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.