Before I write this I must let everyone know for those who haven’t played Gone Home do so before reading this. It’s a powerful story and one that everyone should experience for themselves. Also that this response will have spoilers for the game, since I am writing a response to it. Also since this is specifically for a class I may actually write a more personal response to it later.
Compare and contrast the gender roles of Sam, Lonnie, and Katie. What symbols, signs, and other evidence about the house help inform your opinions?
How do these relate to conceptions of “girl play” and “boy play” as described in Jenkins’s “Complete Freedom of Movement” essay?

(Unfortunately due to the way I copied the blog the summary of the game wasn’t copied).

Gone Home is a game of discovery, one where you find yourself home after a year and everyone else gone. The discovery is more of family history though and not one of great earth shattering changes. This game would probably be considered a “girl play” game according to Jenkin’s “Complete Freedom of Movement” article from previous responses. It is a game where there is no fighting, it’s exploring the home, and is all about mysteries, secrets, and the hidden. But do these characters fit into the typical “boy play”/”girl play” roles? If I had to set them into roles I would say it would fit thusly; Katie would fit the “girl play” model, Lonnie would fit the “boy play” model, and Sam would fit somewhere inbetween.

Katie is definitely the “girl play” model as fits into Jenkin’s description. “Girl space is a space of secrets and romance, a place of one’s own in a world that offers you far too little room to explore.” In other word Jenkin’s believes that girl space is a place of secrets within the home, one which we know from hidden clues Katie loves to dig up. In fact it makes sense that Katie is the one who is exploring the home to find out what has happened, because she is one of exploration. But she just got home from a trip through Europe, you may say, yes very true something that seems like a “boy play” exploration but in fact I feel it’s more to the “play town” aspect of Jenkin’s “girl play” model. Meaning that Katie is really going out to find the secrets of Europe in safe tourist environments, whereas a “boy play” trip would be backpacking through the country, hitchhiking through the country side seeing small cities, having an adventure. As you see these are both forms of exploration but one has a lot more danger to it then traveling to tourist spots.

Since we explored some of the “girl play” why don’t we hit on the “boy play”. Even though Lonnie is a girl I think she fits into the “boy play” model. Let’s get some background for her. She lives with her father, who himself went into the military, and helps him rebuild bikes. She’s a punk girl, one that defies authority, who breaks rules. In fact I believe the only reason she is treated differently by school and others is because she is a girl playing in the boys world. “The space of the boy book is the space of adventure, risk-taking danger, of a wild and untamed nature that one must master if one is to survive” Jenkin’s point is that boys,in addition to “boy play”, are wild and dangerous, and needs to be tamed and this can be seen in Lonnie because of her going into the military like her father, to tame her wild side, even as she goes on to wild and adventurous, while in the military, to places like the jungles of Mexico.
Sam is the one inbetween these two roles I feel. She is coming to terms with herself while at the same time trying to become more adventurous. She is stuck in a world where she is basically a girl but when she writes she writes of the world of a basically “boy play”. She always wrote herself as the hero in her pirate tales, the dangerous, adventurous type, with her First Mate who actually transformed in her stories from a boy to a girl, which in the game world meant going from old male friend to new girlfriend. Furthermore she was trapped in the girl play world where she was stuck at home and discovered all the secrets of the house, the hidden panels, hidden passage ways and kept a lot of secrets. In the end I think she chose the world of “boy play” because of the running away from home rather than staying, but if you continue to look at it she does “sacrifice their private in order to make room for others’ needs” Jenkin’s is insisting that girls in becoming women sacrifice their privacy for others, just like Sam does form Katie in providing all these clues throughout the house. SO maybe she is what Jenkin’s always wanted with his “Neutral Play Space” because “girls need to experience the ‘complete freedom of movement’ promised by the boys games”, his point is that in running away Sam not only has had the closed “girl play” but is experiencing the open “boys play” as well.

In the end “boy play” and “girl play” plays a lot into this game and shows that you don’t have to be a girl to enjoy a game that has no action and is all about exploration, moreover you don’t have to fit into the gender roles that the world wants to place you into.