Unpacking Your Memories: How an Organizing Game Handles Memory

* The title screen of Unpacking

Suppose an accident robbed you of your memory. To recover it — to know who you are — you would first turn to the records your past self left behind. Diaries, photographs, social media posts, messenger logs: we live leaving countless records of ourselves. And every record is a curated memory.

A “record,” written with the intent of preserving some fact for later, differs from the traces we leave without meaning to. A shoe sole worn down along the inner edge, by a habit of putting weight on the inside of the foot, is a trace, not a record. Unlike records, into which intention and interpretation enter from the moment of their making, traces arise outside intention and are not usually treated as objects of interpretation. The trace is, by birth, humbler than the record.

Yet a trace can sometimes describe its owner more faithfully than any record. Records can be written to deceive, but a trace, possessed of physical substance, is honest. For someone who has lost their memory, then, the surest clues to who they are may lie not in a diary or a feed but among the objects of the room they once lived in.

Even if need and taste — intentions, both — govern our first decision to own a thing, with time the thing itself becomes our trace, because the relationship between object and owner keeps being renegotiated beyond its original terms. A trace is born of that relationship, lodges in the object, and changes with the years. This grants traces a self-sustaining life that records lack. As Walter Benjamin put it in “Unpacking My Library,” the essay he wrote while sorting his own books: “Not that they come alive in him; it is he who lives in them.”[1]

This vitality, hidden from our awareness most of the time, erupts without warning whenever we set out to consciously change how we relate to our things. To redefine a relationship with an object is to judge its worth anew. Keep it, or let it go? Within reach and in view, or into a corner? To ground the judgment we ask again: Do I still need this? How long have I had it? How did I use it? When, and how, did it come to be mine?

Reading traces this way, we summon memories from the unconscious. Anyone who has sorted moving boxes or attempted a deep clean knows how the tidying falls by the wayside once the memories attached to some object take over. Unpacking, an organizing game released in 2021, gathers exactly those moments into the shape of one person’s life.

* Each completed stage adds a photo to the album.

To organize is to bring what is scattered or disordered into order, and humans have evolved to find in this act not just psychological calm but real pleasure. Little else, in fact, fits the form of play so well. For Johan Huizinga, who gave us the concept of Homo Ludens, play is an activity freely entered into yet governed by strictly binding rules, accompanied by the pleasure of absorption. Organizing in daily life falls outside play only because it is labor rather than something done for fun — it belongs to the sphere of ordinary life.

Still, organizing and play have shared more than one property across their long histories, and the emergence of an “organizing game” genre feels natural enough. Browse the games under Steam’s “Organizing” tag and you find “Puzzle” and “Relaxing” attached alongside — A Little to the Left, A Storied Life: Tabitha, and Whisper of the House are representative. Organizing as a game, in other words, is understood as the pleasure of solving puzzles with set answers, enjoyed in comfort, without score-chasing or overly elaborate rules.

Unpacking, too, is classed as a puzzle game. Unboxing your belongings in a new home and finding each thing its place: that is the whole of play. Not every object has one exact spot, so players are free to decorate to taste, but things do have their proper kinds of space according to use, and a minimum of rules must be honored. As the stages progress, the boxes multiply and the homes grow larger, and the sorting grows more involved. Yet Unpacking designs its organizing as something more than puzzle plus decoration. Here, the play of organizing is the work of composing memory and identity through objects — through traces.

Unpacking tells one person’s life, from childhood to making a home of her own, entirely through her things. The protagonist moves at each of life’s turning points: the first room of her own, a college share house, early working life, moving in with a partner for the first time, the return to her parents’ home after a breakup, a new love and a new place. The player is given only the year of each move and the changing inventory of possessions. Complete a stage, take the photo, and a brief reflection appears — a remark on the new home, the mood of moving day — but nothing concrete about who she is.

* Belongings pulled at random from their boxes, not yet put away. (Screenshot by the author)

The player has no part in the packing. Each new stage opens on an unfamiliar home stacked with boxes, and the player must unpack like someone who has lost her memory. Across the two decades from 1997 to 2018, possessions persist, disappear, or newly appear, and from these traces the player comes to infer who the protagonist is and what she has lived through.

In 2010, she moves into her boyfriend’s apartment — her first time living with a partner. Wedging her things in among his, you register the difference in taste. He plays guitar; he brews his own coffee. In 2012, after the breakup, she returns to her parents’ home. The pushpin through his face in a photograph suggests it did not end well. Yet the ukulele and the drip coffee she took up through him remain her hobby and her taste. That the ukulele, the songbooks, and the coffee gear keep reappearing from the 2010 stage onward is, by itself, enough for the player to surmise the course of a life.

* A living room that shows the protagonist’s tastes. (Screenshot by the author)

Consider the objects that recur from the very first stage. She draws for a living. That she goes on using the art-supply brand of her childhood well into her professional career suggests firm tastes and confidence in them. The stuffed pig she carried around until its seams gave out shows the same stubbornness: her model since childhood, it becomes the hero of the picture book she publishes once she is an author.

The pig is not the only thing she cannot let go once she has loved it. The sketchbooks of her school days and her favorite book series claim shelf space in every home she moves to. The video games and board games that multiply with every move are her oldest hobby, and when she buys what she loves she collects the whole set — the disposition of a collector.

Yet imagining her life is no part of the puzzle. The sole condition for advancing is putting things where they belong. Even so, the player is drawn, irresistibly, into inference. You cannot know what a box holds or in what order its contents will emerge, so each item, as it comes out, has to be looked at and appraised. In doing so the player comes to remember the objects — to recognize what recurs and what has newly arrived.

There are plenty of ways to make this an explicit element of play: have players deduce the story toward a correct answer, or gather key clues. Many organizing and puzzle games build their narrative exactly so. A Storied Life: Tabitha, framed around sorting a late grandmother’s belongings, has you restore a memoir from clues gathered while tidying; Whisper of the House brings in NPC dialogue and a layer of mystery — “anomalies” — to make its story legible. As the puzzle of organizing joins with narrative, objects become things to interpret, and organizing becomes the act of examining them.

* The memoir screen of A Storied Life: Tabitha. ⓒSecret Mode

Here is where Unpacking parts ways with other organizing games. Between organizing in life and organizing in a game lies a difference of purpose beyond the question of voluntariness. When the discovery of narrative is posed as a game’s explicit goal, the placement of objects hardens from something to interpret into clue, into evidence. And then, paradoxically, the object is severed from the very memory and meaning it carries: a player whose first purpose is assembling the story strips from each thing only the meanings that fit the whole. But a human life as it is actually lived has no grand theme, no dramatic arc.

Sorting through things in reality, we may recall the story lodged in each one, but binding them into a single narrative is impossible; we can only grope through scattered memories. And as Henri Bergson argued in Matter and Memory (1896), memory comes to us not as a text with every detail preserved but as a collection of partial images. Objects, as elements of those images, summon whatever is associated with them, indiscriminately. The memories we meet while organizing appear before us just so — unannounced. What makes the play of Unpacking distinctive is that it realizes this real-world mechanism by which organizing and memory are joined.

In organizing games, the owner of the things is always a fictional other. The player holds no memories of the objects to be sorted. And yet the player can assemble, however faintly, the protagonist’s self — as if holding memories of her, or as if recovering memories that were lost. Finding places for objects, with no explicit narrative at all, turns out to be enough. For memory does not dwell only in us; it dwells also in the things with which we have kept relation.

Let me borrow Benjamin’s reverie once more: “Everything remembered and thought, everything conscious, becomes the pedestal, the frame, the base, the lock of his property. The period, the region, the craftsmanship, the former ownership — for a true collector the whole background of an item adds up to a magic encyclopedia whose quintessence is the fate of his object.”[2]

Organizing in Unpacking, then, is leafing through the encyclopedia written of its protagonist. Just as reading an encyclopedia does not deliver the world entire, finishing the tidying does not tell you exactly who she is. Everything remains conjecture. This loose mode of understanding is written into the game’s flexible rules mentioned above: no object has one fixed and final place.

Which is why we, in reality, keep organizing too. Finding the right place admits no correct answer, and so the task never ends — not for our things, and not for ourselves. Sort through the overflow, and through the memories that surface with it, and you may at least arrive at a fair guess at who you are.

[1] Walter Benjamin, “Unpacking My Library: A Talk about Book Collecting,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), p. 67.

[2] Ibid., p. 60.