While playing Unpacking, I drew surprising connections to Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, a collection of short stories about a platoon of soldiers during the Vietnam War. The novel begins with an extensive description of each man’s physical objects on the campaign, everything from guns to marijuana to girlfriend’s pantyhose to New Testament bibles. O’Brien describes both the physical weight of their gear and the characteristics and beliefs inherently tied to each object. As the novel progresses, the focus shifts from material possessions to the burden of isolation as the soldiers long for home. By the novel’s end, the strain of memories and emotions manifests in the PTSD suffered by O’Brien and the other soldiers.
Unpacking and The Things They Carried highlight the emotional weight and various forms of value we attach to each object as with interact with them. Sentimental value is the sum of every memory, interaction, and experience we have with a thing, and the possessions we retain as we grow and enter new spaces form essential parts of our sense of self. In Unpacking, stuffed animals, books, videogames, writing awards, and old pictures allow us to understand the character despite never interacting with them. These objects convey the accomplishments, changing interests, and lost loves that shape the character’s life; in the accumulation and depletion of possessions, we vicariously experience the weight of her experiences and the simple act of growing older.
The secondary connection between Unpacking and The Things They Carried centers on a critical distinction. In several of Obrien’s stories, including “How to Tell a True War Story” and “Good Form,” he establishes a difference between happening truth and story truth. The latter is the actual events, and the former is how authors alter those events to serve a desired narrative purpose. O’Brien claims that a story’s facts and objective truth matter far less than the message the story wants to convey. For example, he recounts an instance of killing a man who may have been innocent and agonizes over the implications before revealing that the entire encounter was fictitious. The tale’s purpose is not to highlight a traumatic event in O’Brien’s life but to allow the reader to feel the general emotions he suffered during the war. In Unpacking, there is a complete lack of happening truth, as the player has no established narrative of the character’s life; her journey is entirely up to interpretation, and thus we can deduce any story truth we want from the contents of the boxes. This complete lack of emphasis on a canon story puts Unpacking in the cozy game genre rather than a puzzle solver or mystery while allowing each player to form their conclusions about the character’s life. Those personal conclusions build the immersion and enable everyone to connect with someone they never meet personally.
I really enjoy the link you draw between Unpacking and The Things They Carried as they both tell stories through the objects that people choose to carry with them through their lives. One of the things that the novel asks and explores is, if you were to enter this dangerous situation with a limited pack, what would be the things you brought with you. Unpacking never really seems to ask this question and rather focuses on the items our character accumulates and keeps over her many moves. A level I think would have been interesting that gets to this same question the novel asks is moving into a college dorm room, where she physically wouldn’t have the room to keep as many of her things as she does. As a second level, this would have told us a lot about which of her items are most important to her as there’s the idea that she couldn’t bring everything, but she couldn’t leave these behind
I like how you compare The Things They Carried and Unpacking. The Things They Carried is such an interesting story. It is interesting to see how a person’s identity and memories diffuse into items, and how a game works backward to construct a character through items.