Part 1: Game Design as Narrative Architecture
Part 2: You’re Gone
I thought I had clicked into the human version, so when they started talking about skunks and referring to themselves as a cat, I was very confused. It seems I’m not the game’s target audience haha. However, as the game progressed, I could see how the use of animals instead of humans made the story feel not as heavy, but it was still really really sad. I would say the target audience would be most ages (except for pretty young kids) and specifically people who like to feel deeply: the kind who like to listen to sad songs and welcome feelings of melancholy instead of burying them.
The game, You’re Gone, was created by Madison Scott-Clary and is hosted as a web app. I played the whole game, which dives into the life and emotions of the protagonist in the aftermath of his wife’s passing. There’s not much action on the user’s part except to send messages to the phone of the protagonist’s wife (a cat), who has passed away due to cancer. The user sends pre-written updates about the protagonist’s grief and their contentious relationship with their mother-in-law (see Figure 1 for when the protagonist’s mother-in-law breaks into his place and slaps him).
The game primarily uses embedded narratives. We go back and forth between past and present to understand the life of the protagonist and his deceased wife prior to her passing and after (see Figure 2 for a flashback to how things were like after the protagonist’s wife’s diagnosis). We are able to reconstruct the storyline of their lives and empathize with what the protagonist has gone through and is going through. The narrative builds quite well and even though we start off feeling so sad for the protagonist, it only gets worse as we oscillate between how difficult things were in past events (e.g. after they got the diagnosis) and how difficult they are now.
There is also a bit of evocative narratives as the story draws on our preexisting information and assumption about the difficulty of grief, relationships with in-laws, etc. It all contributes to the deep sympathy that we feel for the protagonist. There is also a small degree of enacting narratives since the user is the one to send the message, which helps build empathy a bit. We could even see the drafted text before hitting send, which contributed to the emotional experience. However, I will admit that it got a bit tiring after awhile to keep clicking, but it did feel like a necessary element for the game. I think because texts are so short, and the protagonist sent a lot of short ones back-to-back, it made sense that this was the experience on my end, but I think the amount of clicking I had to do versus how much agency I had was a little frustrating. On that last bit, player agency is tightly constrained, so there are no emergent narratives.
Additionally, the game’s subgenre is Kinetic Novel as it is simply a linear narrative with no player choices or branching storylines. I think this makes sense given the game’s heavy topic, and it allows the creator to more closely control the user experience. I also think the lack of user agency underscores the protagonist’s lack of agency in this situation (losing a loved one) and the fact that they are essentially screaming into the void (i.e. no one is responding). It wouldn’t really make much sense to let the user choose what to send because then they are essentially just having a conversation with themselves since there are no other players. The Kinetic Novel allows the user to be involved but still get to witness the meaningful narrative that the creator has laid out.
I love how real the story feels. For example, it includes typos when things get difficult (see Figure 3 for when the narrator is telling their deceased wife that they’re going to confront her in-laws that he found out about the horrible things they did to her), or it shows a very realistic moment of the the protagonist promising to wait a week to text and then texting a day early and realizing immediately after (see Figure 4). This contributes to really connecting the player to the story, and I hope to emulate this while writing my own narrative.
The creator also builds suspense and flips expectations well. For example, they announce a huge event—mother-in-law getting arrested (see Figure 5A)—and then take us through everything that led up to it, while we’re wondering the whole time what happened. It is very satisfying once it is finally revealed (see Figure 5B), and it was definitely not at all what I expected. This is a great narrative technique that I will also take inspiration from. The one piece of criticism I do have is about the clicking getting tiring. As I mentioned before, I understand why it is needed, but I hope to avoid a tiring/repetitive user experience (i.e. having to do something over and over without thinking) in my own IF.
Ultimately, the game did a fantastic job of drawing empathy towards those who are grieving loved ones through a deeply personal view into the protagonists’ desperate messages to their deceased wife. The decision to have the user send the pre-written messages further built empathy in a way that just scrolling through the messages to read them couldn’t have. This game made me feel very sad (lots of short, repetitive messages that all boiled down to the protagonist missing his wife very much) and frustrated (we had a front-row seat to all the stuff the protagonist had to deal with with this in-laws), just like the protagonist was feeling, so I think it succeeded in its endeavor.
