Gone Home In The Classroom

Gone Home by Fullbright is one of the most inclusive stories in video game history, and my students played it together to talk about tropes in video games.

The students even got to visit Fullbright and ask the game developers questions!

First, some context:

I was leading a game design summer camp and ended up with a dozen boys - no girls enrolled. I wanted to treat it like an affinity group for male gamers.

The tech industry has always been a major cultural battlefield for women, due to push back and misogynistic attacks from male industry folk.

As the Daily Dot reported, the largest demographic in gaming is adult women, although the stories they encounter are largely dominated by male characters, while female characters are often objectified, typecast, victimized, and/or otherwise marginalized - usually non-playable.

These gender tropes are deconstructed so well in the series Tropes Vs Women in Video Games by YouTube channel Feminist Frequency, that it has earned worldwide attention with 200,000 subscribers and 20 million views to date.

Gone Home, on the other hand, stars a young woman, includes LGBT characters, and constructs a narrative that cleverly sets the player up to expect one kind of archetypal story by using several tropes of the "survival horror" genre, only to find a very different story that nimbly unfolds within 2 or 3 hours of gameplay. 

The game received 7 perfect scores from sites as reputable as Giant Bomb and Polygon.

Gone Home in the classroom:

Fullbright was very generous and donated copies of Gone Home for my students to play. I didn't tell my students anything about the game, except that I'd scheduled a visit to Fullbright later that week, and that they needed to think of questions to ask the game developers.

What I did talk about with students involved a more general discussion around gender and video games, fit for a male gamer affinity group just beginning to talk about this topic.

We generated this list of games starring playable female characters:

Metroid
Tomb Raider
Mirror's Edge
Portal
Last of Us
Ms. Pac-Man

Students were proud to know these titles, and they were happy to see such representation of female characters in games, until we all quickly ran out of titles to add. (Here's an online list, including supporting and non-playable characters).

We were able to make a long list of games where female characters needed to be saved by male characters.

When it came time to play Gone Home, my students played through it pretty quickly - within 2 or 3 hours. As a homework assignment, it could be spread out through a few days.

NOTE: The game is rated for players aged 16 and older.

The students really enjoyed the game, and they asked the game developers, Steve Gaynor and Karla Zimonja, several thought-provoking questions, that I won't include, because they're spoilers!

Their experience playing Gone Home in the classroom was very social. It started out with kids comparing progress with each other, punctuated by the occasional scream of anticipation, imagining what they might find rounding the next creepy corner of game space.

By the end of the game, all they were talking about was the story. They were comparing notes with each other, trying to piece it together, one clue at a time.

This kind of story was new to them, and no one wrote it off. They were compelled to see the complete picture, as if they were afraid to miss a single detail. The boys talked about the LGBT aspect of the story like it was the norm (which gave me great hope for the next generation), but they weren't talking about it with the fluency that comes with comfort and experience. I'd wager that this game brought them one step closer to feeling comfortable discussing LGBT issues among male peers.

Gone Home is interactive literature, and the buy-in that came with its well-designed gameplay was 100% effective in engaging a group of teen boys. It set the stage for an entire course about inclusive storytelling.

Who does this story welcome in? Who is this story about? Who might not feel represented in this story? As the story plays out, who wins? Who loses? Who's in danger? Who might feel unsafe or powerless as they hear this story? 

Here were some of the takeaways that kids wanted to share with Fullbright after their visit:


"I loved hearing about how Gone Home was made - how it was supposed to be horror, and how you interviewed people and based it off their experiences."

"I loved the attention to detail in the level design."

"Thank you for not only presenting to us your individual jobs, but the way you design great games as a team. I hope to play Tacoma once it's published!"

"Thanks to your group for showing us how a great game can be made with a small group of talented people."

"I loved Christmas Duck and seeing the artwork Karla was working on."

Gone Home is my favorite game, so I also really enjoyed meeting its designers, Steve and Karla. Here's a photo of us with Christmas Duck, who plays a major role in the game.

For more information, here's a great feature on Gone Home and its connection to the Gamergate controversy.