This Week in Video Game Criticism: From Gone Home to the horror of GTA V

When joking about any form of oppression out there, you need to make the oppressor the punchline, NOT the oppressed. When joking about any form of inequality, you need to make privileged people the butt of your joke, NOT the marginalized and disenfranchised.

Both the world and the characters of GTA are meant to elicit both disgust and pity in the player. The counterpoint of those two emotions is what makes a grotesquerie so compelling: the player (or reader, or viewer, or what have you) wants to continue the narrative because they want to see whether or not the characters come to a place that’s less disgusting, less pitiful.

At one point, I thought I had done it. The regime was ousted with no sectarian violence, no destabilizing of the region, and no religious extremists emerging. The only downside was the loss of hospitals, utilities, and other basic facilities from functioning properly. I mentioned this on Twitter and got the response I deserved. “So you made a desert and called it peace?”

There is nothing literary about Gone Home, if we are to weigh it against the history and progression of the last 200 years of western fiction. And yet it is beautiful (and wildly effective) in its simplicity and earnestness because our own lives are actually quite simplistic. Or at least we perceive our own lives simplistically, amateurish, forced, and heavy handed even when they are almost certainly never only those things. To use Heidegger’s tool analysis, most of the wild complexities of our lives fade into a series of interlocking sequences of events and objects ready at hand, a series of moments linked and made sense of through widely available tropes.

The house governs nearly every part of the game: it is the source of isolation; it is the containing structure for both the supernatural demonic presence that drives the plots and for horror and terror; it tells the story itself through architecture and spatial distribution of plot elements.

Instead, it presents primarily an aesthetic experience, atmospheric horror, living on the moment of fear and, beyond that, dreadful suspicions. Its rationality is faked time and again - just like the fragments of Dear Esther don’t amount to a full story, A Machine for Pigs offers no conclusive whole. Why and how should it, when its themes are taken from a century of mass murder and ideologies of genocide?

Marcus Dittmar wrote about environmental storytelling and the limits necessary to appreciate open worlds, Markus Grundmann covered Cookie Clicker and consumerism and Dennis Kogel interviewed Jasper Byrne of Lone Survivor and other things. Superlevel is also providing smaller features on entries in the Experimental Game Pack 01 over here.