Unpacking (2021, developed by Witchbeam) is a visually ambient video game of eight levels where the player moves into empty spaces and unpacks boxes. Viewed through the lens of queer phenomenology, these levels are moments in which “We are turned towards things. Such things make an impression upon us. We perceive them as things insofar as they are near to us, insofar as we share a residence with them” (Ahmed 27). The boxes hold things for the player to discover by opening the flaps, taking out the item, and thinking about where it goes. From there, the player begins searching the negative space of the room, the visual ambience, to discover where it belongs and how it fits into the identity of the unseen main character. “Visual ambience” utilizes negative space and soundscapes without the human voice. This visualization of ambience makes “visible the ambient environs, the background rhythms of material reality” as it relates to identity formation over a period of time (Kalin). In Unpacking, players are faced with the process of unpacking boxes, pondering materials they collect, and discovering identity in the spaces of empty rooms. 

Through the extensive use of wide shots, zooming in and out, and the presence of over 14,000 foley sound effects, the video game organizes the player to the environments of empty rooms (Notis). Each of the eight levels represents a major move for the main character seen only in photograph frames unpacked from boxes. The player, in turn, is tasked to unpack not just these objects; they are also asked to unpack the main character’s identity. Brendan Keogh states, “the player cannot be considered before or distinct from the video game but instead reflexively as producing the video game experience that in turn produces the player” (27 emphasis added). The video game’s process—unpacking boxes—becomes one where the player is produced alongside the character they embody. Over the course of the game, the objects in boxes and where they are being unpacked hint towards the queer identity of the main character, such as seeing a relationship with a man fail while one with a woman succeeds. In this way, the queer narrative emerges through the negative space on screen: the main character discovers their sexuality as they unpack boxes and find where they belong in empty rooms. 

Unpacking is a game of ambience, atmosphere, and rhythm. Music typically accompanies the player in each level with a rhythm that encourages a constant movement: keep unpacking boxes. It’s an everyday action, one that compares to the objects and routines of everyday use from Virginia Woolf and Alice Walker: “[These authors see] truth (as well as beauty) as something embedded in the everyday, as something in process, as something revealed in glancing ‘moments of being’” (Donovan 54). The ability to zoom in, identify, and place each object becomes a negotiation with each object the player picks up. The body of the character is only seen in vague pictures unpacked over the game’s distributed eight levels. Instead, the camera pans left and right, zooms in and out, and follows the player’s production of the main character. We move into a space without a body to latch onto, yet we can recognize that we inhabit the place of the missing body slowly interrogating its identity. 

In the above clip, the game’s music pauses. I am left in the ambience of the empty rooms and misplaced objects. Thus, I am allowed to make my own rhythm within the ambience of the sounds that each object makes as I pick them up or place them down. In this tracing, we are asked how we turn towards things that make impressions and extend from ourselves, as Sara Ahmed explores with phenomenological considerations (27). Each object has its own unique sound effect and reaction to wherever it is placed. This ambience could ask a player to keep going, keep searching for the right spot and for the right sound as the object is placed down. 

Oppositely, the player may also pause, like I do in the gameplay clip, to zoom in and out to spend time with the objects and rooms. Sarah Ahmed states, “Our task is to recall their histories of [an object’s] arrival, and how this history opens up spaces for others that have yet to be cleared” (63). The absence of hands changes the process on screen, so my hands become the instigator of movement as fingers glide over a controller to unpack these boxes consistently. I see the same objects each level, or I notice the lack of objects from one level to the next, such as the lack of boxes moving into the boyfriend’s apartment. No wonder that relationship would fail: he did not have room for her objects, for her identity. When the main character gets her own apartment, the absence of sound makes me aware of the soft AC blowing, the way the blanket sounds on the couch versus the desk, and the way objects are arranged on a computer desk. This feels right, I think to myself as I tackle the organization of the desk. Each object becomes an impression as they reappear over levels, and each one tells me a story about the queer identity of the main character. 

Like an empty room being filled, the character’s identity fills up and extends through the objects. Over the course of the levels, the character discovers her lesbian identity, and the player discovers this through the process of moving. Suddenly, a partner moving in carrying female-identifying clothing in the boxes becomes the moment things click. Unpacking items of orange, pink, and white leads the player to slowly unfurling the identity of the character. In this way, the ambience of the items being moved around becomes the source of discovery. The visual ambience of Unpacking, formalized through empty rooms and layered foley sounds, organizes the player and attunes them to the identity of the main character as she discovers herself and finds happiness in the right partner. 

Works Cited

Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Duke University Press, 2006.

Donovan, Josephine. “"Everyday Use and Moments of Being: Toward a Nondominative Aesthetic.” Aesthetics in Feminist Perspective, edited by Hilde Hein and Carolyn Korsmeyer, Hypatia, 1993, pp. 53–67.

Kalin, Jason. “Visualizing Ambient Rhetorics.” Present Tense, vol. 7, no. 2, Nov. 2018,http://www.presenttensejournal.org/volume-7/visualizing-ambient-rhetorics/.

Keogh, Brendan. A Play of Bodies: How We Perceive Videogames. MIT Press, 2018.

Notis, Ari. “Hit Puzzle Game Unpacking Features 14,000 (!) Audio Files Replicating Ordinary Sounds.” Kotaku, 4 Nov. 2021,https://kotaku.com/hit-puzzle-game-unpacking-features-14-000-audio-fil-1848000220.