Simply put, you cannot become better than someone else at a walking simulator, and this lack of a mechanism for dividing elite from noob might be what’s really behind some critiques complaining about the lack of gameplay.
Outlandish: If there is no hierarchy of skill, then there is no clear status structure, which might threaten players who value mastery. It makes me rethink complaints about “no gameplay” as possibly complaints about “no competition.”
While the game attracts attention for its centering of a queer narrative, the distance of the avatar from that narrative invites critique:there’s a fundamental passivity to the game that contradicts this praise, particularly where the queer-centered narrative is concerned.
This quote really makes me think about the tension between immersion and observation in games. Gone Home lets the player witness an important queer story without ever participating in it…does that create empathy, or does it keep the player at arm’s length? It also raises questions about what it means to “experience” a story through a character: can understanding and reflection replace direct involvement, or does passivity limit the emotional impact?
Even those multiform stories that offer multiple retellings of the same event often resolve into a single “true” version—the viewpoint of the uninvolved eyewitness or the actual reality the protagonists wind up in after the alternate realities have collapsed.
It is interesting to see how we can draw parallels between this viewpoint of a "linear story" and the human experience. For example, it is common in an interconnected community for people to share "gossip", aka retellings of the same story, and it is a natural human response to then look for more answers or ask other people for their perspectives in search for the "true" version of the story.