I wrote my first ‘review’-assed review on this site a couple weeks ago. Been coming here for a few years now, and I’d never done a proper review in all that time. Part of that is just my life situation in that time – rarely playing games when they’re released – and part of it is that I just prefer rambling incoherently anyway. With GTA, I felt like I had something to say that I wasn’t seeing anywhere else, but even doing it in another format like that, I’ve never really kidded myself that I do these write-ups for my own benefit more than anything else. Still, it was nice seeing that some people read it. Anyway, back to blogging.

I finally saw Gravity, aka ‘the movie where Sandra Bullock plays that poor astronaut from Modern Warfare 2.’ I’m a big Alfonso Cuaron fan – the man made the only watchable Harry Potter movie – and while the visual stuff was extremely impressive, the dialogue kind of deflated the rest of it. I understand the reasoning behind ‘we need an emotional hook/human interest stuff!’ but when you’re dealing with SPACE, nobody gives a flip about dead babies that aren’t even in the movie. Or maybe they would, but not when it's that hammy and sentimental. The one thing the movie did well –and the only reason I’m really bringing it up – was that it had a very strong sense of place, of physicality. Especially compared to something like the newest Star Trek, where I didn’t even realize they were above Earth until San Francisco blew up (again), it was very refreshing to see how a taking a different visual perspective/attitude could have such an impact on the story – that constant feeling of being exposed underlining every scene.

I mention this because that tactile sense appears –albeit in different ways – in two games I’ve played recently, Gone Home and The Stanley Parable. They’re roughly comparable, in that you walk about (dicking about might be more accurate, in Stanley’s case) in an enclosed area while someone talks to you – a rebellious teenage girl and a snarky British man, respectively. The ever-present sense of humor in Stanley makes it a much easier pill to swallow. The fact that you never do very much is fine, because so much of the game is about repetition and variation that any actual ‘gameplay’ in the traditional sense would be an impediment. If nothing else, it’s a refreshing experiment. Gone Home is ok for what it is, but Anne Frank aside, teenager’s diaries rarely make for very compelling material, and it’s pretty clear they're going into standard territory with the different narrative threads early on. It feels like the game equivalent of a YA novel. At the same time, I really like what the Fullbright Company was trying to do here. There’s a narrative subtlety in this kind of exploration I find appealing, and even if they didn’t really pull it off, I hope we see more of this kind of thing in the future. Video games sometimes struggle with finding how best to let you interact with the environments they present, but the Stanley Parable and Gone Home both show how there can be a simple joy in poking around in a place, which isn’t something we can really do in other media (and are likely to get arrested for in real life). I’m not trying to get into any ‘Great American Video Game’ nonsense, but if this sort of thing becomes the new 2D-sidescroller-with-a-twist for indie games, I’d be totally ok with that.