If you've played video games for long enough...hell, if you've had any hobby long enough, you probably have boxes full of stuff and things related to it. The boxes get full over time, and then you have to find somewhere to put the boxes.
Maybe you should, instead, open the box and determine what it's in the box, but it's so much easier to put that box somewhere out of sight. That's a problem for another day. Or is it a problem at all? Who doesn't like a box they can revisit?
You might expect that Patrick and Rob take to this problem in different ways, but there is one universal truth: we all have boxes and we all have stuff in them.
Rob: The past few months we’ve moved a lot of things into storage. I know Janet’s position on storage units, that anything that ends up in a storage unit is probably something you should just have gotten rid of, but deciding what to keep and what to get rid of requires a lot of consideration in itself. That’s especially true if you’ve already been through several rounds of downsizing your possessions. The stuff MK and I are throwing into boxes is almost always a sentimental in some fashion, or would immediately be useful the second we get a larger place, and so for a few bucks a month we have the luxury of clearing space in our house without needing to decide what space we’ll clear in our lives for stuff like my collections of BattleTech novels or D&D campaign records from thirty years ago.
The other day I was emptying out my closet to get it ready for painting and I hit what remains of my old video game collection. Lot of PS3 and 360 discs of doubtful utility, a smaller number of PS4 discs, and then absolutely nothing from this current era. But then I hit the PC stuff. The discount Sierra Classics edition of Red Baron. Myth II: Soulblighter with its manual. X-Wing Alliance. Takeda 3, also with its manual. Multiple versions of Thief: The Dark Project. The Last Express jewelcase.
The list goes on, but not as long as I’d like. More importantly, what I have are bits and pieces of a collection I mostly lost. Some of it was lost when my parents’ home flooded, but I think I’d already tossed most of my old game boxes and manuals. I very much doubt I’d still have them today, for the same reasons it’s easy to roll your eyes at someone moving stuff into storage as opposed to the trash. Why keep such massively oversized packaging, and reams of documentation that you haven’t looked at in years? Yet as I put stuff into another banker’s box for storage, I started kicking myself for not hanging onto more of that material. I’d trade a lot of the easily replaceable paperbacks and comic collections I still have in my possession for the box Grim Fandango came in (look what people are charging for boxes that are in good shape and you’ll see lots of people apparently share my opinion).
My point is, video game packaging and especially PC game packaging was absurdly overproduced and wasteful for much of the 90s and I absolutely regret letting go of any of it. In a weird way those boxes and manuals were part of the experience. I can go and play TIE Fighter with some compatibility futzing, but the huge art on the glossy packaging? I want to put my hands on it.
Is there anything you regret letting go of across your various moves and apartments?
Patrick: I’m not sure it’s going to shock you to learn the general answer is “no.” When we lived in California across San Francisco and Los Angeles, we moved almost every year. We knew the Midwest was where we’d end up eventually, so the idea was to experience as much of the cities we were in before it all disappeared. It was mildly chaotic, but what else is the point of your 20s?
Every move, we’d go through our stuff and toss things. If you were hesitating to pack it in a box, is that really something you needed to unpack on the other side? It gave us enormous clarity, because you are ultimately, in most cases, talking about replaceable stuff if you want it again.
When I left the Midwest originally the summer after graduating college—graduated in May, moved to San Francisco in June, came back for a graduation party a few weeks later—I packed up most of my life from the northwest Chicago suburbs in boxes. Those boxes, over time, found their way to a garage in Wisconsin, and I didn’t touch them until formally moving back to the Midwest after my dad passed. At that point, it was time to dig into boxes of Sega Saturn games.
Because that’s what most of those boxes were: video games. DS. Wii. Nintendo 64. SNES. Genesis. GBA. Take your pick, it’s just boxes full of cartridges, discs, and potentially mice holes.
It’s not that I do not ascribe emotions to physical items, I’m just more selective, I guess.
That journey back to the midwest involved my wife flying back with our dog. I had two friends come out, pack up what little we owned into a moving truck, and we drove my car across (half) the country. We took our sweet time. I drove during the day, another friend drove at night, and then I’d drink beers in the back with a third friend. Eventually, we’d crash at some random hotel.
At some point, we stopped to hang out at some hiking/camping area. You could also go for a swim and buddy, I love swimming. I changed clothes and removed a watch that my dad had worn while he was still around. (It was a gift from my mom). Well, I went swimming, got out, and it turns out someone had kept an eye on that watch, because it was gone when I got back.
I was so fucking mad, man. It was petty, cruel, and there was nothing I could do about it. I’ve worn an Apple Watch daily for basically 10 years now, but I’m still so bitter about losing that.
The boxes of mostly old games were moved out of that Wisconsin garage when I bought a house. They are, at the moment, mostly stuffed into plastic tubs in a closet. In theory, they will find a nicer home when we…put more shelves in? But I suspect they’ll just stay in that closet.
Rob: God I’m sorry to hear about that watch. My dad marked a few milestones in my life with a new watch (maybe an odd choice for an elementary schooler but then again my nickname was “Professor” by second grade) and I have sort of internalized the idea of a watch as a really personal, meaningful thing. I’ve still got my first watch, an Indiglo Timex my dad got for me in fifth grade. I fucking loved its light-up face, even if the primary purpose of the watch was to help me know when it was time to go wait for the bus. I also hung onto my first nice-ish watch, a simple brushed-steel Seiko they got me before I started high school. I still sometimes think about getting a nice timepiece but, yeah, what purpose does it serve now that the Apple Watch is always on my wrist? And yet that desire is unabated. Be honest with me: would you think it was douchey if I wore an Apple Watch on one wrist and a dapper little Tag Heuer on the other?
I think a couple unique things were going on with PC game packaging in particular, though. For one thing, it’s kind of amazing how much those things had to explain what it was you were buying. They were designed originally for computer hobbyist shops and they used all that visual real estate to pitch you on what they were about, how they wanted you to feel about it, and even how they worked. Before they started downsizing packaging I remember some had false covers so you’d open the top panel of the box and you’d get a two-page spread of screenshots and text to further elaborate on what the exciting cover art implied. But that also means they were unusually good keepsakes of the games you bought, a way of displaying the game and thinking about it without actually firing it up.
I don’t know if it was as much a thing in console games but a lot of game manuals also opened or closed with designer’s notes, a kind of statement of purpose and acknowledgments section from the team lead behind the game. A lot of board games still have this but the practice is much scarcer in video games, in much the same ways manuals themselves have disappeared.
It’s funny, because this kind of packaging started to disappear in part because it was seen as wasteful. But I think the culture it represented was much less disposable. Boxes and pack-in materials were part of how a game communicated to its audience, yes, but I think they also said something about how games saw themselves and their relationship to players. The reduction in size and packaging materials might have made boxed retail games slightly less wasteful, but it also made it easier to jam more of them onto store shelves, shortly before the infinite shelf space of digital storefronts made physical editions almost irrelevant, and rendered the the idea of ownership a quaint notion from the past.
Patrick: I, too, have thought about buying a nicer watch for nicer occasions, but I’ve only gotten as far as buying a fancier metal Apple Watch band that I never quite figured out how to configure, so I mostly just wear the sports bands that I’ve accumulated over the years in different colors and move on. But no, you could not wear both watches at the same time! (You could get away with buying a fitness ring, instead?)
What I will say about opening up those old boxes from Wisconsin, though, is better recognizing how packaging changes over time, how it reflected the ways games had to try to grab your attention. (I get a similar satisfaction from looking through a bookshelf and seeing the different sizes and editions of books. I still need to get entirely hardcover editions of The Dark Tower series; I have several in paperback.) The way some PC games used to package themselves back then are equivalent to today’s collector’s editions.
Which, of course, tells you a lot about the modern video game. Nobody is going to the store to figure out what to buy. You show up at the store because you already know what to buy. The box, even the disc in many cases, is superfluous. All that’s happening is an exchange of currency to enable playing the game, presuming the company who operates those online components doesn’t turn them off randomly later on.
If I didn’t play video games for a living, which has obviously impacted the way I think about the form, I’d probably be more precious about those boxes. It’s no surprise, then, that I spend my time and money buying goofy boxes and special editions of horror movies, instead. It’s basically fulfilling the same niche!
On some level, this contributes to why retail stores are so boring to walk through these days. There is nothing to look at, nothing to grab your eye. You already know what you wanted before walking in the door. In fact, it might be sitting behind a counter for order pick-up, if not delivered straight to your car. And that’s assuming you made the decision to step into a store at all, which is rarer and rarer these days.
Makes me wonder: What the hell is going to be in my children’s inevitable boxes in Wisconsin?