Best Results Organizing

[Editor’s Note: This is not a typical Paper Doll post, but it is about organizing, so don’t worry that I’ve changed the focus of the blog. Also, if you click on any of the links in the first few paragraphs and get distracted playing classic games in your browser, don’t forget to come back and read the rest of the post!]

UNPACKING

I have limited experience with video games. Which is to say, I played the tennis-like Pong at a friend’s house when it first came out around 1972 and delighted in PacMan (and Ms. Pacman) while waiting for my Pizza Hut meal to be served, during my adolescent years.

And I even plunked myself down to play Super Mario Bros. when I was in graduate school and needed something obsessive and concentration-focusing to take my mind off what the heck I was going to do with my life when graduate school was over. 

But game strategy, manual dexterity, competitiveness, and the ability to bonk a cartoon plumber’s head upward onto a brick to make a mushroom appear (if I’m recalling correctly) — none of these have ever been my strong suits. 

In the past three decades, my interaction with video games has been limited to helping my clients pare down their video game collections, organize what they keep, and sell or donate the remainder. I haven’t played, or had any desire to play, any games until last week, when Australian game developer Witch Beam released Unpacking. My Google News feed knows me too well, and upon last week’s release, I was inundated with articles and reviews about this intriguing game.

The company describes Unpacking as a “Zen puzzle about unpacking a life.”

The game has eight chapters or levels, each corresponding to a move to a new “home” — a childhood room, a college dorm, one’s own apartment, sharing a space with a significant other, etc. — all for an unnamed, unknown protagonist. It starts in 1997 and continues forward to today. As players, we are never explicitly told the story of this character, but through her possessions, a certain  intimate bond is formed.

The game has been described as “part item Tetris, part home decoration.” You select digital cardboard boxes, open them, and through the game, put the items away. There are pre-ordained slots or shelves; the game is designed as a puzzle, and the goal isn’t to throw everything higgledy-piggledy but find the logical home.

To move to the next level, you need to generally put things where a reasonable person might think they should go. That said, as part of the accessibility features of the game, you can apply the “allow items anywhere” option to eliminate the puzzle element. With this choice, you can’t really put an item in the “wrong” place any more than you could in your own home. (Still, please don’t store extra pantry items or clothes in the bathtub; we professional organizers have seen that in the real world, and it’s just not a great option.)

So, just like at your house, you can put things in weird places. And while I haven’t seen a treadmill or Peleton in the game, I’m betting that just like in real life, you can hang your clothes on exercise equipment. As a player, you get to decide where things belong, but you have to obey the laws of physics and geometry. You can’t fit square pegs in round holes or ten pounds of whatever into a five-pound bag.

I find it appealing that there’s no competition and no timers counting down. But there are, apparently, 14,000 different audio sounds to go along with tucking items in nooks and crannies, setting a toothbrush in a water glass, arranging books on shelves and supplies in drawers, and so on. If you lift a T-shirt to a hanger placed on a rod, the shirt hangs; move it lower to a stack of shirts, and it self-folds. (If only actual unpacking, organizing, and indeed, laundry day, were so magical.)

In addition to putting things away (that is, giving them homes), you can change the color signature of the room, add some on-screen stickers to decorate, take photos of a completed room, and add those photos to a scrapbook, complete with a “handwritten” description of your move-in experience.

Here’s a peek at the game’s launch trailer:

Throughout it all, there’s a soundtrack from a BAFTA (British Academy of Film and Television Arts) award-winning composer, Jeff van Dyck. If video game soundtracks are your thing (Yes, I’m looking at you, my friend Chris!), you can listen to Unpacking’s soundtrack on Spotify and purchase it in all the usual music-buying places like Amazon, Apple Music, Bandcamp, etc. (And no, Chris, I’m not listening to this in the car on any road trips.)

Warning: I should also note that, assuming you’re reading in North America, there will be some oddities in the rooms and homes in Unpacking. The refrigerators are not the full-sized ones we have, but those smaller, under-counter ones that are barely bigger than dorm fridges. The bathtubs have the glass half-walls I saw in Europe; I’ve yet to figure out how one manages not to soak the half the bathroom, but at least there’s no need to run any water in the actual game.

I’ve seen reviews calling the game calming and endearing, but also cathartic and moving. (Of which, I have more thoughts, below.) As a professional organizer, of course, I found this tweet hopeful:

Y’all, I already knew @UnpackingALife is a great game, but my daughter is cleaning her room and I was impressed with how much better it looks than normal.

She told me “Unpacking really helped.” Holy crap ? Best game ever!!!! pic.twitter.com/WQNhT3fHd7

— Dr. Ashley Godbold ??‍??‍? (@ashleygodbold) November 6, 2021

 And for those who wonder how much detail is available to organize exactly how and where you want things to be, this tweet gives you a sign:

We definitely didn’t expect this kind of creativity from our replay feature, but we love it so much! ??

Credits: @carellogyhttps://t.co/wZe1SQpICc pic.twitter.com/115WshTfLj

— Unpacking ? Out NOW! (@UnpackingALife) November 7, 2021

Unpacking is available for a variety of platforms, including Windows, Mac, Linux, Nintendo Switch, and Xbox One and runs $19.99.

ACCESSIBILITY

In the real world, unpacking and organizing a new home, whether a dorm room, a studio apartment, or a multi-bedroom family house, can be a massive headache. Imagine how much more difficult is must be for those with physical disabilities or distracting cognitive challenges (ranging from ADHD to traumatic brain injury). This is just one reason why many clients call in NAPO or NASMM professional organizers who specialize in relocations to work some video game-like magic in setting up a new space.

I can’t be the only person who gets flashbacks to Bewitched watching this sped-up kitchen unpacking/organizing scene play out. Seriously, compare it to Samantha Stevens working her tinka-tinka-tink:

There are no in-game professional organizers, but Unpacking‘s developers prides themselves on its accessibility features.

For those needing visual assistance, the user interface buttons can be enlarged, and you can zoom in on the screen; if you’ve made a booboo, the red “invalid” outline (remember what I said about the laws of physics?) can be changed to a different color. And you can disable the animation feature for room-swapping (in case you unpack a box of kitchen items when you’re in the living room) to avoid motion sickness.

In terms of audio assistance, the game lets you operate soundtrack music and sound effect volumes separately, and there are no audio-exclusive cues for game play, so players who can’t hear don’t miss any of the essential game features.

For cognitive accessibility, the game has no penalties; there’s minimal text, and reading skills (in English or otherwise) are not required in order to play. And, as mentioned, you can turn off the puzzle angle to be allowed to put things anywhere.

There are also a variety of mobility-related accessibility features. None of the actions require pressing more than one button at a time, clicking-and-dragging, holding down buttons. Computer versions support playing via a mouse and keyboard, a game pad, or touch (“on supported hardware,” they note) and you can play one-handed with just a mouse. The Nintendo Switch version of the game supports (and I quote, because I have no idea what this means), “gamepad, touch, and gyro in two-handed and one-handed configurations.” Controls are re-mappable when necessary to support a user’s accessibility needs.

While Paper Doll is neither a gamer nor a reviewer, I think it’s important to accent accessibility features in products, and while this does not arise often when I talk about notebooks and storage options, I intend to be more cognizant of such issues in future posts.

UNPACKING THOUGHTS ABOUT UNPACKING

Having missed three decades of video game development, I am, at best, only peripherally aware that not all games are multi-player shoot-em-ups and car-racing (and crashing) extravaganzas. Certainly I knew about The Sims, a series of simulation games where players create virtual people, build them homes (and families) and play with their careers, activities, and moods and desires.

Apparently, this approach is called a sandbox game, an open-ended type of video game where players have a freedom of movement for their creations and there are no pre-set goals. (If only we humans felt that much ease in creating our lives and risking change!) The popular Minecraft, with it’s blocky 3D people and infinitely expanding world of raw materials, tools, and create-able structures is similar.

Unpacking feels like it belongs in a world tangential to these sandbox games; there’s freedom of movement, no timers or competition, and you can’t lose your character’s life by unpacking things in the wrong order or organizing things “wrong.” But like real life, there is a very solid goal for you as the in-world character: unpack in an organized way to live your life.

In Vice‘s Unpacking Is a Lovely Game About the Power of Seemingly Mundane Objects, Moises Taveras has created a great introduction to the game beyond the broad strokes. Through it I learned some spoilers and realized that there was more depth of insight to be had beyond how many frying pans could be fit into a cabinet:  

The “challenge,” a term I’ll throw around incredibly loosely, becomes finding where everything fits best. It’s a logic puzzle, so as long as you’ve been in a kitchen, a bedroom or bathroom, you’ll be able to sufficiently reproduce a functional home. … There’s a joy in getting it all right, but the greater one to me was playing a game that, in bits and pieces, understood the relationship we build with the things we collect.

But there’s more. After I learned of Unpacking, I started reading every review I could find, and what’s particularly gripping about the game is how you get to see the protagonist’s life unfold through her possessions (and those with whom she shares her space). It reminded me of Sam Gosling‘s book, Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You.

Gosling, a professor of psychology, wrote, in an almost gumshoe detective approach, about how we intentionally and unintentionally create, define, and communicate who we are to the world through our possessions. Published in 2008, before we all defined ourselves via social media, it’s a fascinating look at how our stuff — the essentials, the practical items, the sentimental things, and the clutter — exposes who we are. It seems Unpacking is designed to do that, too.

Kotaku‘s Ari Notis posits, interestingly, in Unpacking Might Have the Worst Video Game Boyfriend of the Year, that there’s more to this game than pattern recognition and matching items with logical spaces. This was the article that really caught my attention, as Unpacking seems to reflect the more complex, nuanced aspects of organizing, the ones our clients struggle with, and the ones we professional organizers are brought in to solve.

The issue isn’t that the home is too small, but that the boyfriend’s items are fixed in place, leaving our protagonist limited in her options for her own things, including as to where she can put her framed diploma. (The review notes it only fits under the bed, but a commenter posits that one can, at least temporarily, place it on the wall above the toilet? Um, yeah. No.) The Kotaku review continues:

September 2010 is the first level in which Unpacking feels truly cramped. Your things—your dolls, video games, and battered kitchen supplies—won’t fit within the confines of the level’s default setup. Instead, you also have to move the dude’s existing stuff around to make room. (There’s also the sense that you’re invading someone else’s space, given the mishmash in aesthetic tastes.) You eventually fit everything, but you do the entire task all alone. It is off-putting, to put it charitably, that this dude who was fully planning on moving in with someone didn’t even bother to make an inch for his incoming partner.

As a professional organizer, I’ve worked with clients whose homes had more than adequate space, but (very) adult children had left behind all the possessions of their childhoods, dorm rooms, and even early apartments, limiting the space available for their parents to use. (This is why I tell clients, “Don’t become the curator of the museum of other people’s things.”) 

For years, I've warned my clients: Don't become the curator of the museum of other people's things. Share on X

And I’ve had clients who felt like (sometimes unwelcome) visitors in their own homes, like the wife whose husband had filled every closet with his own clothes and possessions, leaving her to hang her things on doorknobs throughout the house.

This is all to say that at first glance, this game might seem like little more than a slow-moving version of the afforementioned Tetris or those square, plastic, 16-tile games where you move the jumbled tiles to create the face of a lion. From what I can tell from these reviews and the game play videos I’ve watched, I suspect that Unpacking offers a robust, intriguing opportunity to self-soothe through in-game organizing, even if one struggles with organizing in one’s own spaces, while gaining insight into a fictional character through analysis of her possessions.

Apparently, video games have come a long way from when the plumber was trying to save the princess.

Are you intrigued, but you just aren’t the video game player type? I was surprised to learn that there are actual video of video game play on YouTube. If you don’t mind commercials, you can watch someone else play the game. This version runs two and a half hours (and the player has turned off the music soundtrack):

WHAT’S MISSING FROM UNPACKING

Granted, I’m not a video game designer, and I have zero idea what someone would find compelling in this or a similar kind of gentle, experiential video game. But I know organizing, and let’s face it, unpacking is about organizing from the ground up. Instead of rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, as organizing can sometimes seem when you’re overwhelmed, you’re beginning with a clean slate (but admittedly, a whole bunch of boxes of chalk).

However, as far as I can tell, Unpacking is missing a few essential elements that might make it better reflect the real world experience. Namely:

• Paper — We start when the protagonist is a little kid, so I really wouldn’t expect much more than the putting away of books and maybe tucking some homework into a backpack or drawer. And perhaps it’s because I’m a professional organizer who specializes in paper, but I’d want to see how the character develops some method for unpacking and organizing the paper in her life to help make sense of it. Yes, she’s got that aforementioned diploma, but throughout her life, upon each move, she’d have leases and bills, perhaps a marriage license, and a mortgage or title. (Again, Unpacking is Australian. Maybe they have much simpler paper lives? Though I doubt it.)
• Donations — Every possession that’s unpacked seems to be kept the goal is to find someplace for it; anything jettisoned seems to disappear in the unseen transitions between levels. Though it appears there might be a trash can in some rooms (and emptied cardboard boxes and packing paper magically go *poof* when tapped), but there’s seemingly no box into which to put castoff clothes, toys that are no longer age appropriate, or any of the items that no longer fit her life once she (and you) move to the next level.

On the plus side, one feature I’d feared missing seems to have been considered: continuity. When I began researching this post, I was going to note that from when the character sets up her childhood bedroom in 1997 to when she moves in with her boyfriend in 2010 to the end of the game, there are unrealistically few items that carry through. But perhaps my experience as a professional organizer, working with people who often have difficulty letting go of possessions, has skewed my idea of how much carryover from move-to-move is realistic. (Or maybe I haven’t grasped that the level of detail I see in people’s homes can’t be emulated in a video game?!)

According to Fanbyte‘s Natalie Flores in Unpacking Is a Zen Puzzle Game about the Joys of Moving in and Moving On, each of the levels of the game shows both an upleveling of the character’s possessions and a through-line of much-loved items:

As the protagonist experiences the many changes that life brings, I was glad to see certain items from her childhood — like her stuffed animals and game consoles — still show up in boxes I emptied years later in her life. I felt similarly as I saw her upgrade her small cassette player to a boombox, and her art supplies evolve in variety and sophistication.

I was also sad when the game indicated a portrait that was previously on display — and which I had assumed was still meant to be that way — now belonged inside the kind of cabinet destined to rarely be opened. I felt similarly, too, as I realized certain items she once undoubtedly cherished (and that I had unknowingly grown attached to) no longer accompanied her on the journey. Unpacking truly embodies the act of unpacking in the sense that you’re often surprised by what you take out of any given box. As well as what you don’t. That surprise is heartbreaking as often as it is pleasant.

Finally, perfectionists beware. Moving for a stranger can be as overwhelming as doing so for yourself. Tom Orry of VG247 wrote, in Game Pass Gem: Unpacking is the kind of game you wish you’d thought of, that he’d had no interest in unpacking or organizing before playing the game, but “I can’t believe I’m enjoying placing dishes as much as I am.” However, he quickly got caught up:

I’ve seen a fair few people talking about how Unpacking is a nice relaxing game, but I’ve found it anything but. For one, I want the rooms to look perfect. Books must be placed in order of size, shoes must be neatly placed together, jeans folded, buttoned shirts hung, socks all in one place. And that mark of the wall must be covered by a poster or a picture frame.

And good lord, please let me put all the tea and coffee making things together. I simply won’t abide having the sugar in a different cupboard to the coffee. And why do I have to choose which of my childhood toys get to go on a shelf and others hidden away? I’m thinking about one mistake I made as I write this. I think subconsciously I’ve become the person whose belongings I’ve been dealing with. Are they sad that I put the pig soft toy away? I think they probably are. I’m sorry. There just wasn’t room.

Before you consider playing, consider this a warning.

OTHER REAL-LIFE ORGANIZING AND LIFE MANAGEMENT GAMES WE NEED

Finally, I’ve been thinking about the kinds of “adulting” and life skills games people (like professional organizing clients) could use in addition to this kind of unpacking and organizing effort. Different areas of organizing one’s life take different cognitive and executive function skills, and I’d love to see game developed for these needs.

Financial Management — Years ago, Urban Ministries of Durham put up an interactive, in-browser game called Spent.

The point of the game is to challenge those who go whole hog on the concept of “You should pull yourself up by your bootstraps” to get a sense of the daily reality for some people. In this game, you must get a job and an apartment and deal with the unexpected challenges of illness (and hospital bills) and car repairs (and breakdowns). I have played Spent many times, and have almost always lost. The text-only game, with somewhat ominous music, induces stress. I think a money management “game” where you can’t lose, but can learn better options, would be a great opportunity for high schoolers (and grownups).

Time Management — The same kind of intriguing artistry and thought put into Unpacking could be used to create space in one’s schedule for work (or school), adulting skills (like laundry and grocery shopping), exercise, and relationships.

Paper Management — Come on. I’m Paper Doll, what did you expect?

Hey, video game developers, if you’d like some outside advisors, I know some great professional organizers to offer you advice! 

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Let me know what you think of the idea of Unpacking. Would you find it soothing to unpack and organize these spaces, or would you get overwhelmed? What other life skills games do you think are needed? Please share in the comments!