This past weekend, my wife and I packed up all of our belongings into a series of increasingly heavy boxes, paid some dudes to carry it all down the four flights of stairs from our current apartment and load it into a truck, and unload it all into our new home.  As I sat on the floor of our new living room, surrounded by half-unpacked boxes, trying to figure out where to a particular lamp was, I looked around at the strange new walls that surrounded me and realized, “This is my home now.”

Home is a familiar idea to just about everyone.  It’s the place you wake up in on most days, the place where you cook your meals and watch TV, and it’s the place you (usually) lay your head down at night and go to sleep in.  For something so integral to most of our lives, the idea of the home is not one that has seen much focus in the world of gaming.

The first game I can recall that had a character’s home in it was Zelda: A Link to the Past.  In the wonderful opening sequence of the game, you begin with Link in bed in the small cabin he and his uncle share.  After you leave the cabin to chase after your uncle on that particular dark and stormy night, well, you really don’t have to ever come back.  This may not seem a particularly striking example, but to me, this was the first time I had run into a game that even remotely indicated that your character had a place he could call home.  Link’s house remains for the entirety of the game a safe refuge to stop by and fill up on some hearts.  I would often pop in if I happened to be in the area, if for no other reason than to see if maybe, just maybe, anything had changed.  To me, this was Link’s home, and so long as it was safe and well, things were probably going pretty well in Hyrule.

This game vision of the home became the archetype for many that would follow.  Pokemon, for instance, always provides you with your pastoral country home.  Mom is always there waiting with words of encouragement and an offer to let you rest for the night. Chrono Trigger exemplified this formula as well, replete with helpful mother and soft bed.  Countless other RPGs follow this same trope.

Always, the idea is the same: home is a safe haven, a place to retreat from the troubles of the outside world and get a nice meal and a good night’s sleep (all for free!).  A different take on the home in games that comes up often is the idea of home as the expression of self.

In games like Animal Crossing and The Sims, the player builds the home themselves.  With a blank canvas before them, they can pick and choose what they want to fill it with, and what they want it to say.  Does your virtual home scream “I’m a retro gaming junkie” or “I’m really into art deco!”  Ultimately, the choice is up to you.  This is home as a mirror of the self, home as art.

Regardless of which image of home a game may use, be it haven or mirror, there is still the underlying idea that a home is something constant – something controllable – that the player can always count on.  Even in games where the home is mutable, these changes are enacted by the player – you choose to put the red wallpaper up with the gold stars, or to install a warp pipe in the ceiling.  This is how most of us would want to view home in the real world, as well.  Much like the real world, though, having something happen to our home can be a powerful experience, and one that is not explored by games very often.

The one game I feel that managed to tap into the emotions of having a home become something other than a constant is Mother 3.  Mother 3 is different from many other RPGs in the way it is structured around the village of Tazmily.  Instead of trekking off into the great wide world seeking adventure, the various chapters of the story occur in the same place as it changes over the course of time.

In the beginning we see Lucas and his family at home – an idyllic-looking home if there ever was one – and we see Tazmily as a place of friendliness and joy.  After the initial events of the game, the family’s home remains intact, but there is a critical difference: it now stands empty.  Returning at different points of the game shows that it stands vacant, just as the family left it, a stark reminder of happier times.  As if the loss of the house itself was not enough, Tazmily itself, the place Lucas calls home, becomes more twisted and unrecognizable with each passing day.  The player must watch as all that seemed good and pure about this imagined home is stripped away, one Happy Box at a time.

In many ways, this resonated with me as a player far more than having an asteroid fall from the sky and wipe the town out of existence (or any other number of disasters you can think of).  A home, in my mind, has a soul – it holds a piece of yourself – and if it is destroyed in an instant, then yes, it is gone, but at least you have your memories intact.  By taking Tazmily and having it rot slowly away, growing more and more warped as the game moved on, it serves to almost make a mockery of what once was.  It is a powerful storytelling tool, and Itoi wields it masterfully here.

Mother 3 gives me hope, though, that games will still yet make more of homes than simply being free inns or places to stow your knick-knacks, and that creators will tap into our natural emotions towards home for both sadness and joy.