As was easily predicted, many gamers have accused Gone Home of not really being a game (it’s one of the most common opening complaints in the Metacritic user reviews of the game for instance).
I personally consider myself firmly in “yes it is a game” camp, but I’ve also seen a lot of responses that are similar to the following tweet:
Cut out and affix to screen while playing @GoneHomeGame to minimize cognitive dissonance. pic.twitter.com/p1oxDIWzOu
— Steven Frank (@stevenf)
and I kind of think some of the defenders of the game are missing something important as well. The argument is that the reason many gamers don’t consider Gone Home a real game is that it is not the typical violent AAA game one normally associates with first person games. But is this really the case?
Take Fez as a counter example. Like Gone Home it is a game with no violence in which the player navigates and interacts with an environment, in this case to collect a number of items and solve logical puzzles. Yet, if you look at the the Metacritic user reviews for Fez, while you will find people who think the game is boring, nobody really seems to be arguing that the title doesn’t qualify as a game.
What accounts for this difference? Let me play devils advocate for a moment and point out that when I jotted down my initial reaction to Gone Home, I noted that traditionally video games have a skill or problem solving based component as a major aspect of the game design. More specifically games have traditionally been designed with the goal of providing some sort of challenge to the player. The challenge can be be skill/reflexed based, problem solving based, or even simply based on a system of resource management, but in almost all video games some sort of challenge that is designed to be overcome. I would argue it is this lack of challenge that many gamers are reacting to, not the lack of guns or violence.
Now, I did say above that I do think Gone Home should be considered a game. Without going too deep into the complex argument about what is and isn’t a video game, let me briefly describe why I believe this. First, I think many people get too tied up trying to bind the definition of video game with the root word of game, noting that non-video games pretty much always have a goals and rule sets and stipulating that video games need to have these as well. But I would argue that when you study languages deeply you find that definitions change over time, and the term “video game” has had an independent existence from the root word of “game” for long enough that it’s no longer clear it’s bound by the definition of the later any more than the definition “Secretary General” is determined by the definition of “secretary” or “meter maid” defined by the definition of the world “maid”. Specifically, video games pretty much always (I can’t think of any counter examples) involve the creation of simulated environments, and the forms of these environments generally have a much stronger impact on how we categorize a video game than anything else. This is why we consider both Halo and Portal first person games, while Super Meat Boy and Fez are considered 2D platformers, even though the types of challenges they present to the player (action games vs puzzle games) are very different.
Following from my last point, it should be noted that reflex based action games and problem solving based puzzle games are actually very different types of activities, and both of these are very different than the activity of resource management found in games such as Sim City. It seems a little strange that such a wide breadth of activity can fall under the same classification of video game while a strictly narrative work somehow does not. After all, there is something that does tie all these different types of works together and it is that they all require a some sort of computing device to be experienced. To say that all of the ones designed with some sort (apparently any sort) of challenge is considered a video games but simulations that are designed to primarily focus on a narrative falls into some sort of undefined other category seems a bit bizarre to me.
Finally there is the practical issue of where you want interactive narratives to go if they are not considered video games (and perhaps more importantly, are not sold by video game realtors or discussed in video game focused media). Because like I noted above, these games (and I am going to refer to them as games hereon-in) require some sort of computer to function. Perhaps more importantly they require the same infrastructure that other video games do in order to be distributed to any sort of audience. It’s easy to try to lump them categorically with other forms of narrative media (movies and books etc) but the means for distributing those forms can’t support interactive narrative games, so saying they are not games (and implicitly trying to remove them from the video game space) is basically relegating them non existence.
So in short, yes I think Gone Home (and things like it) should be considered video games. But then why am I taking issue with the reactions like the tweet above? It’s because a lot of supporters of such games are taking the too easy route of accusing mainstream gamers of simply being closed minded about any game that doesn’t involve shooting or stabbing something. But the truth of the matter is that a lot of gamers are actually simply disliking the lack of a challenge component in the game, and are interpreting this dislike by seeing the game as failing to be a game. I think they are wrong in this interpretation but I also think it’s important to see it for what it is if we are going to make any headway in making more space of games like Gone Home to find a home in the video game space.