Subversive Play: Gone Home

For my subversive play, I chose to play the game Gone Home by Fullbright Studios. Gone Home is an adventure exploration game where the player comes back to an empty house after backpacking in Europe. Inside the house the player needs to find clues and piece together information as to why her parents and her sister have left. The game is very much driven by its narrative and has basic mechanics of picking up and moving items around in order to unlock the mystery. Finding certain items, usually letters unlocks the story in a linear manner.

I decided to subvert a game that I have already play once before because I believe that it is easier to subvert a game that you already understand. Though I would like to prove myself wrong by trying to play subversively with a game I have never played before too! In the first scene, I started picking random things from around the house and placing it by the entrance lobby. I started going deeper into the house and noticed that there were a big selection of “soft” objects such as tissues and pillows. I immediately gravitated towards such objects and started piling them on the staircase.

I noticed that some objects such as photos slipped through the cracks of the staircase very easily, I tried to replicated the same thing with a deck of cards but it failed. I attached the video as it shows the basic mechanics of the game as well as my attempt at finding that glitch in the game again. 

I continued going around the house collecting objects, which was a bit tiresome because you are only allowed to hold one object at the time. I started to only collect objects that were considered “soft” and arranged it on the staircase as a still life portrait. 

 

At this point I started to think about the archive, and if day to day objects such as toilet paper, hair comb, candles, pencils can be part of a personal archive. I believe so as they carry just as much emotional weight as lets say, a photo does. There is something quite queer and feminist about assigning objects with so much emotional attachment. To a normative audience it is just a box of tissue but to me it is what I use to wipe away my tears. I began to get really attached to these objects and started to rearrange the scene to create a more curated still life. 

***Spoilers Alert***
At the end of Gone Home, you realize that the player’s sister ran away from home with her girlfriend (coming out in the process) and that the parents are merely on holiday. When I played Gone Home the first time around, I actually wasn’t a big fan of it. I found that the structure was too neat, and that coming out is never a linear story line, it is a deeply complex, emotional and often traumatic process that doesn’t always have climax, it is more akin to a web. More frequently, coming out stories do not end with stating “I am gay”, coming out often happens in the shadows, in between sentences, or in what was actually unsaid. If it was stated point blank, then there might be repercussion. Bottom line is coming out stories do not fit into normative literary structures of beginning, middle, end.
What I found this time around was that, I was able to some what mitigate the linear and heteronormative structure of the game and focus on the details and the emotional complexity of the personal archive, one full of feeling and affect. These objects, organized along the staircase in the main lobby, display a more complex and nuance narrative that is not based on discovery and rummaging but on love and care.

Although I praise Fullbright for creating an immersive and engaging game environment, I hope that game developers will start to approach gay stories differently and realize that a gay story with heteronormative mechanics and narrative structure is just as normalizing.