Through audio journals, handwritten letters and notes, you learn the beautiful and intimate details of Sam’s relationship with Lonnie, and how she came to embrace her identity and break away from the restrictions of her conservative, religious upbringing. Curiously, it’s the player character who exhibits the least personality and the fewest defining characteristics out of any of the family members, while her sister Sam, the black sheep of the family, occupies the central focus of the game. By contrast with the rest of the family, you learn very little about Katie ’ s history, other than her somewhat conventional status as the model daughter who’s mature, good at school and sports, and doesn’t cause trouble for her parents. You uncover a history of abuse perpetrated by your Great Uncle Oscar who died in this very house, leading Sam’s classmates to call it “the psycho house on Arbor Hill” and convincing her that the house is haunted. You find out about Mom’s budding flirtation with a park ranger. You stumble upon Dad’s stash of porno magazines, liquor bottles, and rejection letters from book publishers. The only time you even hear any of the family’s voices is when you stumble upon something of Sam’s that triggers an audio journal entry containing insight into her social struggles with high school peers, her newly discovered sexual identity, and her secret lesbian love affair with a rebellious military punk girl named Lonnie.Īs you explore this deceptively massive house, going from room to room and unlocking secret passageways that lead to even more rooms (a gatekeeping mechanism used to establish some sense of narrative linearity), you discover the personal domains of each of the family members and get to know their secrets, worries, pleasures, and vices. But these seemingly insignificant domestic curiosities actually matter a great deal to any player’s understanding of this family that you only see in photographs and never interact with and will resonate strongly with players who grew up in the same time period, increasing their identification with the protagonist. None of these things provides you with any new information specific to your goal of discovering what happened to the family in your absence. Taped to the door is a foreboding letter from her younger sister Sam, asking Katie not to go looking for evidence of where she has gone or why she has left. It’s late at night in the middle of a loud thunderstorm, and the front door is locked. At the beginning of the game, player character Katie Greenbriar arrives home after a year spent in Europe at a new house to which her family has moved in her absence. So, if you haven’t yet played the game, you should do so before reading this piece or it won’t really retain the same power. I don’t like to do this because Gone Home is one of those games where knowing too much about it in advance could ruin the experience of a first play-through. Now, before I get too far into this paper, I should warn you that I’m going to spoil the ending of the game. Examining Gone Home from a narrative archaeological perspective in relation to the notion of haunting, I argue that the house on Arbor Hill is a haunted place in the absence of any literal ghosts. The primary player action approximates a version of what new media artist and researcher Jeremy Hight calls “narrative archaeology,” or the process of uncovering personal documents and ephemera connected to a specific place and combining them to piece together the most intimate stories of that place. In a nostalgic Pacific Northwest setting circa Portland 1995, the player must rely on analog media artifacts, such as handwritten letters and cassette tapes rather than a digital information trail, to fill in the blanks of a rich family history with more than its share of ghosts. The player is given one task: to investigate the contents of an eerie old house and discover what happened to the family who mysteriously disappeared from it. With few recognizable game mechanics and virtually no traditional character interaction or plot development, Gone Home is a first-person “story exploration video game,” in the words of its developers.

In August of 2013, independent game studio The Fullbright Company released its debut game, Gone Home, to immediate and widespread critical acclaim. She conducts her research with both the Critical Media Lab and the Games Institute at UWaterloo. Lauren Burr is a PhD candidate in the English Department at the University of Waterloo, studying and creating critical locative and pervasive media.

Good haunted space stories