{"id":24220,"date":"2014-09-09T17:52:56","date_gmt":"2014-09-09T22:52:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=24220"},"modified":"2014-09-10T07:54:37","modified_gmt":"2014-09-10T12:54:37","slug":"experienced-points-what-made-gone-home-such-a-powerful-game","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=24220","title":{"rendered":"Experienced Points: What Made Gone Home Such a Powerful Game?"},"content":{"rendered":"

My column this week attempts to offer a gentle counter-argument to the people sneering at Gone Home and calling it a “walking simulator”<\/a>. I suspect this will go the way of all debates about this game, but you never know. Maybe the stars will line up and one person will see the game from a different angle. <\/p>\n

I have no idea where this optimism came from. I hope it’ll pass soon. <\/p>\n

This game had one of those situations where a single mistake threw the rest of the game into sharp relief. At one point I was reading a note ostensibly written in 1994 or 1995, and one teenager referred to someone’s dadIt might have been a teacher. The details elude me now.<\/span> as a “tool”. I was instantly yanked out of the story. In my experience, “tool” didn’t come to mean “useless person” until almost a decade later. At that point I realized I read dozens and dozens of notes that had nailed mid-90’s lingo and I’d just taken it all for granted. Looking back, I realized how hard it was to get little details like that right. <\/p>\n

Which makes it all the more disappointing that a vast majority of the audience won’t even notice the details because they grew up in the wrong place and time. <\/p>\n

EDIT: So apparently the word “tool” was indeed in use for years before I ran into it. (I guess I’d have known about it sooner if I’d ever watched Beevis & Butt-head.) Interesting. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My column this week attempts to offer a gentle counter-argument to the people sneering at Gone Home and calling it a “walking simulator”. I suspect this will go the way of all debates about this game, but you never know. Maybe the stars will line up and one person will see the game from a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[102],"tags":[307],"class_list":["post-24220","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-weekly-column","tag-gone-home"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24220","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=24220"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24220\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=24220"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=24220"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=24220"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}