I have limited time this week, but I can’t get this off my mind so I’ll put this here as a placeholder for now with some preliminary thoughts. The game Gone Home is a wonderful piece of media.

Developed by The Fullbright Company, Gone Home is a coming of age story explored through the medium of a adventure exploration game. You – the player – have basic controls such as walking, picking up, and inspecting objects, and the story expresses itself through this interaction. Some claim it would have worked just as well if not better as a film, or a novel. But there’s something special about the video game experience that few other mediums can claim to do.

When you elect to start the game by clicking ‘New Game’ you are broadcasting an express desire to put yourself in the first person – hence first person genre – and to become a part of the story. At a glance this seems fairly straightforward; a fairly mundane observation, but think, how much closer are you to the narrative through this decision? You – the individual – have elected to enter this diagetic world and hence you are explicitly taking a step toward a narrative that, in other mediums, is otherwise distanced from you. In essence, you remove the distance between reader and narrative; you become the narrative.

Now here lies a question of agency in games that is better left for a much broader stretch of discussion, so I’ll refrain from delving too far into it, but for the sake of an argument I would gladly claim that you are not in control of the narrative. What’s more important however is that you are a part of the narrative. Sure, the writers have already laid out the story and built it into a world, but who drives the narrative? Like dialogue in a film acts as the cause for an effect, or a reader turns the page to proceed through a story, you are acting as the driving force for the game’s narrative and not only are you propelling it, but you are activating it and switching on the not always linear narrative.

The game allows you to explore a house and hence the story within, but there is more than one story. Here you do have agency and it is you who decides whether this narrative comes to light or not because you could just as easily breeze through the central storyline and ignore any other narratives. Essentially, you have control over how much of this world comes alive.

I’ll leave my thoughts there for now to move onto more important matters for the time being but in the mean time if you haven’t played this game yet – or don’t play video games at all – I would highly recommend this game. It handles a humbling storyline of a young girl growing up in a Christian family (hardly groundbreaking, but still a pleasantl story) in a succinct and fluent manner. The game has received perfect reviews from multiple major media outlets (I don’t totally agree with them but hey, whatever they wanna think) and currently has a very high average score on MetaCritic: a user review aggregator.

You can buy the game here for the cost of a movie ticket and, again, I recommend it without hesitation.