We all experience the first meeting, first kiss, first fight, etc. These big moments are universal, so it’s easy to build an engaging romantic sub-plot using just them because they’ll inevitably make the romance feel honest to most players. These are the big moments that every romance story must include at some point, and in fact, these are the kind of moments that any BioWare romance is built around. These are the major moments of their relationship, the turning points when Sam’s feelings start to change, and together they form the backbone of Sam’s story. The game highlights important moments through Sam’s letters: meeting Lonnie, dyeing each other’s hair, sleeping on the futon, their first kiss, etc. By placing the player outside that relationship, Gone Home can develop a romance that feels realistically nuanced. Gone Home tells a great romance story, but it tells a particularly brilliant video game romance story because it finds a way around all these problems you’re not part of the romance. And how do you compensate for the player that just doesn’t care about any of those people? Are they doomed to hate your romance game? Just look at any Bioware game: Our romantic partners are always split between “the shy one” and the “the confident one” or to be even more archetypal, the “good girl/boy” and the “bad girl/boy”: Liara vs. As a result, romance options usually fall into clichéd extremes. They’re just trying to appeal to a slightly more fragmented player base. One alternative is to give us multiple romance options, but those options face the same dilemma. No one likes that, so the game falls apart. Trying to make one character lovable to as many people as possible inevitably results in a bland and inoffensive love interest. We all have our “types” and we all find different features and attitudes attractive. ![]() Fear doesn’t change much from person to person, but love does. Horror is relatively easy because we’re all scared of the same things. It thus falls to the writer to craft a character that is liked by a vast majority of the player base, but this is where things get tricky. It’s a house of cards in which the success of the entire experience rests on a single interaction with a single character. ![]() Because if our love interest isn’t likable, let alone lovable, then the entire game falls apart. The first, most obvious, challenge facing a video game romance is that we must, at the very least, like the proposed object of our affection. Romance is a genre that is better suited to film - or really any passive medium. ![]() Games should be graded on a curve because they’re at a disadvantage when it comes to telling a romantic story (I also believe that they’re at an advantage when it comes to horror, so horror games should be graded more harshly than horror movies. That’s an accomplishment for any story but the fact that Gone Home is video game makes it especially impressive, not because all game stories supposedly suck and Gone Home is better than average (which is the implied criticism when Totilo asks if we grade games on a curve), but because video games are not a medium well-suited to romance. ![]() Its plots are simple (deceptively so), which is the catalyst for much of the criticism of it, but it is really the emotional honesty of its characters that elevates it into something special. Gone Home can be considered a great story, and especially a great romance, regardless of its medium because it successfully tells multiple intertwining stories that relate to each other narratively and thematically. The simple answer to the latter question is: yes. In a recent article on Kotaku, Stephen Totilo asks “Do we grade video games on a curve?” He specifically discusses Gone Home for consideration and wonders: “Would I cherish it if it wasn’t a game? Would it seem special if it was a short story or a movie or a play?”
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