My Top 10 Games of 2013
Gone Home: Forms of Subversive Creation
By Joel Jordon
Creation in the content of Gone Home (the “story”) often comes in a form that echoes the form taken by the game as a whole. Centrally, Sam’s struggle to assert her identity in a culture hostile to her is a struggle to create herself. The parents create, too, although not as effectively. The protagonist in Terry’s bad novels is a time traveler who saves JFK again and again. This almost obsessive return to the year 1963 implies Terry’s own inability to move beyond the tragedies of his past. Jan is a forest ranger in charge of “controlled burns”—evocative language that suggests how she lives her life. Her dull marriage leads her to feel passion for a fellow forest ranger, but the flames are put out soon enough: the forest ranger marries someone else, and Jan and her husband go on a retreat for couples counseling. Then there is the character you control, Katie, who has been called “boring” and whose postcards from Europe—among the very few objects belonging to her that you can find in the house—have been called “vapid.” These evoke little more than her family’s upper-middle-class status.
A game I’ve been working on
I’ve been taking a bit of a break from writing about games to work on designing one. I’m not going to cheaply shift the purpose of this blog so that I just start to use it to advertise a game I’ve been working on, but I wanted to include one post here to show a trailer and direct you to where I will actually be writing more about this game. A friend and I have formed a videogame studio called Astro Assembly, and this first game of ours is called Multilytheus. For more on the game, you can go to the Astro Assembly blog. Here’s the trailer:
The Game Manifesto 