current winner are "random" winners, that just had a lucky day.  

Mechanics vs Story

I had a interesting discussing once with a friend of mine concerning stories in games. I really like good story games, where the story is delivered in a right way, such as full voiceover of all quest etc.

But the game we discussed was Starcraft, i really like the story of STarcraft it is awesome. But in order to "live" the story you need to learn a lot of mechanics, and play through the campaign. I consider myself an average gamer when it comes to real time strategy games, but a one point of the campaign I simply got tired of how many thing I had to do in order to advance through the game, and get the story. So I cheated by calling my friend and have her play through it, she was a ranked diamond league player at the time so she had no issues with it. But what surprise me the most was that she had not played the campaign through before, I mean I was stunt, a game with such a good cutscene story why would you not want to see it?

Her argument was that she did not really care for the story of the game, she played it only because it had so many mechanics and a high skillecap to master. 

That got me thinking that mechanics in games can sometimes overshadow the actual story of the game. Thinking of World of Warcraft end game, where the player are more focused on executing their rotation properly to max their damage per second.

But a the other end of the scale you have games like Dear Esther, a story driven game with very simple mechanics, in that game it annoyed me that i could not interact with anything I simply could only move through the "game/story" which was triggered by certain points of the map.

Bottom Line is that delivering story without having the mechanics being overshadowing or not present seems to be very hard, and I am still debating with myself if Dear Esther is actually a game.   

To balance or to imbalance.

So lately I have been reading a lot about balance in games, both academical and non-academical. And many gamers in multiplayer games seems to be arguing that their games are not in balance, and that some champions (League of Legend/Dota 2) or class (most mmos) are more powerful than others. But why is it that game designers are making these imbalanced choices or mechanics?
Well if you look at games without balance such as Chess or Starcraft, these games comes down to execution and strategy, and in Starcrafts case speed aswell. Players have a symmetrical chance of winning the game.
But by adding an imbalance to a game, some players will switch to that strong champion (LoL/Dota) to win, that will in effect cause the remaining community to develop strategies to counter the first imbalanced champion. The strategy might be the use of another champion to counter or a combo of more, then that strategy will become dominant until it is countered.
The effect of the imbalance is then that the game is never stale, and it keeps players experimenting with the game. While games such as the fore mentioned Chess and Starcraft have predetermined strategies, while the games are a bit more stale in my point of view, they can take years to master and have a very high skillcap. Chess can take a lifetime to master, and even then you might find yourself beaten.
Whether or not a game is balanced, it really is a fine line to control balance in computer games.          

What is normative for gamers nowadays?

So i recently wrote a paper about computer game addiction, and the gamers we interviewed all played more than 24 hours per week, and they all played World of Warcraft.
Like these players i have been there, playing maybe even more than they did. I know the feeling when you "offline" friends asks you what you did during the weekend or if you want to go play basket... you lie.
It seems perfectly innocent when you do it, just a white lie, no one gets hurt... well only you perception of yourself. Shame of playing computer games is so wide spread among the gamers I know that it has become a norm to lie about your habits all the time.
And that is where we come back to the gamers we interviewed, the interview was suppose to uncover their thoughts on the term "computer game addiction" and if they thought it was a real thing. Of course some of them went on defense, denying that there was a problem with their habits and claiming to be totally in self control of the use of games. And that might have been our fault as interviewers, since we did send them a rather critical survey by another researcher before the interview and had them fill it out.
But after the interviews were done and we had analyzed the data, I found out that one of the interviewees had lied and downplayed his use of computer games. The newest expansion of World of Warcraft was recently released, after the interviews, and the interviewee had told us that he was done with the game and that he had to focus on his education now. But as it turned out that was not quite true, him and two of the other interviewees was members of a guild, that within a short period of time reached top 15 in the world. Being at such a level of the game requires an enormous amount of time spend on it, in an interview with one player at the same level, he reveals that they sleep 7 hours a day and plays the rest.
And now you might ask "but what is the problem here", and the problem here is not that the interviewee plays that much, at least not form my point of view. The problem is that he feels that he need to lie to us about it, it is sneered on to play that much computer games apparently. And that makes it difficult for us as researchers to properly identify habits amongst these gamers, since we are not sure that they are true or false.
               

Video Game Pile Guilt

I recently had to procure a new laptop because the old one simply didn't allow me to write notes on it anymore without heaving like a terminally ill hamster. The replacement machine can actually play games from services such as Steam, and suddenly my pc is bursting with titles I've half-played or yet left untouched. I've never even known this feeling before, and I had anticipated that it would have been a happier one.

It's too much.

Now I'm frozen solid with guilt, not least because I received a game for Christmas which is slightly less alluring than the 30 or so titles I have stored in and spread out over various devices.

"Do you like it? Is it a good game? ...Why are you not playing it right now?"

I feel bad. I'm not used to this much choice. Up until recently, I only ever got 2-3 games a year, and I'd always play old favorites while traversing these new adventures.

What do you do? Do you organize your archive into a checklist? Set daily quotas and goals, like completing 15% more of Far Cry 4? Will this make me happy? Will it get my gift-giver off my back?

The more choices I have, the less fun it is choosing something to play. And wasn't fun supposed to be the point of it all?

I'd like to play most games I come across. Except I don't really, not right now at least. It doesn't seem like an uncommon problem, so what is the cure? Going for a walk? Games used to be my walk. The inspiring "other" option when things became too much. Maybe it's time to go cold turkey for a while... or maybe it's just because games has become "work," and everything work-related is automatically distressing.

Do you have to be struck by inspiration and divine desire to play a video game? Does it have to be the highlight of the day from the moment you think about doing it?

Maybe the problem is that I want the game I'm playing to do something specific for me, and I'm no longer in a situation where this process can take properly place. There's a lot of stuff right now. A lot of pressure on being happy and enjoying stuff. On not causing trouble for anyone. When I sit down to play games, I'm somehow always taking away time from something I "should" be doing, or I'm just not playing with the right attitude, meaning I'm not doing something "how" I should be doing it. It's no longer play; it's a broken down vehicle for my ambitions, a broken down vehicle which easily turns into a blockade for everything.

I'm mentioning this because I think a lot, if not most people, know this feeling. Shelf full og games and nothing to play. Is it symptomatic of a generation? Is it a self-generated issue? Do we collect too many games, only to stockpile broken dreams and good intentions?

I'll be going for a walk and considering other career options now.