As you play through Gone Home for class on Tuesday, I want you to liveblog your experience playing. Liveblogging is an informal sort of freewriting — while you are in the midst of playing the game, just notice whatever seems interesting to you and pause periodically to note those observations in your blog post.
The game begins on the front porch, with a brief puzzle to get in the front door, and sets up a little background for the main character and serves as a simple tutorial for basic game mechanics, so launch the game and play through that opening section, then pause the game and open your dashboard. Write a new blog post which starts by announcing that you’re beginning to play through the game and links back to this post (not just the course site, but this specific post). Tag your post with “sq3,” “gone home” and “liveblog” plus whatever other tags you’d like. (You can add tags in the post editor page, in the section labeled Tags, which should be in the sidebar just beneath categories and just above the featured image area.)
Write a paragraph (or a few sentences) responding to that opening sequence. Again, whatever is interesting to you about it — visual and audio style; emotional reactions; how the game establishes setting, time, and character. Perhaps especially think about how the game establishes character given that there is only one person present in the narrative and it’s the first person narrator — without dialog and other traditional methods of defining character, how do the game designers go about doing so? You might make predictions or note expectations for where this game will head.
Publish the post. Once you’ve published your post, you might check out the other students’ posts and see how they responded to the opening sequence — please leave comments on their liveblog posts responding to observations they made!
When you’re ready, go back to the game and play on. When you find a scene that seems particularly cool or beautiful or interesting, take a screenshot and/or write up a brief note about it on your liveblogging post — either leave a comment on your own post or edit the post and add a timestamp plus a few lines of commentary on the end of your post.
Check in periodically with your peers’ responses to the game and pay attention to whether you have similar or different reactions. Leave comments on your peers’ posts too, responding to their observations.
