The True Main Character of Unpacking
In November of last year, a small indie game Unpacking came out. Describing itself as a “zen puzzle game”, Unpacking is a game that is simply the act of emptying boxes and settling into a new space. It’s a familiar act – the art of pulling items out of boxes and trying to find their best location. As someone who both loves organisation and has moved three times in the past two years, I found it an oddly comforting game. Part home décor, and part organisation-porn, Unpacking gives you rooms and boxes, and allows you to live in the art of unpacking. Each level gives us another step in a person’s life – from a childhood bedroom, to a university dorm room, and finalizing in a full several bedroom house. At the end of each level, a snapshot photo gets taken and inserted into a book like a scrapbook with a short sentence that gives hope and context for the life-step the move represents.
Today, I wanted to take some time to explore Unpacking and its story. The way the story is constructed and enacted by the player is a fascinating one, and fairly unique to Unpacking. Part of this storytelling is the interesting question of who exactly the main character of the game is, an answer that is typically found within the things we unpack in the game. And while I won’t alter this approach too much, I do have a slightly different way of answering the question of who the main character of the story is. So, lets – uh – unpack this game.
With the exception of these phrases at the end of each level, no words are provided in the whole game. No one speaks, no one gives written context or dialogue. The entire story is simply told through the art of unpacking – the new homes being unpacked and the items you are unpacking become the entire story. The locations are of utmost importance to the growth of the narrative. For example, one level is when the primary character is moving in with a romantic partner. The next level is moving back to your parent’s home. The items, how they change, and which ones get added or removed is how the progression of time shows a character’s growth, both personally and professionally.
So who is this main character whose items we are constantly unpacking? We never see the main character, we don’t know their name, age, or any other amount of information and details about them. The only thing we have to garner this information is through their items. It’s an interesting way to tell a story, relying on the items that we have to communicate this information. This can be done in subtle ways, like when the main character first move into a house with friends after university where we see table top role playing game paraphernalia, and in all subsequent moves after that house, our character takes several of the role playing game rule books. We see how what the character does for fun, and how they define themselves as changing over time.
The possessions grow over time. They start with one big stuffed animal that’s a chicken, and through each level its revealed they’ve gotten a growing collection of small chicks. The toothbrush always goes into a glass, which gathers chips in it as it goes. There are photos that appear, and some that – then – subsequently disappear.
This is an interesting way to tell the story of the main character – tracing the history of a person’s interests and story through the appearance – or disappearance – of their items. We see, through the locations they live in over their life and the items they bring to those places, the history of this character and their growth to become more confident and more independent.
After the failed relationship where they move in with someone, the importance of their career becomes much more obvious. When I was playing through the game, I was appalled that whoever they were moving in with hadn’t made space for their art. The main character clearly was an artist, and one who cared very much for their work. But it wasn’t until they move into their own place – a bit of a shabby looking house but their own – that there was finally a designated space for their work. The sudden change of heart is simply felt when the player “steps” into the office space for the first time.
That’s the part about this game that is truly fascinating from a storytelling perspective – everything about the primary main playable character is only communicated through their things. Through the space the things go in and the things themselves. We know they’re an artist, have an interest in baking cookies, love tabletop role-playing games, and has an emotional attachment to several stuffed animals from their childhood. They journal and keep a paper diary. They wear jeans and plaid shirts, and worked at a coffee shop for several years before finally being able to do art full time. But we only have these descriptions at hand because of the objects we encountered as we unpacked their belongings.
So I propose we consider the questions about the main character of Unpacking from a slightly different angle: and that are through the things themselves. Most of the time, when humans encounter stories, we find the human in it. Even stories about non-humans become anthropomorphic in their presentations – like Disney movies, for example.
But I want to do something a little different. Instead of approaching Unpacking through the anthropocentric lens we’re used to seeing life and stories through, I want to have a lens on that’s more thing-centric. For a game that has so much focus on the things we have, I want to also focus on those things, but not in the hopes they give us information about a human. So let’s think about his game through things and with things.
Here to help us is anthropologist Tim Ingold. There are a few anthropologists that are helping do the thing-centred way of thinking, but Ingold gives us some solid ways of approaching this to begin with. In order to understand it, we do have to start with our natural inclination to always put humans first. Humans are not solid but are in a constant state of becoming. We are constantly changing and growing and adjusting who we are as life continues. Our experiences, our environments, our things, and engagements all come to define us, then re-define us. We are, therefore, defined by our relations with other humans around us – our relationships, whether they be romantic or friends or family help to define ourselves and our world that we find ourselves in.
But we are also defined by the non-humans around us. Our animal companions, for example, make up the relations we define ourselves by. Our plants, if we love plants, create our environments that we thrive in, and make up relationships as well. If you’re a little sceptical of the plants part, just ask people who surround themselves with it. We have other attachments as well. Many people feel emotionally attached to their objects, from books to photographs to even old t-shirts. These things can be objects we don’t even use in their traditional way anymore, but they still hold a special place in our hearts. When we are first meeting someone, and we go to their home, we look around and start to get a clearer picture of who they are through the objects in their home. We find these non-humans around us – from pets to things – as an intricate part of what it means to be human. So in a lot of instances, humans and things can be seen as inherently equal.
I don’t mean that I think our yearbooks are also humans, but rather what I mean is that importance is not always necessarily only reserved for humans. If we draw meaning for our own selves from both other humans and our things, then when placing things on a hierarchy of objective importance, humans and things are a bit more equal. Some people watching this may think I am making the humans in my lives that I define and understand myself through, like my mother and my husband, as little more than “things”, but really what I’m saying is that my old copy of the Lord of the Rings trilogy that I can’t even play anymore because the DVD is region-locked to my old country should be raised up a bit more in esteem than just a piece of useless junk taking up space in my flat. So it’s not that humans mean less to me, it’s that we should learn to understand that the objects around us are more important than we typically consider in them.
So in Unpacking, we can try to think of the game as giving us sneak peeks into some invisible human figure. But we could also see things in a slightly different way. We can take the game’s focus on the items we use to define ourselves to think with and through things rather than through humans. And when we do this, our view of the game is slightly different. Maybe we have spent too much time thinking about the human at the centre of the things, when we should be thinking about the things themselves. Our main character is not the shadowy figure of the artist who loves to bake, but there are several characters we are following through the game – the objects we find ourselves unpacking.
One character is the stuffed chicken – whose own family gradually grows as time goes on. The chicken finds a partner and a family of baby chickens, and always finds their own place in the home as they move from place to place. Another set of characters are the photographs. They start with friends and family, but grow to include romantic partners. And they become damaged when relationships fall apart, seeing a different aspect of what photographs do and evoke. We also have the pig – the stuffed animal that starts as a comforting friend and then turns into the muse for an artist, through which they find a life, attention and celebrity. Even the toothbrush cup serves as a character – one who see weather and age as it lives its life of service.
What the game Unpacking is giving us is not the story of an individual finding their passion and sense of self through the their life – one that we only get a glimpse of as we help them unpack their belongings in different homes. Rather, it’s a game about the objects. We see the life cycle of these objects, see how they start a life, how they grow and the relationships they build. Our character isn’t the artist – it’s the pig, the chickens, the dishware, and the plaid shirt. We get to know these characters over the course of their life, see them get chipped or worn, or how they grow and develop. How they find a constant source of love and attention, or how they become neglected. We may search for particular objects as we unpack only to find that, somewhere along the way, it disappeared from the story. And we feel that loss.
The human removal from the story in the way the story is told in Unpacking is an interesting way to tell the story. The human removal means we are forced to see the formation of story as inherently different, and we therefore think about the main character in a slightly different way. The intense focus on the objects means that we think extensively about the objects themselves – away from the human figure we are used to thinking about. It forces us to think about the way we relate to the object around us, but more importantly, we think about how they relate to us.