Gone Home, Emergent Narrative

Gone Home is an elitist narrative, with its open world complexity merely a costume, to hide the shallow plot. There's no way for you to proceed through the game than a simple A to point B, acceptance of the plot, follow the bread trail and you'll find out what happened.

Gone Home is an open narrative, where its freedom of choice becomes the ultimate agency - you choose what you want to explore, you construct the narrative how you want to. The entire procedure is chaotic, with the simple task of going through a house bringing up all sorts of questions - what does this mean, what's this? Who was that? Why is that here? A strong vignette of mini stories unfolds in front of the audience's mind. There is no straight path to follow, just whatever shape we can make out from the clues.

Hmmmm.... What else has been said?

Cameron Kunzelman from This Cage Is Worms  provides a list of 28 perspectives on the game, ranging from ludo-narrative harmony (which is as buzz wordy as dissonance), to a discourse on abuse. They're all right in their own way about the interpretation of the game. It can be seen as a success, as easily as it can be seen as a disaster.

That's the problem with emergent narrative.

Narrative is always characterised by a beginning, a middle, and an end.

Emergent content, or rather your ability to create content, is limitless, you could go on making suppositions about any particular object or series of events (I'm looking to you causation), with no external pressures because people are innately curious and empathetic.

Now, Gone Home, taking out all the extra features of a 3d engine, a graphical display, voice overs, to the barest elements of plot, you find yourself with a simple tale of going from A to B "What happened in this house," turns into "what happened to my little sister," especially when the high beams of a voice over beat you over the head with the fact that Katie IS THE FOCUS OF THE GAME.

Now is that a bad thing? The game is deeper than it first appears, narrowing its focus down onto one character, don't books do this a lot? Don't they hit you over the head with the use of a Proper Noun or first person viewpoint? Yeah but that's.........

Different is what the emergent aspect is. Although you could liken it to a Roland Barthes analysis of what the audience does to literature, or any theory of character or place (that of being thin, or round characters), but in the end it's just how the reader goes about interpreting the events presented. In this we have our subjective viewpoints upon narrative, ala This Cage Is Worms. The problem with this is that people can only get out of the story, what they're willing to find - be that ludonarrative harmony (ergh! buzzword disdain for another time), or an analysis of social hegemony of white middle class.

What the writer or designer here does is simply present a framework on which the audience can work upon - what's different is that the writers are much more traditional in the way that they provide narrative.
The writers here provides clues, and even outright state (through telling not showing) that these hunches or constructed narratives are right - but not for all of them. In many cases writers (of any kind) will leave grey areas open for interpretation. What they don't do is provide any dynamics to these revelations.
In most videogames, feedback is given instantly on the main plot, through the in-game characters who give the player an almost chorus like analysis of how the narrative. In more gameplay focused games its, health bars and point meters. Gone Home, while it provides us with the tools in which to construct our interpretations, doesn't interact with our discoveries. (This is somewhat ignoring the small combination puzzles, which are of the "find blue key to blue lock" variety).

Gone Home succeeds in both the telling of the narrative of Katie, and through providing a framework for players to explore the rest of the family. The only room for criticism that it has is in the past tense nature of the plot, everything has already happened, and nothing will ever happen - your agency is limited to observing rather than interacting. Though all of that is tied up with the intrinsic nature of stories, we tell them because they're based off events that have already happened - plot is to a large part predetermined, the ending, along with the start pre-written. Though videogames could change that.

Nevertheless, Gone Home is a great narrative game, with the depth that you can delve into its shadowy rooms, there's always a skeleton to be found - (note the allusion to the horror genre *wink wink*). The discourse around it alone has made it an interesting case study for how people respond to narrative in videogames.

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Next up! How I hate the phrase ludonarrative dissonance.

Gameplay and Guttered narrative, XCOM: The Bureau

XCOM: The Bureau isn't the game it was back when it was first shown at E3 2011. Edgy neat, reeking of the Hitchcock Hour and The Prisoner, with an air of survivor horror.

It was, supposedly, going to rock our socks off. It was going to be as great as Firaxis' remake, a real show stopper.

But it wasn't.

It was a well polished tactical 3rd person shooter, as clean shaven and square as any game before it.

It didn't do anything new.

Under the hood it seemed to be a poor man's Mass Effect with none of the scale. A better shooting and gameplay mechanic in ordering your squad with enemies around, but ... it just wasn't enough to tide me over into thinking that it was a good game.

Just a good tactical shooter, not a good game.

The slow motion effects when issuing orders and the cleverness of the AI to flank, to pull back and forth, with the rise and fall of battle, to have cover change in an instant with the movements of the enemy.

It pulled that all off with flying colours. The battles went across the fields, out from streets and into barn houses. Not in any spectacular way, just solid, actions would force enemy aliens to move across from you in a sinister dance of war.

But its story.... it just brought it down to its knees, the whole spectacle of U.S. military bases being blown up, your secret weapon to destroy the alien threat, the lack of any nuanced guerrilla activity, it all just seemed to fall away in the execution.

But there was still that something, a small element of storytelling that makes  it to the end of The Bureau and ties up your technical abilities. Through the presence of the Ethereals (the ascended/incorporeal "good" aliens), or as the game states, through your presence. This clever, player within alien, within character makes the decisions of your character and the divide that he has of different choices all explainable and relevant to the plot.

In probably one of the best immersion/out of nowhere moves, the main character collapses as you're running down a corridor, Carter runs, trying to get away from something. Then, all of a sudden you notice the camera pulling back from Carter, refocusing as a first person viewpoint with four outstretched tentacles. You are the alien creature, pulling the strings of Carter. From then on, the game progresses quickly, Carter refuses to host the alien presence any further and attempts to blow up the facility, the ethereal takes control of another member of the staff and continues to fight off the invading aliens. The conspiracy, along the lines of  Bioshock's (2006) "Would you kindly.." is nice twist in an otherwise boring game.

<I'd have a screenshot here, but the section in question is in this link)

The problem is that it's too little too late. A small reminder of what the game could have been, if the pro-America, freedom or death, linear path hadn't stopped it from becoming the game that it could've been.

Perhaps it was  comment on the very conformist suburbia of America's mid 50s? A homage to the black and white tales of pulp science fiction tales? A satire on America's homeland defence? I don't know, but with that small segment, I almost saw what it could have been.

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Not too much of a deep analysis here, but if I slaved over it, I'd probably end up hating the game. In all fairness it's a solid game, 2K just didn't really go all out on what they wanted - it seems as though marketing or someone smothered it in it's infancy and all we're left with is an oxygen starved shell.

Anyhow, next up Gone Home (since everyone is talking about it, and it has decent characterisation of female characters).