Sometimes I Play Video Games: “Gone Home”

A common debate lately surrounds whether video games can be considered art. As far as I know, the initial argument was launched by a post from the late Roger Ebert, who argued that they “could never be art” which met him with the wrath of angry gamers (who, I’ve since learned, are a crowd that doesn’t care much for criticism of their games). For a long time, I was pretty ambivalent on the subject, feeling that games often had artistic properties but lacked a certain individual purpose or statement that I tend to associate with art, or at least my definition of it.

A good example is a game like Grand Theft Auto V, which I played when it was released a couple years ago. Its graphics were absolutely stunning, featuring gorgeous scenery, realistic city streets, and characters that really moved and felt like humans. But all of this technical mastery was done in service of a go-nowhere story that just involved running around and shooting people, randomly running over pedestrians, etc. Part of why I’ve never been big on video games is I feel an enormous percentage of them resemble GTA: they’re the equivalent of blockbuster Hollywood movies that dazzle with special effects but ultimately have no real purpose or insight. When held to an art-level standard where I was looking into what it was trying to say or what its themes were beyond “wouldn’t it be cool to kill a ton of people,” most games fell woefully short.

Part of this is that, for a long time, games have been mostly marketed toward a specific demographic of over-caffeinated young boys/men, which has been associated with a lot of blood, mayhem, and explosions. In the last year, I’ve been sort of passively following the industry as critics like Anita Sarkeesian have focused on many of the long-time issues in games and have argued for increased diversity in the business. Sarkeesian has been basically under siege from the gaming community since starting her “Tropes vs. Women in Video Games” series, but I see her as a true critic: someone who loves what they are criticizing, and does it because she wants everything to be better. Her goal of increasing the range of stories games can tell and improving the way characters are depicted mostly aligns with where I wish video games would go — more towards telling stories and away from senselessly blowing stuff up.

One game Sarkeesian recommended was Gone Home, the first release by The Fullbright Company, a small indie game studio in Portland, Oregon. When I played it, it was really easy to see why she recommended it: it is a game grounded in characters and story, and it proves the artistic potential video games can have when they’re not being aimed at such a narrow audience.

In Gone Home, you play from the perspective of Kaitlin Greenbriar, a 21-year-old who returns from a year of studying abroad to find her family missing from the old mansion they moved into the year before. The gameplay is exceedingly simple: you move around the house from room to room, and find little clues sprinkled around the house that allow you to piece together what happened to your family. (I should add that this all takes place in 1995 — the story kind of doesn’t work in a world of smartphones.) Most of the plot comes from journal entries you find from your younger sister Samantha, who directly tells you her story through the duration of the game.

The advantage video games have over any other medium is that they allow you to play an active part in the story — in a sense, to live it out yourself. Many games waste this potential, but Gone Home really pushes it into an interesting place. As Kaitlin, you never speak with anyone in the game, but you really inhabit the character and feel like you’re in her head as you try to piece together the game’s central mystery.

This is part of why I’m sharing as little of the plot as I possibly can: a ton of what made Gone Home a really memorable experience for me was the feeling of piecing together all of the threads myself. The game gives you a certain amount of info on a platter (some disbelief needs to be suspended at how many useful plot tidbits are just left laying around), but tons of the story takes place “off the page,” so to speak, relying on your ability to draw certain conclusions about the characters based on what they left in the house. This is an ambiguity in storytelling that I really love and had never really gotten out of a video game before.

Where Gone Home really succeeds beyond other games is in its characters — which sounds crazy, since none of them are actually on screen, and only Samantha speaks. But through the objects and artifacts in the house, I developed a real understanding of who each character was and what their motivations were. And regardless of what they did, the game portrays each of them with a tremendous amount of empathy. While many games are about good characters and bad characters, the people in Gone Home all behave like real, flawed human beings.

Gone Home is the game that really convinced me that Ebert was wrong in his initial assessment of video games, largely because it feels like a real statement. It has a lot to say about identity, family, tolerance, and the secrets people keep from others. The video game medium was also necessary for the way the creators wanted to tell this story, and part of what ultimately makes it so poignant. Despite a relatively brief amount of gameplay (I brisked through it in about three hours), Gone Home is a game that has really stuck with me in a way I didn’t think video games could.

If you want to play it and then talk with me about it, buy it at www.gonehomegame.com.

“Vulnicura,” “I Want to Grow Up,” and the Albums of the Decade

This post was initially going to be about my albums of the decade (so far). I put an initial list of 20 albums together, agonized a lot over the order, and had started writing the blurbs when I decided to abandon the whole thing because part of me just felt like it was a waste of time. Most people just want to see the list anyways, so here is what I ended up with at the time I threw in the towel a couple weeks ago:

20. Allo Darlin’ – Europe
19. Wild Flag – Wild Flag
18. St. Vincent – Strange Mercy
17. Lotus Plaza – Spooky Action at a Distance
16. A Sunny Day in Glasgow – Sea When Absent
15. SubRosa – More Constant Than the Gods
14. Nona – Through the Head
13. Janelle Monae – The Archandroid
12. EMA – Past Life Martyred Saints
11. No Joy – Wait to Pleasure
10. Colleen Green – I Want to Grow Up
9. Deerhunter – Halcyon Digest
8. Ex Hex – Rips
7. Kate Bush – 50 Words For Snow
6. Afrirampo – We Are Uchu No Ko
5. Throwing Muses – Purgatory/Paradise
4. Björk – Vulnicura
3. My Bloody Valentine – m b v
2. Fiona Apple – The Idler Wheel Is Wiser Than the Driver of the Screw and Whipping Cords Will Serve You More Than Ropes Will Ever Do
1. PJ Harvey – Let England Shake

(I made a youtube playlist with a song from each album if you’re interested.)

The toughest part of the list was deciding what to do with my two 2015 favorites: Björk’s Vulnicura and Colleen Green’s I Want to Grow Up. With albums that have been around for a few years, my opinion on them is pretty set in stone, but these two were new enough that my feelings on them were constantly shifting throughout the process. And they both ended up illustrating my problem with making these sorts of lists, which is that my personal feelings get inevitably tangled up with ideas of objective Importance in music, and it becomes this unsatisfying struggle between brain and heart.

These sorts of lists and rankings were basically made for albums like Vulnicura. It’s original, complex, and beautiful, the work of a truly individual artist in peak form. Most of all, it’s very serious, and year-end lists are the natural habitat of “serious art.” The top of my list certainly reflects these biases, and I do have a soft-spot for a well-executed serious album that I feel accomplishes something beyond just being enjoyable to listen to. So I never really thought twice about putting Vulnicura very high on the list, since it just felt right.

Figuring out what to do with I Want to Grow Up was a lot tougher. Originally, it wasn’t on the list at all. As I grew more and more obsessed with it in the last few months, I eventually threw it on there, and then continued to move it up as I seemed unable to stop listening to it. It became kind of the Cinderella story of the list: mentally, I envisioned Colleen Green stunning Wild Flag in round one, scrapping past St. Vincent, beating EMA with a three-point buzzerbeater, etc.

This underdog image fits Green, who is about as far from Björk as an artist can be. While Vulnicura is made by an artist with seemingly no limitations, I Want to Grow Up is all about working within them. Green doesn’t have Björk’s ridiculous vocal range (it’s okay, no one does). Her songs are conventional, simple guitar-driven pop nuggets — far from the lengthy and complex sonic landscapes of Vulnicura. And while Björk always has fantastical imagery in her album covers and videos, the cover of Green’s album shows her just wearing a plain dress with a sad birthday hat on her head.

Those limitations are why I initially didn’t think I Want to Grow Up was as good as I think it is now: it’s an album that doesn’t really present itself as “important” in the way albums on these lists are supposed to be. On the surface, it sounds so much like it’s going to be another one of those 90s revival albums that is fun to listen to but quickly forgotten about. And the subject matter of the songs — Green’s slacker anxieties and difficulties with becoming an adult — can also easily be perceived as trifling or juvenile compared to something like Vulnicura that is so adult. I actually suspect Green wants be underestimated and not taken seriously, so the truths in her music hit that much harder.

Green’s current Twitter bio (@ColleenGreen420, by the way) is “I can only be me,” which sums up her appeal: she may not have the prodigious natural gifts Björk has, but she knows it, and I Want to Grow Up is (somewhat ironically) a very self-assured album made by someone who knows exactly how to use the skills they do have. Green establishes herself as a great pop songwriter on the album, which is stacked with addictive hooks. But I think what Green really has going for her is her personality, and I Want to Grow Up is really a masterpiece of character. Her lyrics are funny, sad, and moving in equal measure, and she writes with remarkable clarity. I get a really strong sense of who Green is through her music, which is difficult to accomplish and a trait I really value.

Most of all, I Want to Grow Up has meant more to me personally than any album in a long time. No album has ever felt like it was reading my mind this way, and I have huge respect for Green’s ability to capture the feeling of mundane slacker terror and self-destructiveness that has been so familiar for me. This is really cheesy, but it actually made me feel less weird and alone, knowing that someone else is out there who is having these similar thoughts. To the extent that music can really be “important,” I think it lies in that kind of connection with the artist, which is why I’ve come around on the innocuous I Want to Grow Up as one of my favorite albums of the last five years.

The comparison with Vulnicura isn’t meant to try to figure out if one album is better than the other — debates like that are why I kind of soured on making a big deal out of the list. I just find it interesting that two albums can succeed with such different angles of attack. It illustrates something I like about music, which is that each artist has their own tools to work with: Colleen Green can only be Colleen Green, and Björk can only be Björk. And each, in their own way, is capable of making an album that feels important and necessary to me, as they each have done in 2015.

My First Indie Band: Rilo Kiley

I didn’t really start listening to music until around my junior year of high school. For most of that year, I listened to maybe five bands: Oasis, Muse, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Radiohead, and The White Stripes. These bands don’t really have much in common, and in some instances it’s hard to even come up with an explanation for why I liked them in the first place. I think it was mostly just that they were there. I had no real knowledge or context when it came to music, so I went for whatever bands fell into my lap. Not that I was totally a blank slate without opinions: I knew there was music I hated, like Smash Mouth. But I didn’t really know what kind of music I actually liked.

My earliest favorite bands are also an indicator of what kind of music is “there” if you’re a teenage guy who is interested in rock music, but isn’t really putting in any effort to find it. It’s mostly a lot of dudes playing guitar. So even though I never related much to traditional masculinity and had already developed a strong hatred for “bros,” listening to women never really entered the equation, because there was no representation of them except in pop or country music (which I wasn’t interested in).

Over the summer heading into my senior year, I finally started to get at least a little bored of listening to the same five bands over and over, so I started looking around online more and heard about Rilo Kiley. At the time, the band had just released their fifth album, Under the Blacklight, and were getting more of a mainstream push after signing with a major label. They appeared on the cover of Spin and were heralded as the next Fleetwood Mac. In retrospect, this is all funny, because Under the Blacklight would end up being the band’s last album, and unquestionably their worst. It’s pretty much the sound of a band that had run out of gas, and I remember not being particularly surprised when they quietly split up a couple years later.

That said, when I listened to Under the Blacklight back in 2007, it immediately grabbed me, just because it was so different from everything else I had heard. I really didn’t have friends and had gotten used to just not talking during the day and being alone with my own thoughts. The bands I listened to at the time all spoke in the same voice — a voice similar to the one always running in my head. Rilo Kiley offered a completely different perspective.

That came from frontwoman Jenny Lewis. While Rilo Kiley allegedly had other members, Lewis was the clear star, and their best songs were built around her bittersweet vocals and blunt, sometimes-personal lyrics that often touched on themes of sadness and depression. What made her really intriguing at the time was that she played off my ignorance about music and people in general: I was conditioned to expect music to sound a certain way, and I had preconceptions about how a woman singer would express herself. Lewis’ gift was her ability to subvert those expectations, by sounding sweet and looking pretty, but then writing lyrics that cut deep and were nowhere near what I expected. Their music was similarly subversive — it frequently had bright guitars and bouncy bass lines, sounding relatively poppy, which masked the dark subject matter.

Under the Blacklight lacked her more personal lyrics, instead focusing on third-person stories of the sleazy underbelly of L.A, which is part of why I feel the album was a bit of a dud. It was only when I listened to the band’s other albums — particularly The Execution of All Things and More Adventurous — that I really got hooked. The peak of my Rilo Kiley obsession was probably my first year at community college. I had a pretty bad attitude about going there (I felt I belonged at a “real” college despite my awful grades and lack of extracurriculars), so I continued to spend a lot of time by myself instead of meeting people. I would bring my 50 MB iPod shuffle that my dad got for free after signing up for a bank account or something and my junky $10 pair of headphones and would sit on benches or lawns on campus and just listen to their songs over and over and over.

I still wasn’t at the point where I was thinking all that deeply about music, but listening to Rilo Kiley is where certain ideas began to seep into my brain and a lot of my preconceptions were erased. The biggest realization was that music could be this way to get outside of my own thoughts. Instead of telling me what I wanted or felt like I needed to hear, I liked being challenged with a different perspective from a singer like Jenny Lewis. At the same time, I also realized that just because a singer seems very different from me, that doesn’t mean we don’t have similar experiences or feelings — some of Rilo Kiley’s songs about depression articulated how I felt much better than any songs I had heard up to that point.

When I look back on Rilo Kiley now, what also really stands out is how personality-driven the band was — at least to me, it was all about Lewis, and there was a feeling that through their music, I really got to know her and she became like a friend. Ever since then, I’ve tended to gravitate towards really individual, charismatic artists, who put a lot of themselves into the music they make. It’s part of why I got into music instead of movies or TV: I like how individual the medium is, that you can really know or understand someone through their songs. As someone who has never had a wide circle of friends and has consistently lagged behind socially, artists like Lewis have been important as a sort of form of social contact, and it’s why I prize them above those that lack that personality and honesty.

After my Rilo Kiley phase is when I really kicked my music exploration into overdrive, and soon the band was pretty much left in the dust. There was so much other music to discover that it was hard to justify listening to a band whose songs I’d already memorized. Lewis embarked on a solo career and made a record with Jonathan Rice, but none of it really grabbed me until last year’s The Voyager, in which Lewis, now in her late 30s, reflected on a life spent on the road, acting in movies as a child or performing in bands. It had a combination of toughness and vulnerability that reminded me of why I was so attached to her music years ago.

Listening to The Voyager, I couldn’t help but be a little nostalgic for the Rilo Kiley days, when everything was so new and exciting. It is kind of the ironic tragedy of someone who loves music: the more you listen to, the harder it is to truly love it, to feel the level of almost child-like attachment I did with Rilo Kiley. Though I’ve sometimes felt like I “moved on” from them, I really never did: their presence reverberates through almost all of the music I listen to now. They were the gateway through which I discovered that music could be so much more than I ever had thought it could be.