Patrick Healy | 1

Name: What Remains of Edith Finch Developer: Publisher: Annapurna Interactive Platform: PS4, , and Windows Released in 2017 Interactive Fiction Without Interactive Fiction What Remains of Edith Finch is a first-person adventure game containing an anthology of action games. You play as Edith Finch returning to the Finch residence for the first time in almost six years. The family is haunted by a curse that kills everyone prematurely; you are the last surviving Finch, only 17 years old. The house is full of rooms transformed into monuments to every dead leaf and branch of your family tree; following the death of each room’s resident, Great-Grandma Edie filled their space with an elaborate shrine, somehow incorporating how they died, usually complete with some personal account of the tragedy. You traverse this museum and individually inspect every monument, launching into unique mini-game segments where you re-enact the last moments of their lives, usually through allegorical imagery. In one segment you’ll inhabit a child attempting to swing a rope swing a full 360 degrees only to fall off the swing and plummet to his death off a cliff in front of him; in another, you’ll play as a hermit leaving his bunker for the first time in years, only to die getting hit by a train. The premise is dark but the game itself is incredibly whimsical. Even when experiencing the death of a toddler, we’re embraced by a warm orchestra and bright dancing bath toys; a suicide is decorated with the glitz of a palace. The house itself is at once a monstrosity, with added structures for new living space precariously tacked on to its side as to not disturb the graves of the past generations, and a beautiful gallery, with the narratives that shaped familial death on display. When Edith finishes her journey, she sits at her bed and writes all of these stories out in a journal so that a new generation of Finch may remember them. As we learn close to the end of the game, Edith is pregnant. Flashing many years forward to the game’s epilogue, Edith has passed away and her son returns to the house, her journal in hand, to place flowers on her grave. What Remains of Edith Finch is, broadly, a game about storytelling. At one level, it’s about how their family members’ lives shape the stories they tell and, more importantly, how those stories shape their lives; at another, it’s about the medium of games as a platform for storytelling. What the story tells us The game’s narrative is in conflict over one question; should the Finches share their stories of tragic death? At one end of this debate we have Dawn, Edith’s mother, who seals the rooms of the house off to protect her children from the stories; at the other, we have Great- Patrick Healy | 2

Grandma Edie, who built the monuments in the first place and has since drilled peepholes in the doors Dawn sealed. Edie is excited by the magic of the curse. Even when her own husband tragically dies while building a dragon-themed slide, she tells the story as if he were killed fighting an actual dragon. There’s a lot of comfort in the stories, but her fixation is to the point of obsession; the narrative implies she reaches out to a comic book writer to make a book about her own daughter’s death; she does an interview with a tabloid about a mole-man living under her house, which is revealed to actually be her son Walter, living in a bunker, traumatized by having witnessed the death of his sister, whom the comic book was written about. She cares more about the stories than the lives of her family members. Dawn resists the stories, leaving the house behind when she grows into adulthood, moving around the world for her work and eventually settling down with a man she meets in India: Sanjay, Edith’s father. It’s only after Sanjay’s death that they return to Edie’s house, perhaps returning for the comfort of the stories or maybe just because it’s what made sense in the face of tragedy. Dawn blames her mother’s stories for the deaths of her two sons, and this blame is reasonable; she lost both of her sons to their imaginations, attempting to recreate the fantastical stories they grew up with within their own lives. Milton disappears, having apparently been sucked into the world of his own creative work; Lewis’ suicide was an attempt to escape the ‘real’ world and move into a more beautiful world he had daydreamed. In our ludic interactions with the individual death stories, we only ever experience the good side of these stories: the most idealized versions. From the beginning, with Molly’s surreal story of becoming a sea monster and eventually having that monster consume her human body, we are far from experiencing objective reality. In reality, Molly likely died by poisoning herself; a ten-year-old girl poisoned herself with toxic berries and a full tube of toothpaste all because her mother, Edie, sent her to sleep without food and locked her door from the outside. We only ever play from Edie’s perspective on the stories; these stories are magic that rewrites history and makes us comfortable. Even Dawn comes around to the comfort of stories. On her death bed, she gives Edith the key to the first room, allowing her to move past the boarded-up doors and access the monuments that fill Edie’s house. She would never give Edith this key if she truly wanted the stories to die with her; Dawn wants the magic of their family mythology. As Edith writes these stories in her journal, she questions whether she should really be writing all of this down, struggling with the same conflict she witnessed between her mother and great-grandmother. After all, if she doesn’t tell her child about the “curse”, couldn’t it die with her? Ultimately, she comes to the same conclusion as Dawn; their stories need to be told: perhaps even only for self-preservation. What remains of Edith Finch is only, really, her stories1.

1 Roll credits… Patrick Healy | 3

Walking Simulator? These types of games are typically referred to as ‘walking simulators’; it’s clearly a pejorative term meant to mock the premise of having a first-person game that doesn’t include a gun but it’s since been adopted by enthusiasts of the sub-genre. What Remains of Edith Finch is definitely about death but it isn’t about violence, or at least it doesn’t adopt violence into its ludic vernacular, and regardless of whether one thinks that makes it a ‘bad’ game or even not a game at all, we can all agree that that makes it different than most first-person games, worthy of placement in this sub-genre. Many critics, notably Ian Bogost, have labeled ‘Walking Simulators’ as a “transitional form”, claiming What Remains of Edith Finch represents where the genre was going2. I find this insight particularly foolish. Sure, What Remains of Edith Finch is clearly later in a genealogy of these sorts of games, deeply linked to ; Edith, of course, also begins the game by returning home, but to recognize Gone Home as a kind of game only means to the end that is What Remains of Edith Finch fundamentally misunderstands the kind of game Gone Home is. What Remains of Edith Finch is a much different game than Gone Home but it is not unquestionably better. Gone Home did not remove agency from the player, nor is it a game “without gameplay”. As I’ve already discussed, Gone Home is a game that presents us with a playground made of a family’s object ecology3; it is this ecology, and by extension the family itself, that we, as players, willfully take apart and put back together, analyze and synthesize. The action of Gone Home is no doubt less pronounced than that of What Remains of Edith Finch, but the choices underlying are perhaps more plentiful in Gone Home, regardless; both games have the pseudo-analog near-infinite agency inherent to exploring a 3D environment, but only Gone Home allows you to interact with these objects, while What Remains of Edith Finch only linearly guides the player through narratives, with an almost entirely static environment in between, closer to Disneyland’s Peter Pan’s Flight than Bioshock’s Minerva’s Den. Bogost is right that the supposed target of What Remains of Edith Finch’s analysis is narrative itself, but I’m skeptical that the game allows any ludic engagement with this analysis. It’s a game made out of storytelling, giving us distinct playgrounds to explore its modes. Ironically, though, this analysis leads us only to shallow conclusions in the central theme; if we are to understand half of the kind of art this is, we must push ourselves out of the guided experience and look at it as an interactive fiction text.

2 Ian Bogost made this claim in a piece for The Atlantic called “Video Games Are Better Without Stories”, which this paper is largely a response to and reflection on. You can read it here (https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/04/video-games-stories/524148/). 3 I mean that I’ve discussed this in a previous paper, not previously in this paper. Patrick Healy | 4

What we say Upon further analysis, there is something much more nefarious going on in the narratives of What Remains of Edith Finch. In fact, there is a clear villain, as sympathetic as she may be: Great-Grandma Edie. So many children died because of Edie. From the death of Molly on, we see the unnecessary death of children because of negligence. Calvin died because of an unsafe swing precariously placed in front of a cliff; Gus died because his father forgot about him while he flew a kite in a storm; Walter died because he was more comfortable breaking a whole in his wall out to a train tunnel than simply walking upstairs to greet his family; Gregory died in a most devastating situation, as his mother left him alone to drown in the bathtub while she talked on the phone. At first, in the case of Molly, the narrative of this “curse” and the rewriting of history with her personal story and monument were means to excuse Edie’s negligence: a scapegoat. But now, generations down the line, they have only reinforced negligence; if all are destined for an early death, why put so much effort into safety? The curse becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy4. To Edie, everything must happen for a reason; and so, once we have the reasons, more of those things must happen. Milton and Lewis grew up with those stories and were pushed to death by the dissonance between fantasy and reality; Edie’s stories created, effectively, a bar too high for reality to achieve. Even Edie became bored by the mundane reality of Edith’s generation, filling in downtime without death, 1983-2003, by further iterating the stories, reaching out to a comic book writer to create that cheap portrayal of her daughter’s death, keeping a few slabs of wood around in case she needs/gets to prepare a new monument at the last minute. Her descendants are not people to her, they are characters. All actions have meaning; everything is attached to a clear history; everything has a setup and payoff. Even on Edith and Dawn’s last night with Edie, Edie tries to tell Edie a new story, telling a fantasy about how on the night of Edith’s birth, the tide was low enough for her to visit her old house out off the coast of their current house. Dawn cuts the story off before we find the conclusion but it’s clear what the conclusion would imply; this was Edie (actually named Edith Sr.) passing the torch to Edith (Edith Jr.). As Dawn and Edith leave, we see Edie for the last time; she chose to mix her medication with alcohol, choosing to kill herself to fulfill the narrative of passing the torch. Can we really blame Edie, though? Loss is much easier to comprehend if it’s meaningful. It’d be truly devastating to accept that her father, and children, and grandchildren, and great- grandchildren, all died not because of some powerful curse entrenched in the history of her family, but instead as most of us die, for absolutely no reason. This seems to be the note the game ends on. Even outside fantasy, life’s losses are inevitable; so, why not seek comfort in that narrative?

4 Even Edith herself could have easily died while exploring the house on her own; she tells the player of her pregnancy just as she walks across a tree branch that could have easily snapped and let her fall to her death. This death could have been excused as a fitting end to the Finch story. Patrick Healy | 5

This is not a theme we fully engage with as players; our play suspended in narrative told several layers deep, experiencing only mini-game segments that glorify the mythology of death, Edith’s perspective, as we live it, is one consistent with the surface of Edie’s philosophy. In the end, as a passenger of Edith’s journey, we embrace the stories. We can only reach a nuanced understanding of Edie’s motivations and impacts if we step outside of the game, viewing it as a piece of storytelling with several layers of unreliable narrators. What we do Though we might not find ludic engagement with these themes concerning the impact of storytelling, we do find ludic elements exploring the modes of storytelling, themselves, building towards a statement about narrative that doesn’t concern itself with any individual narrative. In each of the short death-sequences, we see an exploration of mediums. In Barbara’s segment we see an exploration of comic books; in Milton’s, paintings; in Sam’s, photography; in Gus’, poetry; in Walter’s, literature; in Gregory’s, film; in Lewis’, dreams. The game is allowing us to analyze these modes, understanding what they may do fundamentally different, or the same. Look at Milton’s story, told through a flip-book animation. What makes this different than the other’s? I notice that many players, from casual players to profession critics, tend to find Milton’s flip-book an outlier in an otherwise wildly-interactive experience5. But is the flip-book really any less of a game than Calvin’s swing-set or Gus’ kite? These are the kinds of questions What Remains of Edith Finch asks us to consider. Lewis’ segment is undeniably the best part of this game6, and it’s worth dissecting why. Here we see the remediation of a dream (or a day-dream), likely the closest medium to games we have other than games themselves. While working a mundane job, we, as Lewis, get to partially escape into another simulated reality. We simultaneous live in two spaces, and as the magic circle expands to engulf us, our simulated reality overrules our “real” one. I find Bogost’s comment that What Remains of Edith Finch “invited players to abandon the dream of interactive storytelling at last” to be particularly amusing, since in Lewis’ sequence we experience a literal dream of interactive storytelling, and one that the game cannot fully endorse abandoning. The real tragedy of Lewis’ death, present even in the perspective of his psychiatrist, is that to a point we can understand his perspective, because we’ve just lived it7.

5 This is also partially because Milton disappears instead of simply dying in what’s seen as a cheap narrative move that introduces real magic into the world of the narrative so that Giant Sparrow can tie this game into their previous game, , since it’s implied that Milton becomes the king in that game’s world when he leaves this game’s world. As a fan of the Unfinished Swan, the tie-in is cute, but it does create a real narrative problem, since his body never being recovered implied to me that Edie found the body and hid it somewhere so that Dawn wouldn’t leave the house. 6 I suppose someone could deny this, but I reject their opinions. 7 This suggests the merits of interactive fiction both in the fact that it can uniquely immerse us in writerly text and that it is uniquely qualified to inspire empathy. Patrick Healy | 6

Lewis’ segment shows the game’s endorsement of the power of interactive storytelling as writerly text8; it doesn’t fully endorse the mode itself, though, in the same way it cannot fully endorse any sort of storytelling, consistent with the conflict of the narrative9. To say the game rejects it is simply untrue. Still, it’s interesting to note that What Remains of Edith Finch doesn’t really use interactive storytelling; it is partially made of interactive storytelling, but its narrative is told in slight remediations of traditional modes, a mostly readerly text. Instead, its ludic elements are arranged so that players may analyze and synthesize storytelling itself, the abstract object that the game is made of. This, I think, is what Bogost means by the inflammatory phrase, “Video Games Are Better Without Stories”10. What is it This game makes me uncomfortable in its segmentation; returning to the motivations of Edie, this is a game that doesn’t want you to understand it, as close to propaganda as a game can be. Playing the game without criticism, doing only the actions endorsed by its systems, players will leave the game viewing storytelling as a virtue, as if they had just watched Tim Burton’s Big Fish. The game’s narrative, as it is read to us, is propaganda; it wants us to accept that we, too, can live in a magical world where everything happens for a reason. True understanding, though, requiring a level of criticism on top of the base narrative, gives us a more nuanced perspective; we understand the harm stories cause, along with their benefits. Games allow players a playground to find their own truths; this is exactly what this game does with its array of modes of storytelling that allow our analysis. The source of the truths is the player themselves, like Socratic meditation. This is why games cannot be propaganda; they are at best aestheticized pursuit of real truths, and at worst a kind of indoctrination far more insidious than anything propaganda can offer11. Would we be playing a better game if it actually created us a playground to explore the problem of the role of storytelling in addressing existential questions? I think, yes, this would likely be a better game, in that it would do the kind of thing games do, allowing players to reach their own truths. But would this be a better piece of media, piece of art? I’m not sure. The

8 I mean this in the way Barthes discusses ‘writerly’ and ‘readerly’ texts in S/Z. 9 I should probably introduce some nuance to this statement; I mean that the text as a whole cannot endorse interactive fiction, since the game clearly does not endorse Lewis’ daydreaming that led to his eventual suicide. Ludically, though, the game does implicitly endorse interactive fiction, in that this is the most enjoyable and memorable portion of the game’s actions. 10 One of the worst, most misleading titles of an article that I’ve seen on the internet. I’ve remained mostly consistent with a lot of Bogost’s ideas in this paper but I cannot excuse the poor taste of this title. I suppose one has to live for ‘the clicks’ when writing online, though; maybe this was necessary clickbait. 11 I accept that this is a controversial position, dependent on how I define ‘propaganda’, but a meaningful distinction. Patrick Healy | 7 game’s propaganda is almost dishonest, but it seeks to guide us away from nihilism, a conclusion we might have reached if left on our own12. In What Remains of Edith Finch, we see a game that purposely disallows ludic engagement with theme, specifically so that players may avoid skepticism, presumably, for their own good. This is a kind of thematic dissonance that we don’t yet have a name for: a game that actively suspends agency for the sake of the experience.

12 One could say it’s the kind of game Edie would make if she could somehow make games.