Unfamiliar Feminine Spaces in Gone Home's Environmental Storytelling

This conference paper, presented at DiGRA 2020, examines how Gone Home (The Fullbright Company, 2013) uses environmental storytelling to fuse domestic familiarity, feminine and queer identity, and the poetics of horror into a single spatial experience. The author argues that the game's household objects and architecture do more than convey plot: they build a believable world, encode gendered and queer social identities, and defamiliarize the home through horror conventions such as flickering lights, hidden passages, and ambient storm and creaking-floor sounds. The paper positions the game within a material-culture framework, drawing on theories that objects can communicate emotion and identity and on the concept of "poetic artifaction," which treats objects as carriers of poetically encoded meaning. It also invokes theories of the architectural uncanny to explain how spatial design evokes unease.

The paper's stated contribution is to focus specifically on the game's fantastic and horror-reminiscent aesthetics, an angle the author distinguishes from prior scholarship on Gone Home's nostalgic affect and queer narratives. Its central analytical interest lies in how femininity, sexuality, and eeriness are crafted and intertwined with one another and with the pre-established narrative. Framing horror-inflected spatial poetics as rhetorical devices, the analysis considers how they both frame the story and communicate emotional meaning to the player.

The scope is limited to a single title, with the analysis conducted through close reading of the game's environment and object placement rather than through empirical audience data. The paper's broader claim is that exploration-driven games can shift narrative focus toward objects, positioning them as both worldbuilding tools and primary agents of storytelling within the digital medium.