home
My grandfather and grandmother are extremely ill. My Mom’s father, and my Dad’s mother, and while they both still live at home, they could supposedly use the care and expertise of a nursing home. Nobody wants to go to a nursing home, and you hear horror stories and great stories of old loved ones adopting to a new lifestyle with new friends, activities and what not. It’s especially good for them if family visits them often, but then again, maybe that would depress them.
I can’t possibly get inside the head of my grandfather but I know his pain is more than just his failing and ill body, it’s the fact that he can longer function on his own and that he is slowly or quickly dying, whichever is the speed, it’s still an awful fate to face, regardless of when it’s going to happen.
Stephen Lavelle dropped an art game called Home last Saturday that addresses how pathetic one may feel when going to a nursing home, and even more heart-wrenching, the protagonist is not bitter and in fact is overly positive for someone in his situation. The game plays out with you the player addressing the protagonist’s needs by moving him through the world to food, a toilet, a nurse, and a bed. Each of these interactions will increase different stats on the old man. He’s not hungry when he eats, and he’s happy when he interacts with a human. After your first night, things aren’t so wonderful and soon it becomes overwhelming to help keep track and satiate the old man’s needs. The game compensates for your inevitable inability to be responsible for the old man and slowly your responsibilities begin to decline, leaving medication and diapers to take care of the old man’s simple, yet hard to fill needs.
It’s depressing, you can’t win, you can’t lose, you play it, and then it’s over. Home pushes the game medium to the uncomfortable realm of forced inter-actual narrative. Uncomfortable for it’s subject material and the things you are forced to do to finish such a game. You can always exit, but watching accidents and misery is just too interesting for us to switch off sometimes. It’s like the most depressing Gigapet clone ever created. Cruel, right? The sum of all things in your life surely end up being more than this, but perhaps it’s not something to dwell on too much, and is it something we should accept?
You can download and play Home, here.
- Kyle
More Home
Penny Arcade sums up what Home is all about in three easy to enjoy comic frames, here.