A feature in Gone Home (2013) that I continue to be intrigued by is how it chooses to deliver Sam’s journey through a series of voiced journal entries that automatically plays itself when you collect certain items. What I find interesting is that in some ways it threatens to break the immersion of the game — does it work? In contrast to many other games such as Firewatch (Delilah) and Soma (Catherine, initially) in which an un-embodied human voice also serves as a source of intimacy and warmth, Gone Home does not try to fit Sam’s voice into the diegetic space of the game. What I mean is that the playing of the journal entries signals a break between our avatar, Katie, and us, for while most of the information we gather — the visual appearances of the house, objects, and texts — are diegetic, Sam’s voice is not, and we learn that Katie only discovers it at the very end, as we — the player — finishes and quits the game. Out of all things and this may be a bit of a stretch, but I remain bizarrely reminded of the ending in A Hundred Years of Solitude, in which there is a similar unfolding of the world and its temporality into multiple layers. The time of Katie and the time of Sam forms both a closure and a separation at the moment the journal is opened.
Sam’s voice function almost like a procedural deus ex machina that springs out of nowhere to deliver the narrative as we play along. Yet, attaching themselves to objects lying around the house, they also gain a special relation to the space in which Katie finds herself. They appear almost as memories the house has kept — only hidden, suppressed. Many have commented on the use of voice and sound in horror games to build deeply invasive and horrifying atmospheres, but Gone Home plays on this usage with an interesting twist: in this house it is the radical absence of voice that builds suspense, and the presence of voice, a voice bursting through the silence of the house that sought to suppress it, that performs the opposite. This break of diegesis in fact both conveys and symbolizes Sam’s break from the symbolic order of the house (that which is embodied in her parents), running parallel to her break from the physical order of the house, as she uncover hidden passage ways and talks to ghosts (well, maybe).
Aside from the voice, Gone Home is an impossible story on many other levels, too. A punk girl and an army believer at the same time, Lonnie seems to be an impossible contradiction. And like Sam says herself in the very first entry, the house feels unreal — and it isn’t, the architecture twists into physically paradoxical structures that could never exist in real space (1). The family isn’t real, at least we don’t know if it still does. There are only shards and fragments of signs lying around for us to piece together in an attempt to construct reality. In that sense, Sam’s voice is in fact the only thing that we know and feel that we know is real, not in spite of but precisely because it isn’t diegetic, because it transcends the diegetic plane and speaks directly to the players, to us.
In sum, the journal as a non-diegetic voice is not only not a potential break of immersion, but, transcending the space of diegesis, carries with it a metaphorical and affective significance that crystallizes Sam’s break from the house and the real-ness of her story. One article on Gone Home said that “It’s a game of emptiness, of voids that can’t be properly filled” (2). If that is true, then it is precisely this voice, an equally impossible, non-embodied void in its own sense, that fills and completes it.
Works Cited:
(1) What Gone Home owes to Ken Levine, and the 1992 Sears Home catalog – Polygon
(2) Why Gone Home is the most important game of the decade – Polygon
