Recently, by sheer coincidence, I ended up playing Minerva's Den and Gone Home right around the same time.
Even though Minerva's Den, a downloadable add-on for the game BioShock 2, was released in 2010, I only got around to playing it after Irrational Games announced a similar self-contained side story for BioShock Infinite. Hey, this piece of news reminded me, if you supposedly like BioShock so much, why did you fail to play Minerva's Den?
So I downloaded and began playing it, and in the middle of that I got an email with a review code for Gone Home, an indie title made by a four-person team called the Fullbright Company that had won some nominations at this year's Independent Games Festival and was getting a lot of pre-release buzz. So I stopped in the middle of Minerva's Den, played Gone Home, then went back to Minerva's Den to finish it.
And at some point in that back-and-forth, I thought: You know, these games might seem totally different – artsy indie game on one hand, triple-A shooter on the other – but they're actually quite similar! I wonder if anyone else has noticed this?
Then it turned out that instead of being smart, I was actually the last one to the party: The Fullbright Company is made up of the key creative team that made Minerva's Den. Well, how about that.
So what exactly is Gone Home, available for PC today? Well, BioShock is often talked about as an example of "ludonarrative dissonance": an irreconcilable gulf between a game's story and the things the player actually does. Why does every villager in The Legend of Zelda treat Link as a nice young boy when he just chopped down all their grass, broke every pot in their house and stabbed all their chickens?
Gone Home attempts to remove the dissonance. There are lots of games in which you explore someone's house, reading their diaries and learning about them. Only in those games, you also have to shoot people while you do it. In Gone Home, you're just walking through the house and exploring, with only minor challenges thrown in front of you. The joy of playing doesn't come from overcoming game-like challenges or refining your skills; it's about taking in an unfolding story.
Do you suppose that Gone Home is the game that at least some part of BioShock creator Ken Levine wishes he could make? In the world of big-budget games, you've got to have action, or else a substantial group of people would say this isn't even a videogame. BioShock is generally considered to be a better story-game than it is a shooter, but if you're making a $60 game that needs to sell millions of copies just to break even, the action is considered the core of the experience. As good as the story might be, it's still negotiable–the icing, not the cake.
Can the icing be the cake, too?
For me, the answer to how I felt about Gone Home lay submerged in Minerva's Den. Both games really are quite similar; in the BioShock expansion you're exploring a small part of the underwater city Rapture, listening to audio diaries and reading the signs and notes you find lying around to piece together who these characters are and why they're in conflict. I didn't wish that there were enemies in Gone Home; I wished that there were no enemies in Minerva's Den. Every time something started firing at me, I just wanted to kill it as fast as possible so I could get some peace and quiet and keep trudging around the rooms finding more clues to the story.
Or that's what I thought, anyway. Maybe I was misreading the nature of my own experience? There is certainly a strong argument to be made that challenging, gating gameplay can enhance a storyline – that the story would have more impact on the player if he had to expend mental energy to get there in the first place. (I should point out that there was a moment in Minerva's Den that choked me up to an extent that nothing in Gone Home did.)
The dual action and storytelling aspects of a game like BioShock could potentially enhance, rather than distract from each other, although that's still a work in progress for the gaming industry. One way to figure out exactly how to make it work might be to split those two components up and see what happens when they're apart. The Fullbright Company, I think, wanted to find out, so it removed all the cake.
For me, it was a remarkable success. Thinking back on Gone Home's story, I find myself remembering the characters as if they were the players in a novel I'd just finished reading. I feel like I've met them in real life. This is at least partly due to the fact that they live in real life; Gone Home is not a fantasy or sci-fi game, there are no magic powers or technologies that the characters' lives revolve around, just mundane everyday experiences. This, in and of itself, is something we don't often find in any videogames, no matter the genre or gameplay mechanic. To play Gone Home is to come face to face with the realization that videogames are failing because they're not even scratching the surface of what topics they could cover.
The characters also feel real because of Gone Home's elegant design. We never see anyone face to face, they only exist in audio logs, letters, and photographs – things that a lower-budget game like Gone Home can render with 100 percent realistic accuracy. There's no uncanny valley because rather than attempt to create ugly grotesques that are meant to simulate humans, Gone Home creates its people with suggestions and ideas, and in so doing makes them much more powerful presences than they would be if they were all stomping about the house going through canned animations.
So why is Gone Home a game, not a novel or a movie? The feelings of control and of immersion in a world are still powerful forces here (I think Gone Home would be amazing on the Oculus virtual reality headset). Finding things yourself, not having them handed to you, is rewarding. And having to force yourself to go on even as things start to look grim, to climb down the dark steps or turn the blind corner, is riveting and sometimes scary even after you know nothing's going to be shooting at you.
Even so, Gone Home might not satisfy the sort of game player who considers challenging gameplay mechanics is a dealbreaker. But in the fullness of time, even they will benefit from the work the Fullbright Company has done here and that I hope other developers do. By stripping away what some might consider to be essential elements of videogames and attempting to perfect other elements within these deliberate constraints, we will learn more about how to make games.
Then, whoever ends up making the next Minerva's Den will have Gone Home to think about as they build their more "traditional" game, which will be better off for it.
