What games writing teaches us about creative writing: A case study of The Fullbright Company’s Gone Home

Abstract

This paper challenges the popular perception of creativity as a characteristic of special individuals and, instead, proposes that creativity is an emergent event resulting from the dynamic interaction of a creative subject (or subjects), a social and cultural context, and the material artefact (itself embodying its own social and cultural history). This theory of creativity derives inspiration from the social psychology of creativity and, especially, the research of Vlad Petre Glăveanu, who analyses Romanian Easter-egg decoration to establish how creativity in all its manifestations occurs as a ‘distributed, dynamic, sociocultural and developmental phenomenon’ (2014: 2, original emphasis). This paper focuses on games writing. Taking as its case study The Fullbright Company’s multiaward-winning computer game Gone Home (2013), and informed by an interview with The Fullbright Company’s Steve Gaynor, this paper attends to the ‘sociality, materiality and temporality of the creative work’ (Glăveanu 2014: 5). Having deliberately chosen a game with literary characteristics, the paper aims to arrive at a deeper appreciation of a new form of creative writing (conceived here in a way that accepts medial change as a fundamental part of literary history). It concludes with a reflection on the possibility for a less Romantic and elitist understanding of creative writing in its traditional forms.