Are video games the future of storytelling? 'Gone Home'
- rebeccaphillips-iad
- Nov 15, 2014
- 2 min read
Extracts from an article in the January issue of Dazed & Confused.
‘It’s a first-person game in which you are a 20-something woman in the 1990s who, after a year abroad, comes back to her family’s new home in Portland, Oregon, to find everyone gone with no explanation. Playing it, you explore the abandoned house and inspect objects, play mixtapes, and read books, notes and manuscripts in hopes of reconstructing what happened to your family.’
- even watching the clip above I feel immersed, there is tension, a real need to find out what happens next, just like the need to turn the page in a book. It is also the problem solving element, finding clues to lead you to the next stage, we want answers to the questions and that keeps you hooked.
‘Really, it’s less a game than an interactive fiction.’
‘The world is immersive and domestic.’
- it is creating that drama and trouble that we love in a story.
‘In playing, as in reading, we become the unnamed protagonist. This is what we most want from story – to share a oneness, to inhabit a consciousness, to play a role.’
- with a book you are riding with the protagonist, waiting to see their next move, with a game, you ARE the protagonist (or against?) you are the character so you take on the role completely. See post on interview with G.Rigby.
‘But the stories we love the most are not the most sweeping or spectacular, with the most kickass effects, but the most intimate.’
‘The better question isn’t what these technologies can do for us but how might they facilitate intimacy.’
‘I’m not advocating the cellphone novel. I’m thinking of something more interactive and more intimate that hasn’t yet been done. Maybe you’ll be the one to do it. How might the next story we will come to love give us this old intimacy in a new way?’
Written by five-novel author and poet Ander Monso – January 2014
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