My post for this week is going to be something a little different from previous weeks. I’ll be using this opportunity to introduce everyone to a particular game that relates to some of the questions we have been pursuing this semester–Gone Home (2013, PC/Mac) by indie game company Fullbright.
Gone Home is a first-person exploration game that tells the story of Kaitlin, a college student who returns home to find her family curiously missing. 
Kaitlin explores the house trying to find out what has happened to her family, and discovers quite a bit about them while doing so. Without revealing too much, the game has become noteworthy for its endearing portrayal of LGBTQ characters and their struggles.
What makes Gone Home so interesting in regards to our course is its focus on discovering and encountering the minds of other characters through the objects they have left behind. As we read in Bailenson’s “The Virtual Laboratory” for this week, “virtual behavior is, in fact, ‘real'” (94). Through a series of experiments with virtual reality, Bailenson and his team were able to show that “agents” and avatars encountered in virtual spaces are perceived in much the same way actual people are in actual space. I use the term actual space quite intentionally–as anthropologist Tom Boellstorff has noted with his studies in Second Life, it is not very apt to call it “real” space when what happens in both actual and digital spaces is “real”. Bailenson and Boellstorff (amongst many others) have thus shown us that our cognitive processes in virtual/digital realities are not so different from such processes in the actual world.
But Gone Home presents a different case. So we encounter avatars similar to how we encounter real people, but what happens when there are no avatars to encounter? What happens when those avatars are absent, and all we have is whatever they have left behind (or, to complicate things, what the designers created and made to look left behind)? We still get a sense of character in Go
ne Home, but that character must be discovered as part of an emergent narrative found and created by the player. I suggest that we use similar theory of mind processes to construct and interpret characters in Gone Home, but that these processes have been broken up. In other words, we are still encountering minds, but minds that have been fragmented into different objects that can be discovered or ignored by the player. This necessarily requires space–space for the objects to dwell in, and for the player to move in.
A further point to consider in Gone Home is that every act becomes a narrative one (a significant point in the game narrative study our group is designing). Unified character has been removed, and in its absence character must be recovered through interaction with objects. Because of this, even the simple act of moving within the game world has narrative import by virtue of navigating the space and objects that comprise the entirety of the game’s story. Play in Gone Home is narrative, exactly what our group is trying to prove in other games.
These are just a few threads to pursue as an introduction to the game. We will play Gone Home together in class on Tuesday–I look forward to seeing what everyone has to say about it!
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