This walkthrough self-referentially explicates creator Bryan LeBeuf’s integration of physical and video game-based recordings of childhood memories
Home Movie is an interactive new media documentary that allows players to explore disappearing neighborhoods from Detroit’s West Side. The game animates the childhood memories of its creator, Bryan LeBeuf, by melding archival media, including contemporaneous cable television and LeBeuf family photos, with classic game aesthetics. For users familiar with historic console games, navigating through the sparsely populated environment of Home Movie evokes memories untethered from the geographic specificity of LeBeuf’s Detroit. In this context, hardware memory functions as an extension of personal and collective memory. By reducing archival footage into 16-bit resolution, cutscenes in Home Movie — “memories” — visually depict the degradation of human memory, while the fragmentary volumetric cityscapes rendered by sophisticated game engines and LiDAR technology suggest the destruction of memory spaces.
This guide draws on a rich history of video game walkthroughs and strategy guides. Perhaps the most visible of these publications is the Nintendo Player’s Guide series, which released more than one hundred titles between 1987 and 2007. Although commercial publishing of video game strategy guides has declined since the proliferation of player-generated guides freely available online, major releases are still accompanied by lavishly illustrated tomes celebrating the art and narrative of a given title. For Game Studies scholar Mia Consalvo, walkthroughs complement the spatial narrative progression of video games with a more traditional mode of story-telling which is read intertextually by game fans. Referencing the intertextual format and shifting narrative voice of the genre, this guide invites readers to navigate the remembered neighborhoods of Home Movie alongside the game or as a standalone text.
This walkthrough is best experienced on a desktop monitor. Click here to view as a full-size PDF.
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