Starmaker: As much as I dislike Twat Simulator 2013, its whole point is the very personal experience of being a massive privacy-invading twat and rifling through other people's belongings, with the order, focus and pace of the invasion determined by the player. The point is that if impersonal-you the player think "ohmaigawdz she must have drowned herself in the bathtub!!!1!" (for example), you can go and check the bathtub.
(Inb4 it's not a game: no, it's just bad. Zork Nemesis works the same but it's good and no one's complaining.)
kohlrak: Wasn't she a member of the family ,though?
I don't want to derail the thread, but this makes it even worse. One's home is supposed to be a safe space. Eternal vigilance is bad and will fucking kill you. Relatives are not entitled to know about mommy's sex dungeon escapades or daddy's incontinence. Honestly, I shudder to think about how life in a house wih no expectations of privacy would play out. Keep your room's door locked at all times Check the bathroom for cameras. Fridges in rooms. Watch your laundry.
Now, in videogame-land the justification for RL crimes is provided by the setup or handwaved entirely, with the assumption that yes, people understand it's a videogame. A lot of shooters reward you for committing war crimes. Many strategies reward genocide (e.g. when, trying to prevent the match from being a death spiral, they make an enemy race's cities vastly less useful to the conqueror - raze it and build your own). Adventure/horror logic says when you find yourself in a spooky mansion, it behooves you to investigate.
But then, surprise surprise, the game pulls and bait and switch, like that one shooter whose name escapes me at the moment, or Brenda Romero's happy holocaust adventure (seriously, fuck Brenda Romero). Turns out it's *~an ohsoserious game for real adults which raises ohsoserious adult questions~*, not your typical puerile ghost murderer nonsense. Awww, games can tell serious stories, let's collectively cream ourselves.
Except, in the real adult world, if you're a rich white person and you suspect something bad's happened to your family, the one thing you touch is the phone, to call the police, exactly because they're strangers AND bound by privacy law and whatever embarrassing facts they uncover, your family's social interactions won't be tainted by them.
Gone Home "should" have been a movie because the only thing the protagonist should have done is passively peruse her sister's "diary" (addressed to her and effectively "sent"). But what people love about it (and Tacoma) is nonsequential rifling through stuff.
Not that a movie would've been any good:
The thing about it is, there are a lot of different kinds of specifics in the story. There are the specifics of the years that Sam was in high school. That she’s a girl. The region of the world where the game takes place. All that kind of stuff that doesn’t map one to one with me. We’re in Portland now, but I grew up in Florida
Peak white liberal.