A Bit of a Love Note for Well-Done RPGs

I fall into new games the way I fall into any new activity-- with optimism, curiosity, and willfully dancing a jig on that edge of unhealthy levels of obsession. Inquisition has been out for three days and the sadistic "time played" counter tells me without fanfare that I have logged over thirty hours. I'm tempted to stop writing now to instead dedicate myself to this beautifully rendered and complex virtual world for the rest of my waking hours. Husband is lovely and supportive, feeding my physical body with random offerings of meals and snacks as I traverse the mountains and coasts of Thedas, closing rifts and helping random farmers. I promised him I would come back to this world for a few hours this evening-- have a proper dinner. It's his birthday.

A truly amazing game, like any media, should teach you something about yourself, and Bioware seems to have embraced this by crafting a story about the individual player. Sure, they call me Inquisitor, and though sales numbers haven't been released yet, I'm certain it's safe to say that there are hundreds of thousands of people currently sharing that title. And yes, I'm often restrained to making a choice between two options. I can talk to everyone but only select people to the depth that I'd like to. My experience will likely be similarly played through by hundreds of others, but what Bioware has done is given me the tools and invited me to participate as if it were my story. And I clicked the "Join" button to that event invite, because shit looks amazing. Dragon Age feels like a world that truly exists somewhere, and I have been thrown into it. The rift I walked out of might have been my entry from this world into that one, my hinted-at back story an inconsequential reorganization of the universe to make room for my existence. I'm also playing a clever-yet-totally-confused Inquisitor. I freely admit to having no clue what I'm doing and my companions seem to appreciate that.

And this has become a singular experience in playing games. I have a nasty habit of attempting to game RPGs. Even when all choices are "right" I'll go back to previous saves to make sure I have the "rightest" one. Restart the game for the perfect run through, keep seven tabs open on my phone browser so I can make sure I get every chest, access every dialog tree, get the maximum approval, and maximize my skill points. The first thing I did after meticulously sculpt my character's face was antagonize my first companion. 

Sorry not sorry. I've got my eye on you, Judas.

Sometimes decisions are placed before you and none of the options are good. Sometimes all of them seem equally good. Sometimes all of them seem equally mystifying and you choose one because a decision has to be made. It's a very good analogue of how I experience my own life as a clever-yet-totally-confused human being. But it's let me discover that I do care about politics, and that there are some dialog trees I won't attempt to unlock, that I'm not so much a completionist as a sap that can't say no when someone needs help, and that when the world is repopulating with herbs every few minutes, yes I do absolutely have to get every single one of them.

Thirty hours in and I haven't even approached the midway point of the game. I'm curious to discover all the other bits of me I didn't know about.

Game Night: Indie Edition - Gone Home

I finished Gone Home a week ago, but I wasn't entirely sure how to begin to describe it. I certainly wasn't prepared to tell others how good it was. I found myself in conversations I feel I've seen parodied in sitcoms, where one person is excited about an event but unsure if it's considered cool or not and wants to talk about it, but isn't sure if they should be wanting to talk about it, and the other person is a normal-fucking-human-being.

me: I finished Gone Home!
normal-fucking-human-being: How was it?
me: It was awesome. I mean, it was okay. I mean, if you like that sort of thing. It was weird. But good!
normal-fucking-human-being: What's it about?
me: It's about a girl and her family. Well, a girl and her sister. But no, actually her sister. And her sister's friend. And you're the girl. But the story's not about you.
normal-fucking-human-being: What's the game play like?
me: You run around clicking on things. And those things give you more insight into the story.
normal-fucking-human-being: So it's a point-and-click adventure game?
me: Yes! But not like that at all. I mean, you point and you click, but you don't adventure.
normal-fucking-human-being: ...
me: Well, not normal adventure.
normal-fucking-human-being: ...
me:  It's an emotional adventure? 

How do you judge a thing if you have no category for it, no schema to understand it, no examples to compare it to? What merits a good whatever-Gone-Home-is?

Super-Brief Spoiler-Free Analysisless Summary
You come home from a year-long trip through Europe, to find your house dark and empty. You start making your way through the house and picking up objects, nosy-neighbor-style, to find out what's been happening since you've been gone. Each paper scrap, letter, and note gives you a bit more insight into the lives of your family members. Over the course of the two-hour game, you put together why they aren't home. (And waiting to welcome me with sweets and rollerskates, having turned the foyer into a personal skate rink with only the best music. E.g., all Ghostbusters all the time. Which is what I expect each and every time I arrive anywhere.) Since much of the game is about the process of discovery, every specific detail I could give becomes a spoiler and thus makes a summary a bit spotty.

Things I like about it
It's loud in all the right places. Every sound is jarring and out-of-place in the silence of that desolate house. Every decibel is relevant. The murmur from the telly sounds summons you down the hall like a whispered name, and you physically hunger for the continued revelations from your sister's journal just to hear her voiceover. The punk rock is terrible and tinny, just like I remembered mid-90s punk and the musical proclivities of teenagers. The sound of thunder is always startling and though the game boasts that there are no puzzles, conflicts, of fights, I couldn't help spinning around to face the door in preparation for a zombie ambush. (No guns ever made themselves available, but I'm pretty sure I could fling one of the bazillion carefully rendered objects and dropped them in the general direction of brain stems.)

You have never been in the presence of a plastic cup so dangerous.

This game is achingly lonely. As you make your way through the post-its and paper scraps, you discover three individuals suffering their own personal crises in isolated worlds, surrounded by each other but utterly failing to connect. It gives the impression of ghosts passing by each other in the kitchen, and sidling past one another in halls. The game makes you meet it halfway. Since the story is told in found notes and bits of trash, you are find yourself inferring emotional confusion, depression, anger, and joy. You're forced to make an effort to derive meaning, and therefore unintentionally become more invested. It's ridiculously fucking immersive.

Time management. It's two hours. (It's two hours if you're thorough and read everything, anyway.) This is the perfect amount of time. Any longer and it would feel like a chore. Any shorter and it would have felt like developer laziness. I make a whole section for this because knowing the right amount of time an experience should take is trickier than it has any right to be.

Moment of awesome: Following the trail of my sister's sleepover antics, seeing the remnants of her seance, and scaring myself by being alone in the dark, empty house and speculating on the monsters and baddies that were going to jump out at me from around corners.

Problems I have with it
It's not a game. There is no indication of what's important and what isn't, so after the eighth toilet paper roll you examine, you have to convince yourself there won't be anything under the ninth. Forced to self-determine importance for the sake of time, you can't stop wondering if there was something special about that last cup, maybe a word carved into the bottom that would unlock another journal entry. It's also ridiculously linear-- once you've explored a room, well... that's basically it for that room. Once there is nothing more to see, you move along. This is likely to be reflective of real life, you aren't likely to snoop through someone's living room, leave to snoop through the kitchen, then get an explicitly worded hint that you might have missed something in the back corner. Except that...

Kidding, it IS a game. And you do get an explicitly worded hint to go back into a specific room. But to uncover the super-secret panels that were put there originally for... a plot device to further the story. The secrets in this game are of the not-really secret variety. And once you uncover them, you feel vaguely disappointed that you got so worked up to begin with.

Stupid Sitcom Family is Stupid. The entire premise of the game is that you have no idea what's going on with your family and you have to discover it. They attempt to explain your ignorance with a year-long trip to Europe-- you even find postcards you sent from your travels! But apparently, your whirlwind trip was so erratic, you didn't have an address for your family to send a letter back to you. Neither did you have time to call, due to all the fantastic travel you were doing. Or maybe, your family didn't want to depress you with the mundane trivialities. Because, you know, this is set in the mid-90's when people refrained from telling their children about the happenings at home. (The better to induce a laugh-track, my dear!)

Moment of screaming furiousness: When half the house was locked from the foyer for no perceivable reason whatsoever. Compounded when I finally found the way in... only to discover that it was locked from the foyer for NO PERCEIVABLE REASON WHATSOEVER.

What the fuck is it?
Gone Home describes itself as "an interactive exploration simulator" and this is probably both the most and least accurate descriptor. It isn't a game in all the head-deskingly frustrating ways that you would want a thing to be a game. But it sucks the player in so completely, pushed face-first into a feels-filled ballpit that the experience morphs into something else, something wholly unexpected and something near-embarrassingly indescribable. I'm calling it a game if only to encourage developers to do more of this part.