Unfamiliar Feminine Spaces in Gone Home’s Environmental Storytelling

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Bednorz Magdalena
2020 DiGRA ’20 – Proceedings of the 2020 DiGRA International Conference: Play Everywhere

Spatiality of digital environments, including video games, is not only one of the defining aspects of the medium (Murray 2001), but also an aspect through which medium-specific types of narratives can be communicated to the audience. It allows for environmental (or diegetic) storytelling – a narrative method in which the story originates from exploration (Carson 2000; Peirce 2007; Smith and Worch 2010), in which the player traverses the game space and discovers pieces of information in the form of artifacts and elements of the environment. Among the games which broadly employ this type of storytelling is The Fullbright Company’s first-person adventure exploration game Gone Home (2013). In the game, the player assumes the role of Katie, who returns home after a year abroad only to find her family house deserted. By spatial exploration focused mainly on searching the house, the player, through Katie, can solve the mystery and discover the story of coming of age, discovering one’s sexuality, and coping with the aftermath. Doing so requires interacting with objects placed within the house—they seem to work as a conduit of the narrative, not only informing of the recent events by themselves (e.g. notes, pictures), but also occasionally triggering additional audio-narration.

 

Three Shadowed Dimensions of Feminine Presence in Video Games

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Cosima Rughiniș Răzvan Rughiniș Toma Elisabeta
2016 DiGRA/FDG '16 - Proceedings of the First International Joint Conference of DiGRA and FDG

Representations of femininity in video games and other media are often discussed with reference to the most popular games, their protagonists and their sexist predicament. This framing leaves in shadow other dimensions. We aim to identify some of them and to open a broader horizon for examining and designing femininity and gender in games. To this end we look into games with creative portrayals of feminine characters, diverging from the action-woman trope: The Walking Dead, The Path, and 80 Days. We talk in dialogue with scholars, but also with a digital crowd-critique movement for films and games, loosely centered on instruments such as the Bechdel-Wallace test and the TV Tropes.org wiki. We argue that the central analytical dimension of female character strength should be accompanied by three new axes, in order to examine feminine presence across ages, in the background fictive world created by the game, and in network edges of interaction.