Gothic gaming, queer mash-ups and 'Gone Home'
Kirkland, Ewan (2021) Gothic gaming, queer mash-ups and 'Gone Home'. In: Gothic mash-ups: hybridity, appropriation, and intertextuality in Gothic storytelling. Lexington Books, pp. 205-223. ISBN 1793636575
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This chapter examines the celebrated exploration game Gone Home, a ‘walking simulator’ release in 2013, developed and published by The Fullbright Company. In this game players assume the role of a young woman, freshly returned from a year abroad, to find her new family home mysteriously deserted. Situating this game in the context of Gothic literature, videogame mashups and queer culture, I begin by detailing the extent to which videogames, like all modern media, has been influenced by Gothic. While rarely drawing explicitly upon pre-existing Gothic narratives, games have always featured spooky and unsettling environments, labyrinths and mazes, locked doors, secret rooms and narratives from the past which impact upon the present. Although lacking specific qualities of the Gothic mashup, videogames combine different ludic experiences, but also appropriate, simulate and remediate aspects of architecture, paintings, cinema and print media. In this respect, digital games resemble the patchwork narratives of much traditional Gothic literature. These hybrid qualities of the medium contribute to an observed queerness across videogame culture. In foregrounding non-linearity, heterogeneity, exploration, different experiences of embodiment, and playfulness, the digital game potentially concords with various aspects of queerness, also seen as an ambiguous quality of Gothic fiction. Gone Home is then explored as a means of illustrating overlaps between the videogame, the Gothic, the mashup and the potential queerness of ludic digital experiences. Like the literature before it, Gone Home uses the ghost story format as a means of telling hidden histories, raising silenced voice, and allowing the marginalised, oppressed and ostracised to speak their stories.
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