Symbolic Architecture in Her Story and What Remains of Edith Finch
To sincerely play a videogame is to inhabit a simulated space. This seems like a given — games tend to be about, or at the very least take place in, interesting spaces. Whether by our presence, interaction, or mere observation, the spaces we inhabit can tell fascinating tales. However, the specifics of the space’s relation to a narrative can be messy, and differ from one game to the next. Two excellent examples of titles that offer varied approaches to narrative spaces are What Remains of Edith Finch and Her Story. Through the lens of Henry Jenkin’s “Game Design as Narrative Architecture”, this essay will explore how these two games form a relationship between spaces and stories through “memory palaces” and narrative architecture(Jenkins 11).
Rather than traditional literature, which generally moves in a rigid fashion from one plot point to the next, games are able to offer much less linear stories that essentially replace temporal progression (Scene “A” leads to scene “B”), with spatial progression (Telling a story through the movement in a space). This spatial progression can be seen clearly in Her Story, where player interaction occurs on a desktop that holds hours of years-old police interview footage. Despite the footage originally occurring in chronological order in-world, the player can watch them in any order they wish using typed commands. This can result in wildly different player-led stories. They could type the word “mirror” and be greeted by a mundane early scene where Hannah idly discusses her late husband’s job: “Simon does the more special work. Mirror making feature windows. Artistic things. Really beautiful things” (Her Story). Or they could just as soon enter the word “throat” and have nearly the entire central mystery spelled out in a monologue from Eve: “They argued. Screamed. He hit her. So she grabbed a piece of the mirror just swung it round. She cut his throat clean open. She’d only meant to scare him off” (Her Story). The player exists in an information map where any route can be traveled to further progress the game. Thus, the desktop acts as a place out of time, or as Jenkins would put it, a “memory palace”, wherein the player is free to experience the story of Hannah and Eve from an entirely unique perspective (Jenkins 11).
Whereas Her Story uses a memory palace structurally, Edith Finch does so literally — the house that players spend the vast majority of the game exploring is itself a story space. Each room is unbothered by time, frozen at the moment its inhabitant passed for the sake of the story. This is clearly seen early in the game when players encounter the room of Molly. Despite her shrine declaring that she died in 1947, her room exists in a state of perpetual youth. A bright-colored jellyfish plushie sits atop a dust-free bed, and leafy vines hang from the ceiling in perfect health — almost like Molly had passed only moments before. It’s as if the home was slowly embalmed as the Finch generations marched on, eventually becoming only a mummy wrapped in the memories and possessions of those who once lived there. So while the player themself must visit each room in sequential order, the in-world events are still organized through space (the Finch house) rather than time (the actual birth/death dates of each denizen).
What’s especially intriguing is that through the use of thoughtful narrative architecture, these spaces are able to not only house stories, but contribute to them as well. The Finch house is more than a collection of bedrooms — it’s the mediated essence of the curse that lived in said house, passed through diary and imagination, rendered in full detail for the player to explore. The rooms of Dawn and her children climb comedically high into the air, each staggering on the mountain of plywood beneath them. However, the ridiculousness of the construction is halted when Edith makes the following statement about her mother near the end of the game: “My mom moved up to the loft after her brothers died. At the time, it was as far away as she could get” (What Remains of Edith Finch). With this quote, it becomes clear that Dawn did not want herself, nor her progeny to suffer from the fate of the curse, represented by how their corresponding rooms are built as if they are trying to get away from the core of the house. This new generation climbs higher and higher in a desperate attempt to escape their past. But ultimately, each rotting floorboard and paint-cracked window pane is still built atop the same cursed foundation. In this way, the architecture of the play space contributes to important aspects of character drama.
While Her Story doesn’t feature much physically rendered architecture, recurring themes around houses and specifically attics play an important role in the story of Hannah and Eve. This can be seen in the following line from Eve as she describes the events that led her to live with Hannah: “They had made the attic into a place where Hannah could play. There was a dollhouse. She hid me up there. No one else ever went into the attic. It was her place” (Her Story). The attic became a special space for Hannah and Eve, their home base where false identities could fall away and they were free to assume co-dependence. This is significant because even in a game entirely without traditional play spaces, the audience still ends up focused on specific environments and architecture. Eve’s journey from stranger to a clone to a stranger again is mirrored through identifiable spaces: Florence’s house and the street across which she would gaze, Hannah’s attic where an enduring bond was formed, and even the dingy bar that facilitated her first sultry encounter with Simon.
Her Story and What Remains of Edith Finch are meaningful as companion texts precisely because they offer different perspectives on the types of relationships that can be formed between narrative and architecture in video games. Whereas stories are born from the Finch house, spaces are born from the words of Eve and Hannah. They are capable of creating and supporting one another through the use of memory palaces and narrative architecture. Whether it’s a house crawling away from its own past or the uncoupling of a desktop from the burdens of sequential time, powerful things can occur when designers consider the spaces they create with the same weight as the stories told inside them.
