Narrative

You wake up in a deserted house, wondering how you ended up there, and soon stumble on a dead body lying on the floor. As you explore the house, you discover a gun, newspaper clippings, a list of names—all clues pointing to a serial killer’s scheme to murder several women in the neighboring town. You find out that your wife’s name, Rachel, is on the list too. As you rush home to protect her, you run into a number of clues—a credit card, a driver’s license—suggesting that you have been there before, but you still don’t remember anything. Somehow you manage to find your way through a dark forest and an abandoned factory. When, finally, you reach home, you can choose whether your wife has already left for an unknown destination, or whether she’s dead, her corpse hidden behind a thin divider wall in the basement. You can also choose whether you are the murderer, or whether someone else killed your wife. Finally, you can choose whether the previous events were just a figment of your imagination, or whether they actually happened. No matter what you decide, the story won’t make much sense.

This is a brief and somewhat partial summary of Benjamin Rivers’s 2012 adventure videogame Home.² A one-man creation in a medium where most projects involve dozens of developers, Rivers’s game is as technically simple as it is effective in creating a disturbing atmosphere while challenging the player’s expectations [End Page 231] regarding videogame storytelling. Home involves us in the exact teleology of its narrative progression (“going home”) but at the last minute pulls the rug from under the player’s feet, leaving him or her in a state of puzzlement and even frustration. The point is not just that the player can influence the course taken by the story; the point is that the whole plot starts out in a relatively linear fashion, raising a set of questions that—in a curious gesture of authorial insouciance—we end up having to settle ourselves: whether the protagonist’s wife is dead, whether he is the murderer, and whether these events took place in the actuality of the fictional world, or only in the protagonist’s mind. Described in these terms, Home is a powerful example of how contemporary videogames can experiment with both the plot conventions of traditional, non-interactive narrative and with the gameplay conventions of the videogame medium. (For the uninitiated, “gameplay” can be defined as “the formalized interaction that occurs when players follow the rules of a game and experience its system through play” [Salen and Zimmerman 303].) Using Rivers’s game as a case study, this article examines how players’ responses to plot, fictional minds, and counterfactual scenarios change at the intersection of narrativity and gameplay choices, and how these traditional narratological categories can be enriched and, potentially, destabilized by player agency.

Espen Aarseth, one of the founders of game studies, wrote in 2004 that the “greatest aesthetic problem for the adventure story-game seems to be believable characters. . . . [T]he characters’ behavior is totally prescripted, with a few lines repeated endlessly and brainlessly. The dramatic ambitions of these games remain unfulfilled and seem as unreachable as ever” (51). Marie-Laure Ryan similarly remarks on the aesthetic limitations of the videogame medium: literary narrative seeks “the gray area of the ambiguous, while games and popular genres thrive in the Manichean world of ‘the good guys’ versus ‘the bad guys’” (Avatars 196). Home seems to contradict Aarseth’s claims through its sophisticated play on what Porter Abbott would call an “un-readable mind”—one which players cannot decipher, but still constitutes one of the major foci of their experience. Likewise, Home demonstrates that videogames can not only linger in “the gray area of the ambiguous,” but encourage players to explore this area by giving them control over a character whom they don’t understand. Finally, Home can be said to construct a “stubborn” plot, in James Phelan’s term, insofar as it resists players’ attempts at forming a...