Why is My Frying Pan Here? Familiarity through Movement in Unpacking

As someone who is often quite troubled by the idea of moving places, Unpacking triggered many moments of anxiety and even fear – which says a lot about this game’s success in evoking my personal experience with the object of “packing.” Reflecting on my gameplay experience with Unpacking, I came to realize that one of the mechanics in the game’s design that made such evocation possible is the fact that objects that the player is supposed to unpack are not very clearly labeled and are often misplaced in different cardboard boxes.

The first example of this can be found as early as the second level of the game, when the protagonist first moves out of her childhood bedroom and into a proper apartment with three rooms, a fact that I initially did not recognize at all until I pulled out a toothpaste and a toothbrush from a cardboard box, and wondered where they could have been possibly placed. It was only until then that I realized there’s other rooms, and I am supposed to find these misplaced objects and return them to the room in which they belong.

For me, the ingenuity of the inclusion of this mechanic, instead of making each individual room a “sub-level” in which the player can complete decorating before moving on, is that it fosters the player’s frequent movement among the different rooms of the space. When we unpack a frying pan in the bathroom room, we have to go to the kitchen and find a place for it; in the same bathroom, we can also find a boot that was missing earlier when we were unpacking the boxes in the living room.

As a result of this mechanic, familiarity with the space is fostered by the player’s movement among its individual components. Through frequent movement among these individual rooms, the player can formulate a structural comprehension of the entire place as a singular spatial entity. In the later levels that include more and more rooms, this effect becomes more apparent. In the chapter where the protagonists moves into a house with roommates, the frequent navigation across different rooms, often with the help of the floor plan, allows the player to feel almost as if they are physically present in such a space, being able to comprehend fully its spatial composition and connect the dots between each individual room.

I think what this achieves can be generalized as twofold. First, its embodiment of the process of familiarizing with a space through movement within it parallels the process of getting to know a new space in real life. When we arrive at a place where we’ve never been before and we need to familiarize myself with such space, one of the most common things we do is to move through it, explore different parts of it, and through such movement develop deeper and deeper understanding and familiarity with the space. We got to know where each building on our UChicago campus is because we’ve walked through this space for countless times, and Unpacking, for me, replicates this process really well.

This process also contributes to the characterization of the protagonist, of the player-avatar, which is an interesting aspect for me. In Unpacking, our protagonist is not very well-organized, and this aspect of her personality is mainly constructed through forcing the player to encounter these misplaced objects, as well as the frustration of not knowing what’s in a box because they are never labeled. In this case, characterization is achieved through a procedural rhetoric, which is quite different from what could be achieved in other media forms. Another aspect of this characterization, which even hints at some form of character development, is the fact that (at least according to my observation) misplaced objects become less and less common as the story progresses. This was certainly not what I expected when I clicked on this “zen”, “cozy” game about unpacking and decorating rooms.