Last summer I led a six-week online course on Identity in Video Games and Online Gaming Communities. After I had my students play and discuss a game about two teenage girls falling in love and running away together, I observed some objections that deserve further reflection.
For the first two weeks of the course we confronted the following fundamental but complicated questions: “what is a game?” and “what is the relationship between the game developer/author and the game player?” To guide my students’ thinking I had them play two of game designer Davey Wreden’s narrative experiments (or are they games?)–The Stanley Parable and The Beginner’s Guide. In The Stanley Parable players embody the role of the titular character, a disaffected worker who experiences an existential crisis at his banal office job where he perfunctorily presses whatever buttons his 1990s-era office monitor tells him to. As players roam a depressingly familiar office building haunted by empty cubicles and the faint buzz of electricity in the walls, a comic narrator describes or anticipates Stanley’s every decision. Occasionally the narrator will try to coax Stanley in one direction, but the player can guide him in the opposite while the narrator adapts to the unexpected (and totally programmed) detour. The object of the game, which takes up to two hours to complete, is to find as many of the seventeen endings–some very well-hidden–as the player can. Endings range from bleak and depressing to humorous and uplifting, yet because the sole object is to capture all the narrative threads the game resists giving the player any sense of closure. Instead, it acts both as a meditation on the existential implications of a player perfunctorily inputting commands so the game responds in kind (who is in control?), and a subversive commentary on all of what we’ve come to expect at the end of a story (resolution, contentment, a neat package).
The second week students played Wreden’s more thematically challenging follow up, The Beginner’s Guide, which is a narrative experiment about the relationship between the game developer (or artist) and the player (or the person who consumes the art). Here, Wreden himself acts as both museum guide and unreliable narrator while the player, a nameless spectator, navigates a series of micro-games or interactive art pieces crafted by a man named Coda, an ostensibly troubled aspiring game designer who Wreden met at a game developer’s conference in California. Wreden orders the games chronologically–progressing from amateurish experiments to depressive false starts–to create a narrative thread of his own design about an ambitious artist descending into madness. One soon gets the impression that Wreden has developed an unhealthy obsession with Coda’s art. He maps his own desires onto each game in order to frame Coda as his romanticized ideal of a troubled and struggling artist. It backfires. At the end of The Beginner’s Guide, Wreden subjects the player to “The Tower,” a severe and imperially oppressive game world of low-polygon, boxy, and gray structures. Here, players find themselves trapped by prohibitive game mechanics that stop their progress at every turn–an invisible maze that transports the player back to the beginning should they touch a wall, a dead end room with a door that only opens when somebody (certainly not the player) flips an inaccessible switch on the other side, and a five-digit lock with no combination in sight. Wreden, of course, intervenes and modifies the game design so the player can advance. Fed up with Wreden’s invasion of his privacy, Coda nests a terse demand at the end of “The Tower” that Wreden leave him alone and stop selfishly altering his games.
Unlike The Stanley Parable, which is a humorous take on agency and control that gives the player free rein to explore the rendered environment even as the narrator attempts in vain to exert his will upon the player, The Beginner’s Guide is serious, linear, and totalitarian. The first game is easy to stomach. It’s funny, intellectually fulfilling, beautifully written, and delivers its dark existential themes in small doses. In the end, it provokes us with its tongue-in-cheek design quirks and shows us the blueprints. But we’re kept at arm’s length from the designer himself, who remains contentedly silent and cedes all messaging to a narrator who hilariously believes he has all the control but is, ironically, part of the design.
By contrast, when I first played The Beginner’s Guide years ago it reminded me of Roland Barthes’ seminal essay, “The Death of the Author,” in which Barthes argues that our tendency to read an author’s intentions into a work of literature (and by extension, film) is misguided. He argues not only that the creator and the work are different, but that our insistence on merging the two limits our engagement with the work. It’s easy enough to apply this logic to video games. We’re left wondering who is the real creator of the games in The Beginner’s Guide, since Wreden’s narcissistic auto-narrator has stolen and modified all of Coda’s micro-games and cut-and-pasted them next to one another like lines in a heavily-revised poem. Wreden makes alterations, determines the direction, tells the player what to think, and confiscates all agency from the player–a nameless spectator beholden to the whims of an unreliable developer. It matters less whether Coda really exists and more that the player reflexively wonders. These could be Wreden’s games. Or they could be Coda’s. Or both. In any case, intention and result dissociate.
As expected, my students’ reflections on both games were incisive. They noted much of what I observe above. Most were comfortable calling The Stanley Parable a game, arguing that it fit, if a little uneasily, into Jesper Juul’s six criteria that he argues have to be met before something can reasonably be called a “game.” The criteria are:
1.) A rule-based formal system;
Jesper Juul, Half Real: Video Games Between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005), 6-7
2.) with variable and quantifiable outcomes;
3.) where different outcomes are assigned different values;
4.) where the player exerts effort in order to influence the outcome;
5.) the player feels emotionally attached to the outcome;
6.) and the consequences of the activity are optional and negotiable.
While it is tempting to dismiss Stanley Parable as a non-game for failing to conform to the second rule, as a couple of my students did, one could also argue that finding all the endings in fact constitutes “variable and quantifiable outcomes.” As expected with The Beginner’s Guide, students had a more difficult time calling it a game, since criteria two, three, and arguably four do not describe the experience (though it’s important to note that Juul’s definition may require some modification). With but a few exceptions, my students found both games narratively rich and emotionally complex. By the end of week two I found myself agreeing with most of my students.
I parted with many of my students by week three after their play through of Gone Home. On the surface, Gone Home is a story based in the year 1995 about a 20-year-old woman named Katie arriving back to the United States from a year of travel abroad only to find that her mother Janice, father Terrence, and little sister Samantha (known in-game as “Sam”) have abandoned the home they moved into less than a year before. As Katie/the player explores the interior of the Greenbriar Mansion bequeathed to her family by her deceased uncle, Oscar, she finds notes, magazines, tapes, bills, correspondence, locker combinations, half-written stories, and homework assignments scattered around the mansion. These disposable or sentimental fragments build a narrative about what happened to her family over the intervening year.
Any player would be forgiven for suspecting that something sinister happened to Katie’s family. A storm rages outside. All the lights have been turned off, yet the living room television is tuned to a forever-repeating weather warning. The home is in disarray–paper strewn everywhere, video game consoles unplugged from their outlets, a tent fort in the living room. Abandoned familiar spaces is a common environmental design used by developers of horror games. This is because familiarity can easily become terrifying. What happens, after all, when the home–an ostensibly safe space–transforms suddenly into a nightmare?
The difference is that here, the developers play off of our expectation that something terrible has happened to Katie’s family so they can perform a magic trick. As players explore the mansion, they discover not that the family had been killed, or that a haunting drove them out, but that in a desperate attempt to salvage their ailing relationship, Terrence and Janice left on vacation. Meanwhile, Sam, the game’s central character study, forged an unexpected romantic relationship with her classmate, Lonnie, and used Terrence and Janice’s vacation as an opportunity to run away together. Sam and Lonnie are teenage girls tortured by the social expectation that they fall in line and indulge heteronormative lifestyles. According to notes and correspondence left in the open, Terrence acted as authoritarian enforcer of this status quo and insisted on surveiling his daughter and Lonnie after he discovered their relationship. In that sense, Terrence is an embodiment of these social expectations. As a small act of resistance to Terrence, Sam and Lonnie express their budding feminist identities through their shared love of storytelling, video games, music, and art. They produce and distribute a feminist zine, earning them the scrutiny of their school teachers, classmates, and parents; they listen to the same riot grrrl punk (a popular genre of the 90s for its themes of feminist empowerment) at live venues; and they collaborate to write short stories starring versions of themselves–metaphors for the brand of resistance they embody.
One could argue that the developers never really pulled a bait-and-switch, but instead merely redefined the haunted house. Why should we fixate on literal ghosts when the traces a family leaves behind are ghostly in their own right? In a way, the game’s central conceit–the home–is haunted by the absence of a traumatized family. It is haunted by the evidence of trauma left behind.
I expected some resistance to Gone Home for its story about two young women falling in love. After all, in 2018, twenty-three years removed from the game’s setting, our country is still confronting institutional violence against LGBTQ+ bodies. Our art struggles still to ally with widespread acts of resistance to that violence. Some students are therefore likely to feel uncomfortable swimming in these uncharted waters. What I had not expected, however, was the objection that, unlike Stanley Parable and The Beginner’s Guide, Gone Home is neither a game nor a rich narrative experiment. A common refrain from students was that Gone Home‘s bait-and-switch made the game feel manipulative and cliched, even offensive. Some argued that it compromised Gone Home‘s narrative integrity and relegated it to yet another story about queer women falling in love (in truth, I’m at a loss for other games with similar stories). Notably, save for a few students who were moved by Gone Home and, in two cases, personally identified with it, students rarely chose to discuss the game’s social justice themes directly.
I confronted these objections with the following challenges:
- Are there any other narrative experiments like Gone Home that pull a similar bait-and-switch?
- In response to the objection that Gone Home isn’t a real game, both The Stanley Parable and The Beginner’s Guide are measurably less complex. Neither game enables the player to open doors, or solve puzzles, or pick up objects. In both cases, the player is limited to walking around a small arena. They’re even spoon fed narrative arcs and told explicitly what each game intends to prove. With Gone Home, on the other hand, the player can solve puzzles, open doors, rotate objects, and unlock complicated interfaces. How do we reconcile the contention that The Stanley Parable, a less complex game mechanically, is a game, while Gone Home, a more complex game mechanically, is not?
Gone Home made many of my students uncomfortable. I can venture some guesses as to why. Shira Chess argues queer video games have the potential to subvert the traditional Freytag model of narrative, which moves from “inciting event, rising action, leading towards a climax, and then ultimately a falling action.” This model, she argues, privileges male sexual pleasure–a single, ultimate climax–as opposed a series of delayed climaxes. Video games like Gone Home are, instead, “constantly submerged in the story’s middle” that “revels in queer process: It allows for a space that is not defined by a single, ultimate climax but a multitude of climaxes that are not intent on necessarily finding an end.”
One could argue that both Stanley Parable and The Beginner’s Guide fall under this new queer narrative model, to a degree. However, the former more readily mirrors a series of self-contained mini-narratives, each with an individual climax and falling action that adheres more closely to the Freytag model. The Beginner’s Guide, meanwhile, is an entirely linear interactive narrative that offers the player little control. It also has a clear climax and endpoint–falling action–during which Coda finally confronts Wreden and the game ends abruptly.
Naomi Clark writes that Gone Home‘s stripped-down, almost anti-climactic storytelling techniques make players uncomfortable because they exploit players’ expectations that the game will be a first-person adventure (or shooter?) in a haunted house. By depriving players of such pleasures associated with familiar horror tropes and replacing them with a spare story about two young women falling in love, Gone Home enacts a kind of betrayal through its bait and switch. Other scholars like Merrit Kopas have written poignant personal reflections on Gone Home‘s insights about coming of age as a young queer woman, and praises the game for attracting heretofore untapped audiences.
The Stanley Parable, on the other hand, is easier to digest. Existential and dreary though it is at its core, Wreden tempers the darkness with levity, and players are lifted up as a result. Our struggle is Stanley’s struggle because we live that darkness–we ask ourselves whether we’re just biding our time until our reality expires–and a cubicled office is the most apt symbol to illustrate that collective despair. The Beginner’s Guide, by contrast, offers no such lightness, opting instead for a linear and oppressive meditation on artistic obsession and ruthless ambition. Many of us find ourselves–as I and most of my students did–identifying with both Wreden and Coda, even if we want to distance ourselves from their more harmful impulses. But Gone Home conforms to no such universalizing pretense, hopelessness, or dread. Simple though it is, Gone Home mounts a far more specific and challenging cultural critique of the ubiquitous patriarchal gaze (embodied in Katie and Sam’s father, Terrence) that imprisons LGBTQ+ people in the closet once they have bravely exposed themselves to the world. That re-closeting effectively erases their identities, and in a way we’re all responsible for reinforcing those systems in our refusal to confront them. It makes sense such themes would cut some so deep, so we don’t confront them. Instead, it is easier to dismiss Gone Home as not a game, or narratively cliche.