RESISTANCE - A Game Design Vocabulary - page 131

the mundane details of household life. There's challenge and problem-solving in Gone Home as
you piece together clues and search for secret passages, but it's not an experience that needs
to grow more challenging or gradually build the player's

skills. Instead, the player comes to
understand the systems at play—the relationships of characters, the ways that different mem-
bers of the family inhabit and use various parts of the house—by uncovering new information,
some of it in the form of words or diagrams, some of it ingrained in the spatial arrangement and
visual representation of a home.

Figure 6.9 Gone Home subverts expectations with unnerving experiences that can't be conquered

with typical game verbs.

Gone Home is set in a world that closely mirrors our own—it could be drawn from the experi-

ences of real people. Of course, some games are overtly autobiographical, like dys4ia , which
we've already discussed, or Mainichi

(2012) by Mattie Brice, a game that represents a single day
within the author's life. It doesn't necessarily make sense to create a traditional journey of flow
through a game that recounts actual events—after all, real people's lives don't always progress
from easier to more challenging. They can't necessarily be conquered by building skills and
systemic understanding, but they can resistance

in these games plays a role—showing players where the systems represented can or can't be
pushed—but the experiences that result aren't necessarily about players overcoming resistance
or finding strategies to plant their own flag of victory at the top of a mountain. Instead, they
offer players an opportunity to listen and understand systems that they might not otherwise
have considered.

be represented through systems. The shape of