Coming Through with the Goods
I was a week from launching Gone Home in my senior English class and the pressure was mounting to come through with the goods. I’d contacted The Fullbright Company, the game’s developers, to purchase a class set of copies. Purchasing and loading a class set of video games was a first for me, so I wondered what the logistics would be of downloading the games to my students’ laptops, but Fullbright made it very easy. They offered a fair pricing scheme and instructed me on how to purchase the copies via Humble Bundle, a digital distribution platform similar to Steam. Once the transaction was processed, they sent me 58 redemption codes, one for each copy I’d purchased. Each student would receive a code, paste it as a URL, and follow the simple download instructions. Piece of cake. Kudos to Steve Gaynor and Fullbright for their prompt responses and being thoroughly accommodating.
My students own their laptops and they go home with them, so I was concerned that if I released the redemption codes too early a few of them might decide to play the game prematurely. Not the end of the world, as there are always students who like to read ahead in lit class. But, I felt that it would be more entertaining and that the game’s story would be less likely to be spoiled if they all more-or-less started playing at the same time. So, I decided to hold on to the codes until a few days before launch. That would still give us enough time to download the game and field any technical issues that might come up in the process.
Reading a Video Game
With the first major hurdle cleared, I now had to confront the daunting task of hashing out the specifics of how the unit would play-out (pun intended). Would I let my class wander the house freely? Would I somehow direct their gameplay? Aside from playing the game, what would the response apparatus look like? How would I assess and evaluate them? On one hand, this was a lit class and I could approach it much like a short novel study, except I would substitute a video game for a novel. But this seemed like a bit of a cop-out; a video game, after all, is formally different from a novel, and should be considered in that light.
Dr. James Paul Gee
Much like songs, TV shows and comic books, any cultural theorist would tell you that video games are cultural artifacts and can be considered texts in their own right. Like novels or other literary texts, video games operate on a symbolic level, employ rhetorical strategies and can be “read” or interpreted for meaning. For more depth on this idea, you may want to have a look at Angela R Cox and Jeff Mummert’s informative posts about video games as texts in the very excellent Play the Past blog. We can safely say then, that the reception of a video game involves a type of literacy and is worthy of critical analysis, as Dr. James Paul Gee entertainingly and persuasively argues in his classic What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy.
Gone Home is a video game and a text, but despite its literary merits, it’s a different type of text than a novel or short story and, accordingly, tells its story in its own way. A video game’s unique technical and formal features invite a fittingly unique response mechanism. A film isn’t studied in the same way as a novel and, likewise, a video game should be examined with its own distinct set of considerations. Unfortunately, I wasn’t altogether clear on how to productively emphasize and leverage the unique textual features of Gone Home, and still deliver a valuable and pedagogically sound lesson. I decided that my best bet was to dive into an “in-depth” replay (dare I say close reading?) of the game that would hopefully trigger a few lesson plan ideas.
Replaying, Not Playing, is what Counts
By a stroke of luck, Fullbright added a developers’ commentary feature to Gone Home just a few weeks before our scheduled classroom launch date. When activated, Fullbright’s trademark cartoony light bulbs appear at set locations throughout the Greenbriar mansion. Clicking on a bulb icon triggers an audio commentary from members of the creative team providing insights into their process. They discuss music, sound, technical elements, hidden content and development anecdotes – usually related to the space where the specific bulb appears. This was solid gold, as it offered a whole new layer of material that I could mine for the unit.
Developer’s commentary Fullbright light bulb icons in Sam’s room.
By this time, I’d played the game twice casually, but it was time to dig into the nitty-gritty details. I woke up early one Sunday morning, set myself up at the kitchen table with a hot cup of java and undertook a meticulous inspection of the creepy old mansion. I activated the developer’s commentary mode and methodically explored every corner of the house, dividing my notes according to room and creating a comprehensive inventory of every meaningful artifact. I also jotted down anything valuable I could glean from the commentary. Seven hours later, I’d found just about every bookmark, post-it note and newspaper clipping and felt intimately familiar with the game. By this point, I could probably better orient myself in the Greenbriar household than my own. Despite my thorough CSI-style sweep of the place, my students would later find a number of items and details that had slipped through my fingers.
Every item in the game gathered in the foyer. Image: Linuxgnuru
To be honest, I wasn’t bursting at the seams at the idea of retreading every inch of the big ‘ol Greenbriar mansion again. I’d already played twice, and the game was fantastic, but I thought this third forensic run would be a bit painstaking and feel a bit laborious. Happily, I was wrong. The time flew by, the developer’s commentary was extremely engaging and I discovered many new details that I’d missed the first two times around. I was reminded of a quote by one of my favourite writers – Jorge Luis Borges – “rereading, not reading, is what counts”.
Best of all, my scheme had yielded fruit – a few exciting assessment ideas had percolated while I played and a vision for the lesson began to materialize. I worked late into Sunday night getting my thoughts on paper and sketching an outline for the unit, which I will begin to unfold in my next post.
Next Post
Gone Home Lesson 1: Writes of Passage, Annotating a Foyer and Screenshot Citations.
Launch Codes, Info Bulbs and Inventories: Prepping to Teach Gone Home is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
