<div style="page-break-before:always; page-break-after:always">Videogame awards season is here &ndash; the time of year when I hunker down and play through the year&rsquo;s big games in a marathon crush for various jury duties. For a few weeks I live like a game reviewer, overwhelmed by how damn long games are. Flashback to the year when a fellow juror told me: &ldquo;You really need to play at least 70 hours of this game to understand why its narrative is so special!&rdquo; Normally this makes me grumpy towards bloated triple-A blockbusters and my heart soars when I hit a short and unique game. However, this year the triple-A blockbusters are pandemically thin on the ground and so I am left to get grumpy at the short and unique games. This is not the kind of behaviour I really want to boast about in public. But for now let me (half-heartedly) grumble about indie storytelling as I digest my thoughts on the recent Unpacking. Unpacking is a pronounced example of the trend born of both indie necessity and ingenuity: it tells a story entirely devoid of humans, those creatures who are annoyingly expensive to model, animate and program. This is an indie thing, but it started with the big games. Once upon a time, when games were primarily about shooting or whacking, we lauded them for telling stories with their environmental dressing. As we pushed to elevate games even more, we talked less about the shooting and whacking (still the core experience) and more about the environmental storytelling. At some point we convinced ourselves that this was a special and magical way of telling stories &ndash; unique to games! (Mise-en-sc&egrave;ne is French, so clearly something entirely different.) As much as I love ellipses in storytelling, I posit that telling a story with only the objects or atmosphere that surround it often feels less effective than, well, telling a story directly. So I was primed to raise my eyebrow when I saw Unpacking praised for telling a story &ldquo;in a way only a videogame can&rdquo;. And, yes, there is a lot here that is environmental storytelling &ndash; at least once you&rsquo;ve unpacked it all.<div style="page-break-before:always; page-break-after:always">Unpacking is a Seinfeld routine that opens with, &ldquo;Moving house, huh. What&rsquo;s the deal with that?&rdquo;<div style="page-break-before:always; page-break-after:always">Our protagonist&rsquo;s career is mapped out through the tools of their trade on their desk, the certificates and framed prints on the wall. There are now two toothbrushes on the sink, announcing the arrival of a live-in partner. So far, so mise-en-sc&egrave;ne. And, yes, I do find this somewhat unsatisfying. It&rsquo;s like if Citizen Kane was just about a sled called Rosebud and we never saw Orson Welles and his Mercury Theatre chums. I love to infer a Major Life Event, but would also love to see a protagonist react to it in a way that is uniquely their own. In the absence of a main character, I find these games often become a projection of their player. Which is not entirely surprising when we consider the type of story which Unpacking taps into.Unpacking is all about Observational Storytelling, where the storyteller points at something and asks, &ldquo;Have you ever noticed&hellip;?&rdquo; It works best when the thing you point at is so everyday and common that we all recognise it, but are not used to looking at so closely &ndash; opening up unexpected comedy or insight. Unpacking is a Seinfeld routine that opens with, &ldquo;Moving house, huh. What&rsquo;s the deal with that?&rdquo; The gameplay asks us to go through the motions of unpacking &ndash; something universal &ndash; and through the scrutiny of a game mechanic have us notice things in a way we wouldn&rsquo;t necessarily. So: unpacking into a partner&rsquo;s existing apartment is a very different spatial puzzle to unpacking into an empty apartment as a single person. Don&rsquo;t we all have that one weird thing we carry around with us from place to place? What&rsquo;s the deal with the special mug? A lot of this is the stuff of a Seinfeld routine, but there&rsquo;s a novelty to the game because we exercise muscle memory and recall buried memories associated with the processes that we&rsquo;re calling upon: I&rsquo;m doing the thing and thinking about the thing at the same time. Synthesising experience and reflection is one of the higher goals of art, in my opinion &ndash; it&rsquo;s something that eludes us in everyday life. So let&rsquo;s applaud Unpacking for this &ndash; and wonder at what other pieces of observation would benefit from an interactive take. That said, I come back to the people themselves and remember the pitch for Seinfeld, which famously posited that it was &ldquo;a show about nothing&rdquo;. But it wasn&rsquo;t really a show about nothing. It took the universal standup routines and dramatised them through the vessels of its minutiae &ndash; an oddball cast of specific and memorable characters. Imagine an Unpacking whose mascot is an Elaine or a George, rather than a stuffed pig toy.

Unreliable Narrator

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