Patrick Healy | 9/15/18

A paper in which a straight white man takes a game about queer women and makes it about himself Name: Date of (Original) Release: 2013 on PC’s, 2016 on Gen-8 Consoles, 2018 on Switch Developer: The Fullbright Company (Steve Gaynor, Johnnemann Nordhagen, Karla Zimonja, Kate Craig, Emily Carroll, Chris Remo) Publisher: The Fullbright Company Platform: Originally Windows, OSX, ; eventually PS4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch Gone Home is a first-person adventure game with a focus on storytelling through exploration and shallow puzzles, typically referred to as a ‘walking simulator’. The game sees the player assume the role of 21-year-old Katie Greenbriar, returning from a year-long trip abroad in June of 1995 to her family’s new house, the mansion of their now-deceased Uncle Oscar, which they moved into while Katie was abroad. You arrive in the middle of the night to find the house vacant, with an ominous note from your sister, Sam, on the door, telling you she’s sorry she can’t be here but you’ll see each other again someday. It sounds like the premise for a horror game, and the aesthetic does little to dispute this. The sound and light of a heavy thunderstorm outside fills the house, the lights flicker, the answering machine in the front room plays a message of a woman crying, the mansion itself is full of secret compartments and passages; turning corners, the appearance of figures at the end of the hall have startled me, even though it’s always a lamp. Even the title screen shows an image of the house from the exterior that greatly resembles the Haunted House visuals for the Magnavox Odyssey1. As I searched the closets of the house, inspected its many objects, part of me was terrified I would find a body2. But then as I was investigating one closet, I found a backpack with a familiar paper: a back-to-school checklist, with all of the required school supplies checked off, except the last requirement, “A positive attitude”. When I put down this paper, a recording of a young woman’s voice started playing; it was my sister, Sam, talking about her move to a new school, in this new town, and how her new peers had labeled her an outcast for living in “the psycho house”3. This narrative, at first, was not completely inconsistent with a horror narrative, but as I continued, my fear for the house staggered, as my care for the home’s residents grew. Sam’s story continued, but perhaps more importantly, I learned who these people were through their

1Haunted House is technically the first horror-themed , on the first game console. The resemblance is probably a coincidence but it’s an interesting coincidence.

2 Though, I guess I technically did find somebody in the closet, HEY-OH! … Bad joke, sorry.

3 This audio log is actually the second of the game; I just started with it because the school supply checklist is more meaningful than the movers’ receipt that signifies the first audio log.

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possessions. I viewed Sam as a complex human being because I sorted through her belongings, listened to her music, explored her collection of recorded VHS tapes, her SNES game collection4, her hilariously-written sex-ed assignment. I understood her mother, Jan, as someone who took pride in her forestry work, with the abundance of mementos of her good work around the house. I understood her father, Terry, and his failed writing career, with the abundance of unsold copies of his science fiction books, a manuscript of his latest work in a trash can with Jan’s handwriting exclaiming, “Don’t give up on this!” The plots of the game were impactful but this mode of delivery allowed for a kind of character development other mediums cannot replicate. In Gone Home, we are allowed, and encouraged, to analyze object ecology, the objects that make up a person’s world, and synthesize those into the image of a human being. We understand that Sam, Terry, and Jan are human characters not because we are told they are human but because we have built them out of the material we observed. When we find evidence of the troubles in Jan and Terry’s marriage, while exploring notes about Jan’s possible extra-marital affair and their marriage counseling, we understand the motivations. Jan is feeling a lack of affection from Terry, only made worse by the anxiety surrounding Terry’s inability to financially support the family with his failed writing, and her ridiculous hour-long commute to and from work; it seems inconsiderate Terry would choose to move the family to his deceased Uncle’s home, an Uncle only Terry had even met, so far from everything as to inconvenience everyone, except himself, who works from home. Jan has been trying to resuscitate their relationship, with couples’ classes in cooking and dancing, and arrangements of candles and books on middle-age sexuality in the bathroom, trying to renew the passion of their youth. But as they cancel those classes and their sexual efforts fail, illustrated by the single unused condom in their bedroom dresser drawer, we can understand why Jan might want to pursue an affair; she wants the affection she doesn’t get from Terry and a new hunk at work has seemed to go out of his way to socialize with her. Of course, we understand the trauma behind Terry’s lack of affection, or at least his difficulty to communicate his feelings. His uncle sexually abused him in 1963: the same uncle whose home they currently inhabit5. He was forced to repress that memory to keep his trauma a family secret: a memory that rears its head in his science fiction novels, as the hero of these novels goes back in time to save JFK from assassination, back in time to stop a tragedy in 1963. When we reach the greenhouse of the home, we find an unlikely signifier to a resolution to these conflicts; Terry’s newest novel is about that same hero going back in time again, not to save the

4Though Street Fighter is mentioned, the only game cartridges we actually see are fake games, including such creative gems as Adventurous the Cat: Returns and Journey of Crystal.

5 Though I thought it was too tangential to include in the body of this paper, the game does put in a significant amount of work to humanize Uncle Oscar, in the small bits of his narrative we get. We know he was haunted by a life of guilt following his exile from the family. We find a safe in the basement that presumably belonged to Oscar; the combination to this safe is 1963, the year of Terry’s abuse, as if Oscar had set it to remind himself of the horrible things he had done. Inside the safe we find a note he had written to his sister begging for forgiveness, returned to sender. Oscar was clearly dealing with that guilt for most of his life, which is probably why he left the house to Terry. I’m not saying Oscar’s not a monster; he is most definitely a disgusting monster, but he is a human monster.

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president’s life, but instead, his own. Terry is finally invested in repairing himself and, by no coincidence, we find this next to a flyer for a couple’s retreat, which Terry and Jan are currently out on. We learn every aspect of this narrative without hearing any clear narrative explanation, only by inspecting objects. Reading the back cover of Terry’s new book felt like a victory. Of course, this is only a side-plot; the focus of the game is clearly on Samantha. Her story, as told through Sarah Grayson’s beautifully performed voice diaries, is simple but powerful. Moving to a new high school, she’s an outcast. She befriends a girl named Lonnie, who she admires for her unique style and energy. A romance between them grows, as Sam discovers her sexuality. Conflict arises as they face discrimination from an unaccepting world, including their peers and Sam’s parents. Lonnie enlists in the military and they watch as her ship-date to basic training approaches, an expiration date for their relationship. They spend one last bittersweet night together before Lonnie departs, leaving Sam alone in a world that doesn’t accept her, in a home that refuses to accept her experience as anything but a phase. Again, the main plot is only the surface of what Gone Home offers. We read the notes that they passed in class, see the pillow fort they built when hunting for the ghost of Oscar, listened to the Riot Grrrl mix tapes they traded; we have full access to the objects that make up their romance, from start to end. Most interestingly, we can read private short stories about Captain Allegra, which Sam has been writing since elementary school. In these stories, we see Sam create the character Captain Allegra as an image of herself and Allegra’s First Mate as an image of her childhood neighbor, Daniel. As a teenager, she writes an entry into the Captain Allegra saga that sees her first mate transform from a man into a woman, signifying the development of her understanding of her sexuality. When we find out about her parents’ rejection of her identity, their cliché homophobia, we understand Sam’s frustration, because we’ve inhabited the space of Sam, but we also understand the parents’ intolerance, because we’ve inhabited their space, too. At a surface level, they are shocked by Sam’s apparent resistance to their Christian upbringing, evident in Bible’s scattered around the house, but more importantly it’s a resistance to their past assumptions about Sam, given her childhood puppy-love for Daniel. Sam is pushing to something new and different from her childhood while Jan and Terry are desperately trying to rekindle a love they shared in Sam’s childhood6. This is not to say Jan and Terry are justified in how they treat their daughter, because they obviously aren’t, but Gone Home allows us to fully understand all actors as complex human beings and come to the conclusion on our own that Sam deserves a more accepting environment. When I reached the climax of Sam’s story, having finally secured the key to the attic, after I had heard Lonnie was gone and Sam was left home alone, I was scared, as if the game had returned to the status of horror game I originally ascribed it. She wasn’t welcome in her own home or school and the only other person on her island of tolerance had left her alone. I thought

6 It also may be notable that Terry’s only prior interaction with same-sex sexual acts was when he was abused by his Uncle; I would hope Terry would not be bigoted enough to consciously believe homosexuality somehow leads to sexual violence, but it’s not unlikely this major life event may have colored his view of LGBT people.

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that at best we’d find Sam crying in that attic but at worst hanging, finding a permanent escape from her life, a scene all too common for LGBT peoples. I’m glad that wasn’t what I found in the attic, though the possibility still haunts me. Instead, Lonnie didn’t go to basic training; she came back, packed up Sam’s things, and they ran away together. It’s not really a happy ending; Sam still had to leave her family, Lonnie abandoned a life in the military she had been dreaming of, they have no money, no real plan, but the game ends with hope, a hope that everything will be okay, one day. At its time of release, back in 2013, the game saw a lot of resistance from certain online communities. At the height of the gay marriage “debate” and just before the reached its peak, Gone Home was the perfect game for a certain kind of straight white male ‘gamer’ to hate, along with Zoë Quinn’s Depression Quest. They hated the game because it “forced” LGBT issues onto the player and, most notoriously, because it apparently wasn’t even a game. Gone Home is obviously, without question, a game; it’s an adventure game full of interactive elements and puzzles, with the inherent analog choice of 3D environment exploration. There are clear goals, feedback systems, rules, and voluntary participation; one can clearly immerse oneself in the magic circle of Gone Home and pursue the goals of understanding what happened in this house, getting to the attic, unlocking the safe in the basement, or even delivering Christmas Duck to his ‘spot’. Critics who claim Gone Home isn’t a game might just be excessively ignorant of the history of game systems and their many forms but I fear something more nefarious is at play; Gone Home is not the kind of media they want as part of their medium. Unsurprising to those familiar with the premises of the Gamergate scandal, people resisted Gone Home because it was a sign that their sacred space had been invaded. How is it that we could get a non-violent game with a teenage girl protagonist, dealing with LGBT issues, where intolerance is the primary antagonist? This is not for GAMERS. Gone Home met resistance for the same reason a teenage troll would assume there’s no way Sam grew up playing Street Fighter; a problem of visibility led sexist, xenophobic men to believe they own video games, and Gone Home is an unjust weapon in a thriving culture war. The more bold of this online army of trolls may go on to claim the second typical critique of Gone Home; it forces players to accept progressive politics around LGBT issues, as SJW propaganda. It’s here that I actually have to agree with the disgusting troll; Gone Home does make the player manifest tolerance, though not through propaganda. Good games can’t be propaganda7, since their primary artistic method is analysis and synthesis; good games can only help the player pursue truth.

7 This is part of a topic for another paper; though games may contain propaganda, games themselves cannot be propaganda, since they exist as aestheticized philosophy. In other words, calling a game propaganda would be like calling Socrates a sophist.

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Gone Home is about prejudice: the prejudices we come into this haunted-looking house with, the prejudices we have as players of games, the prejudices we have against the writers of genre-fiction like Terry, the prejudices we have against women like Jan who pursue extra-marital affairs, and, of course, the prejudices we have against LGBT people like Sam and Lonnie. Since the game doesn’t exactly wear its narrative on its sleeves, it’s entirely possible, at least before games media around the game blew up, for someone to play Gone Home and believe it was a horror game. Throughout the game, this player would overcome their prejudices and understand the true nature of the game’s systems in the same way they would move to understand that Terry’s genre fiction isn’t shallow but instead a deep, autobiographical personal struggle, and understand that Jan isn’t some cartoonish villain for pursuing an affair. In this player, the ludic experience and narrative experience mirror each other. I find the critique that Gone Home isn’t for GAMERS to be particularly ridiculous because the game actually requires you have a certain level of games literacy to achieve the intended experience. As you enter the house, you are given the choice to either head up the stairs in front of you to the house’s second floor or head left to explore the rest of the house. The game’s narrative actually starts to your left; if you go up the staircase, you will start halfway through the narrative, likely incredibly confused. To a GAMER, this is never an issue; years of scanning environments for collectibles have conditioned them to always explore environments left to right, inspecting everything on one level before moving upwards, as to ensure they don’t miss anything8. This is one of the few places I may actually suggest an improvement to Gone Home; though a player’s prejudice leading them to experience the narrative in a certain way is definitely thematically relevant, it would be beneficial to lead players to the left in some way, regardless of learned biases, so that everyone can experience the narrative in order. Perhaps a fuse could have blown in the upstairs hallway and players will have to fix it in the left side of the house before they could see clearly upstairs; this isn’t technically a total barrier to choosing to go upstairs first, preserving player choice between these two options, but it would greatly encourage players to find the game’s intended narrative sequence. Gone Home is a game built for people who play games, which include the huge population of queer women who have always been playing games as well as the more typically represented straight white male GAMER9. I am, myself, a straight white man10, and I reject the premise by those sexist critics that Gone Home isn’t for us. Gone Home is most definitely for us, especially the most bigoted amongst us; Gone Home is for the GAMERS.

8 I hadn’t even imagined it was possible to experience the narrative out of order until I watched a friend who doesn’t often play games start up Gone Home and immediately walk up the stairs.

9 I tend to use the term GAMER in all caps because I’m not a fan of it and I want it to look awkward in my sentences. It seems to exist to exclude: either to exclude people who play games from the rest of society, as some unique brand of dorky freaks, or as we saw in the Gamergate event, as a term to refer to an in-group that excludes anyone who isn’t white, male, or straight in online gaming communities. At this point, I typically only use the term when discussing the online abusers behind Gamergate, their fans, and their apologists.

10 “Let me white-man-splain social justice, you guys!” – me in too many philosophy papers.

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I was once one of those sexist, homophobic trolls. I was raised in a conservative home in a conservative town, and I had adopted some notably intolerant beliefs. No doubt, I could have become a Gamergate apologist, having used online communities on Xbox Live throughout my adolescence as safe havens to meet other people like me, presumably white presumably straight young men, with whom I could crack the occasional ill-informed joke about feminists on Tumblr or call out any and all perceivably non-masculine action of my peers as gay. I was sixteen when Gone Home came out. I had just discovered Ayn Rand, had a knack for defending George Zimmerman, and held a lot of hatred for gay people, under the guise of “religious freedom”. I probably wasn’t likely to play Gone Home on my own but Marty Sliva and Greg Miller11, online games media personalities then associated with IGN, recommended everyone play the game with the explicit instruction to go in blind without reading anything about it. So, I did. Gone Home challenged my prejudices. From the start, I empathized with Sam; I found her outcast story relatable but more importantly, inhabiting her home and finding her personality in her belongings forced me to understand her as a human being. As she began to discover her sexuality through her relationship with Lonnie, I never doubted her feelings were genuine or thought she had somehow chose to be the way she is, but I kept hoping this was a horror game, if only to change the subject; it was a beautiful love story and that’s what made it so uncomfortable, so inconsistent with what I had believed up to that point. When I heard what Sam’s parents said about this all being “a phase”, I got so angry, not just with Jan and Terry, but with myself. I would have been right at home with their brand of intolerance. When I got the key to the attic, I cried12. It wasn’t just that I thought their love story was coming to an end; I thought for sure I would find Sam’s dead body in that attic, having committed suicide to escape from a world that refused to accept her, a world that I had contributed to with my own intolerance. I thought Sam was dead and I had killed her. Needless to say, I was relieved when I reached the true ending to the game; I had a second chance. Sam and Lonnie hoped for a comfortable, more tolerant future and I could at least try to support that. I didn’t totally change overnight but Gone Home started a journey of reevaluating my core beliefs, liberating me from my harmful biases. I’ve played the game dozens of times since then, re-purchasing it every time it comes to a new platform, revisiting the virtual space where I grew up. Gone Home is why I study games. My experience with it is the medium at its best; games are not just a new interactive means of traditional storytelling, they are systems that create spaces for us to analyze and synthesize objects and actions in a pursuit of understanding. Games don’t just teach us things; they force us to teach ourselves. I’m thankful Gone Home made me teach myself how to be a better person.

11 I would love to personally thank both of these men, along with the entire staff of Fullbright, one day.

12 Imagine what 15-year-old me on Xbox Live would say.

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