Go Big Or Go Home

Disclaimer: this article contains spoilers for Gone Home.

Recently, the long-awaited first-person exploration game Gone Home was released. It received stellar reviews for its small-scale, emotionally charged story and its ability to tell that story through environmental detail. The player explores a seemingly empty house and finds out about its inhabitants by inspecting the items they left behind: forms, letters, crumpled notes, drawings, even a scribbled Chun-Li special move list.

As long as the game sticks to its stated intent, it works very well. Even though it doesn’t completely succeed in cramming all this background material into one house in a believable way (it’s hard to imagine why a nine-month old note would still be in a paper bin, and neither is it likely that a married woman would let letters that make mention of her romantic infatuation with a co-worker just lie around the house), it works often enough to at least show the potential of this sort of storytelling.

However, the game lacks the courage of its convictions, and doesn’t believe in its core design enough to let it stand on its own. This is most evident in two design decisions.

First, developers The Fullbright Company deemed it necessary to ratchet up the tension artificially by including the signifiers of a horror story. A thunderstorm rages outside the house while you’re exploring, one of the first things you come across is a panicked voicemail message and there are frequent allusions to the house being haunted in some way. When none of this pays off in any way, the only possible conclusion is that the designers thought the player needed the promise of some supernatural possibility to keep playing, which runs counter to their stated intent and is frankly insulting to the audience.

But the most egregious example of artistic flip-flopping is the ever-present voice-over. In Gone Home, you slowly uncover the story of the player character’s sister, Sam, and her budding romantic relationship with a slightly older girl called Lonnie. It’s an affecting, well-told story, and it tackles themes that no videogame has ever touched before, which is entirely praiseworthy. But instead of respecting the player’s intelligence and letting the story unfold through the objects and documents you uncover yourself, every discovery is accompanied by a non-diegetic, voiced journal entry that painstakingly explains Sam’s situation and feelings. Though these fragments are well-written and very well-acted, their heavy-handed presence can’t help but undermine the strength and importance of the main exploration gameplay. In a game that purports to let the player piece the story together herself, the invasive emotional storytelling deployed by the voice-over feels condescending and self-defeating.

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The game Gone Home is most often likened to in general conversation is The Chinese Room’s Dear Esther, which also uses a voice-over that periodically offers commentary. This is indeed an apt comparison, not so much for the similarities in approach, but for the differences. The reasons why Dear Esther excels where Gone Home fails are twofold:

1.   In Gone Home, the voice-over feels out of place because everything else in the game is directed towards realism. The painstaking work The Fullbright Company did in filling their game with period detail, and making sure the house feels lived in, clashes with the disembodied voice of Samantha. Dear Esther, on the other hand, establishes from the start that its environments are more mindscape than landscape, and in this context the introspective ruminations (which, unlike Gone Home, can be ascribed to the player character himself) make a lot of sense.

2.   Whereas Gone Home uses its voice-over to explain the story, making the player less and less inclined to thoroughly explore their surroundings because the drama is dripfed to them anyway, Dear Esther uses the opposite approach. By keeping the monologues vague and associative, the player’s attention is directed outward – definitive answers aren’t forthcoming in the text, so maybe these wall scribblings, or even these rock formations can offer me some clue?

Great art keeps you guessing; this is a lesson that Dear Esther has internalised. On the other hand, the game can feel cold and distant because it doesn’t offer much of a real human presence to latch onto. This is why many people (myself included) were looking forward to Gone Home’s release with such fervour: here was a game that promised to tell a human, small-scale drama in the way that only games can: by letting the player actively figure it out bit by bit. Considering the fact that Gone Home goes further than any other game before it in making this a reality is certainly deserving of praise; however, it also makes it miserably disappointing that it ultimately betrays its own design principles with its incessant narrative handholding.

It’s not the end of violence, but you can see it from here

(Disclaimer: this article contains major spoilers for The Last Of Us)

Since its release, Naughty Dog’s The Last Of Us has been praised for its unparallelled atmosphere, narrative ambiguity and character development, but also criticised for its propagation of certain storytelling tropes. This analysis takes a look at the way the game deploys and challenges these clichés.

 The medium of videogames is in a transitional period. After years of being dominated by male-focused, violence-heavy narratives, the rise of indie developers and the maturation and diversification of the audience has birthed a vital counter-culture, which has grown so large that it can no longer be ignored by the industry at large.

 More and more, publishers and developers are called upon to rethink their approach to characters, violence and the integration of gameplay and narrative. Lazy tropes are called out, sexism and other nasty prejudices no longer tolerated.

 Unfortunately, the battle is far from won. Though the conversation is starting to change, the adoption of these ideas by AAA developers is moving at a snail’s pace. Though arguably the recent Tomb Raider reboot succeeds in emancipating Lara Croft into a three-dimensional character from her beginnings as a teenager’s sexual fantasy, this victory was tainted by sexist comments by the game’s executive producer and the torture porn imagery within the game itself. And the second blockbuster release of the year, Bioshock Infinite, was deeply problematic on a variety of levels (among them: the narratively dissonant violent gameplay, the portrayal of the game’s black characters and the naivete and subservience of its female protagonist).

 In these tumultuous times, we are confronted with yet another male-led, violent epic, and yet another game in which we’re tasked with protecting a female character: Naughty Dog’s The Last Of Us. The game was released to enormous critical acclaim, but also to justified criticism: do we really need to roleplay as a tormented white man again? Indeed, the introduction to the game confronts us with that most tired of tropes: a female character being killed to serve as grist for the emotional mill of the male protagonist.

 However, as the game progresses, The Last Of Us increasingly challenges the notions of male heroism and exceptionalism it at first seemed to embrace. First off, the adult female characters in the game are, in direct contravention of conventional stereotype, far more capable and less driven by emotion than Joel. Both Tess and Marlene are pragmatic characters with well-defined goals. The contrast with the Joel we meet in the game’s opening chapters is stark: he is an utterly broken man, barely able to get out of bed in the morning. Interestingly, this paints the male presence in the story as far more emotionally dependent than the women: Tess and Marlene must have lost family too, but somehow, they have succeeded in moving on.

 This turns out to be the central theme of the game: Joel’s failure at living without being able to take care of someone, or without being in charge of someone else’s well-being. In essence, it is about Joel’s inability to love selflessly. Time after time, the game underlines this:

 - Joel can’t accept Ellie’s love until she tells him that she depends on him emotionally;
 - in the game’s Winter chapter, Ellie’s independence is presented in direct counterpoint to Joel’s convalescence. Only when she is in danger does Joel recover, only for Ellie to rescue herself;
 - Joel’s most sickening and least hesitant acts of violence (both of them acts of torture) are perpetrated when he’s “rescuing” Ellie;
 - in the Spring chapter, Joel is ready to call this whole “saving humanity” thing off (though he presents it as concern for Ellie); it’s Ellie who makes the choice to go on.

 The ending of the game supports this narrative in no uncertain terms. By pitting the survival of humanity against the survival of the “damsel in distress”, the game makes the selfish nature of Joel’s love crystal clear. From the aforementioned torture scene to the brutal killing of the brain surgeon who’s about to operate on Ellie, his rescue mission transpires in the ugliest way possible. And the worst is saved for last: Joel murders Ellie’s surrogate mother Marlene in cold blood, symbolically ending any female interference in his relationship with his “daughter”. Even Joel’s slow-motion escape reinforces the sense that his actions are more about him “heroically” correcting his past failures than about Ellie.

 The final scene shows the human cost of this monstrous behaviour: in a devastatingly ambiguous conclusion Ellie presses Joel on the truth, but he chooses to lie to her. The conflicting emotions on her face show as much sadness and disappointment as they do relief at her continued survival.

 Joel, in the end, represents the utter failure of a man to change with the times and abandon his traditional role of master and protector. His culturally programmed dependence on being able to fulfill that role makes him cling to it ever more violently, with predictably disastrous results.

 We’re still waiting for an AAA game that does away with the primacy of masculinity and violence altogether, and it's inarguable that the game is partially predicated on the clichés that it works so hard to subvert. But as a critique on the ultimate destructiveness of the “male protector” trope and the way that most games conflate heroism with violence, The Last Of Us represents an important step in the right direction.