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.
______________________________________________________________
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, 2nd 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 16th, 2013). At: http://critdamage.blogspot.dk/2013/08/notes-on-gone-home.html. An Australian analytical videogame
blog. Last accessed: December 10th 2013.
Meyers, Maddy (2013): ”Growing up Riot Grrl:
The Nostalgia Lie of Gone Home,” From the blog: Metroidpolitan. (August
19th, 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 10th 2013.
Fullbright Company, The
(2013): Gone Home. Released for: Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.
August 15th 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.
