Throughout our time in class we discussed the different aspects of the first person gameplay of Gone Home. Gone Home is an award winning exploration game that was created by Steve Gaynor. The game went on to be very influential because it included a different form of sexuality while also welcoming players of the LGBT community. Gaynor does this by representing lesbians in a narrative that is exploratory, relatable and mysterious. Merritt Kopas describes the game as “This is a video game. About girls in love. That shouldn’t be exceptional in and of itself, but it is. And because it’s a video game about a big empty house and because it’s a story about girls in love, anyone who has any familiarity with either of those genres is going in expecting the worst to happen. Because seriously, setting a lesbian love story in a creepy old mansion is the perfect confluence of terrible… So you’re moving through the house, and you’re finding these audio journals from your little sister, Sam, telling you all about this girl she’s met named Lonnie and how cool she is. And you’re kind of on edge because the lights are flickering and every once in a while
the house creaks in the storm and you don’t know what’s going to
come first, the beginnings of a lesbian tragedy suicide sequence or
something jumping out at you from a dark corner. And then there’s this scene in a bathroom on the second floor. I’d entered the room from the hallway coming out of Sam’s bedroom, having just read a few ominous-sounding notes from her. In the bathroom you turn on the light and immediately notice that there’s blood in the bathtub, and your heart races because this is a video game and you’re exploring an empty house on a dark and stormy night and nobody is around for some reason and you’re just waiting for it to turn out that, surprise(!), everyone is dead”. Furthermore, conveying the mental environment of an individual who has to be discrete about their sexuality due to family and friends. Although the narrative may come off as cliche, it still possesses relatable factors that many gamers have been through in real life.

Additionally, gamers like Kopas enjoy the possibilities that come with developers creating more games that are in the same genre as Gone Home. Obviously it’s difficult to fulfill the needs of single gamer, but with more LGBT representation in gaming brings hope for more. Narratives will need to be more diverse and relatable to others that seek this type of gaming. For example, Kopas mentions that “But ultimately Gone Home left me hopeful rather than grieving. Hopeful about storytelling and games, and hopeful about my own experiences. Because obviously we can’t go back home, into
our pasts, and change things—like Katie, all we can do is observe, witness, turn things over in our heads until they make a kind of sense that we can work with. But we can write new stories, ones where girls in love don’t die tragic deaths and where big empty houses are scary but ultimately safe and where you can have a teenage girl romance at twenty-five, or thirty-five, or whenever you want to”. Overall, it’s essential to acknowledge the effects of gender-based narrative that can affect the overall gameplay experience for users of the LGBT community.

Works Cited

Kopas, M. (n.d.). On Gone Home.