When a Game Just Feels Like Home

Open Thread is where Waypoint staff talk about games and other things we find interesting. This is where you'll see us chat about games, music, movies, TV, and even sports, and welcome you to participate in the discussion.

I knew I’d found the right place when I bonded with the cafe owner around the corner over our shared love of great coffee. Maybe he was just trying to upsell me on the ridiculous prices he charged for the “real stuff” but then again, but I like to think he was just trying to work out whether he wanted to dip into his precious stash for someone like me. By the time I left and stepped back out into a gentle snowfall, I’d spent more than I wanted to on coffee, and found my coffee shop for life. I’d also fallen in love with the Kreuzbasar in Shadowrun: Dragonfall.

A lot of games begin with the idea of home, and the action that ensues is either about defending it, losing it, or reexamining it. A lot of times you’ll end up doing all three. But while there’s no shortage of games that begin with the idea of home, getting the feeling of home is a much rarer and trickier thing. But when a game manages to evoke the combination of belonging, familiarity, mundanity, and overall placeness that I associate with the times I’ve had a home, it always gets me a little more invested, and a little more charmed.

When you move around a lot, you start to realize how hard it is to feel at home in a place. There are places I have lived for years and never had a home, and there are those places where I lived for only a few weeks or months and sometimes still find myself daydreaming about. Because home isn’t just a function of living in a place, it’s something a bit harder to pin down. But you know it when you feel it.

And it’s a feeling that was evoked the moment I saw the slightly worn, mismatched chairs in the coffee shop in Dragonfall, the chess game sitting abandoned at one of the tables just begging to for someone to come along and pick it back up. I had started the game for our upcoming Waypoint 101, but while I'd expected some classic cyberpunk, I hadn't expected a game that would so completely nail the appeal of cozy domesticity.

It reminded me a bit of the opening hours of The Longest Journey, which starts by having you spend a day in the shoes of a struggling art student, and getting to know her roommates, her friends, and their hangouts. It was a day spent seeing how these characters have carved out space for their lives in much a larger and indifferent world.

In seeing those places, and being immersed however briefly in their rhythms and society, you learn what it would be like to live in such a world. And the things that would make that life worth fighting for, with all its flaws and limitations.

Anyone else have places in games they immediately identify with and can imagine calling home? What were the details that made them “real” to you?

Let me know in today’s open thread!