The Power of Immersion and The Joy of Breaking It

Funny Kitchen

I watched a friend as he wound his way through Gone Home, falling into the solitary and eerie atmosphere it established right from the start. He slowly explored each room, expecting something unusual to happen at any moment, visibly tensing and becoming immersed in the experience. He was drawn into the screen, leaning forward, staring wide-eyed into this strange house.

Then he found the kitchen.

Scattered throughout the house you can find cups or other small objects to interact with. They often bear little to no consequence on the story, and have no gameplay importance. The kitchen is more or less filled with these. My friend proceeded to fill the oven with every dish he could get his hands on. He put furniture in the fridge (as you do), and generally left the kitchen a wasteland of goofy hijinks to break the tension built from the rest of the game.

Narratively Rich

In both cases -- the careful creeping through each room, and the physics tomfoolery in the kitchen -- he was having a fantastic time. That a single game can provide such a rich availability of experiences is, in my estimation, precisely why they’re such a powerful storytelling medium. Clearly the designer didn’t intend for players to stop and build an oven shrine from a bunch of dishes midway through their narrative, but they did allow plates to be picked up and moved. Or dropped on the floor. Or flung deftly into the refrigerator from across the room.

Comedy is often derived from the unexpected. Gone Home is a fairly serious endeavor, with sharp themes about the inhabitants of a home and how they coexist. That's why it can be pretty darn funny to start gathering all the cups you can find on the first floor and try to build a smiley face out of them. It's unusual and subverts our expectations set up by the game.

Funny Kickin'

These situations happen all the time in games. As I played F.E.A.R., a horror-shooter mashup, I was pulled into the rhythm of intense shooting sections followed by slower, creepy exploration arcs. I also spent twenty minutes slide kicking dead enemies into things after finding out it slingshots them across the level at absurd speeds, rag-dolling them loudly into couches and doors where they'd get stuck and start wiggling endlessly.

Game designers spend a tremendous amount of well-spent effort making our games immersive and engrossing, but it's fine to lean into their inherently unexpected nature and occasionally break the illusion for those joyous moments of chaos. Games provide a unique opportunity to have interactive humor played out through mechanics or the complex interplay of systems, and I hope to see more designers lean into this often-overlooked potential of interactive storytelling.