When was the last time you ‘Tetrised’ something?
Closet?
Moving truck?
Kitchen cabinet?
Tetris is so synonymous with organizing, it’s become a technique for fitting junk together,
even if you don’t get points in real life.
It’s not just Tetris;
Bejeweled, Candy Crush, like 90% of mobile puzzle games.
Video games love to give you stuff to organize.
Which makes sense - our brains like to find relationships and connections between visual stimuli.
It’s why “organization porn” exists.
Our brains are also stressed out by clutter.
Study after study shows that when people are in cluttered spaces they have higher levels
of stress and find decision making more difficult.
I've had people contact me to say that with the stress of their clutter no longer
in the way they've been able to be more successful in business or as a family.
This is Natalie Schrier, a professional organizer.
She’s helped people whose clutter has disrupted their day-to-day lives, and has seen the importance
of organizing first hand:
when people aren't stuck spending time looking for lost items and stuff like that
they have more time to spend with their family or exercise.
They've been able to cook meals, and be healthier and lose weight.
I mean, there's immense psychological benefits.
Has the word or idea of 'Tetrising' ever come up in your work?
I hear Tetris every time I'm working.
I am the master of Tetris
Puzzle games, Tetris, give us an easy way to alleviate stress by sorting little gems
or dots or tetrominos...
And then you destroy them!
Does the L block spark joy for you?
If not, get rid of it.
Purging becomes the reward in these sorts of games
because the stuff you’re sorting is meaningless,
but as Marie Kondo has taught us, purging is only the first step of organizing.
You also have to sort, evaluate, and categorize all the good stuff,
which is a literal chore in real life.
And yet, some games make this chore fun.
Games like Resident Evil 4.
Though more action heavy than its predecessors,
Resident Evil 4 was still a horror game,
and one of the main ways any horror game scares you
is by limiting your resources.
But in previous games in the series, an herb takes up the same space as a shotgun,
so deciding what to keep was usually a 1-to-1 equation.
Resident Evil 4 made your inventory a physical space.
Condensing herbs saved room for more stuff and gave you healing bonuses.
Weapons were different sizes, so you had to weigh how personally useful they were to you
and your play style.
Even if your play style was filling your inventory with nothing but eggs and fish.
That element of control highlights something I’m going to come back to a lot, because
it’s true of organization both in video games and real life:
how things should be organized is subjective and very personal.
Take virtual streamer Inugami Korone’s playthrough of Resident Evil 4.
Her organizing style had some...unique elements:
she flipped grenades upside down and put all
her guns on the bottom of the case
Her audience may not have liked it, and my eye only twitched a little bit, but it wasn’t wrong.
The joy of this inventory system is that Korone can organize this way
and we can’t do anything to stop her.
Video games simplify the organizing experience and give you total control,
which keeps it from becoming overwhelming.
And by designing it more like a puzzle game, they can even be fun.
There's a reason that inventory system's like Resident Evil 4’s are often called
‘Inventory Tetris’.
Plus, Resident Evil 4 paused the game while you were in your inventory, so managing all
your guns and herbs and eggs was like taking a deep, relaxing breath.
To the dismay of many fans, Resident Evil 5 dropped this inventory system in favor of
a simpler but much more stressful one:
the game no longer paused while you checked your
ammo or grabbed a healing spray.
It was the result of the game’s addition of co-op, but it forced players to keep their
inventory well organized.
This is another lesson that can apply to real life: organizing does take time,
but it’s an investment.
When your smoke detector runs out of battery in the middle of the night,
its much easier to find another 9 volt
in the battery bag, than it is in the junk drawer.
But organization isn’t just about arranging stuff:
It’s also about arranging our day.
In Stardew Valley, you organize your inventory, storage chests, crop arrangements, and grazing pens.
But there’s never enough time to do all of this in one day, which only lasts about
12 minutes in game.
There are caves to explore and relationships to build, but first you’ve got crops that
will rot and animals that will get angry about not being milked.
You have to organize your time if you want to be the best farmer you can be.
And guess what, those are chores.
But there’s a reason Stardew Valley has such a relaxing reputation:
having complete control over all this organization
makes it a task you enjoy doing rather than dread.
Other titles gamify the inventory sorting experience by directly rewarding players who
doing it well using adjacency bonuses.
In No Man’s Sky, upgrades permanently take up an inventory slot, so you have to weigh
the upgrade and adjacency bonuses against the ability to carry more stuff.
Moonlighter takes it a step further.
Not only are there adjacency bonuses, but certain items will destroy or corrupt other
items in your inventory if you put them on the wrong side.
More than any game since Resident Evil 4, organizing your inventory in Moonlighter feels
like a game unto itself.
Whether you find this process fun or a chore in real life, video games have lots of ways
to make it more enjoyable.
Or less enjoyable.
Imagine if you went to your fridge to get a snack and all you saw was a list of the
contents in alphabetical order.
Mmmm, cheese stick #5.
That’s what games with text-based inventories are doing.
This is a visual medium.
Why are you making me read an appendix list of my items?
Ahh, but you might think that visual inventories, like the style popularized by Diablo,
help solve this problem by letting you see everything at a glance.
But while they’re really nice to look at they’re not as practical as they might seem
and they quickly get overwhelming the more items you have.
It’s kinda like those “organization porn” photos: pleasant to look at, but not really
a practical way to store things.
I have this shelf in my house that’s full of little mementos and travel tchotkes.
I enjoy adding something and reorganizing it maybe once or twice a year.
But if I had to do that after every combat I have in my living room!?
C’mon!
Autosort can help with that problem, but it’s also something of an admission that organizing
in this game is tedious.
The system is basically saying “this is a chore, so let me do it!”
“I find organizing extremely relaxing, but my brain is wired for organizing.
For people whose brains don't work in an organized fashion.
It's not relaxing.
It's stressful.
and overwhelming, and anxiety provoking which is why people like me have a job.”
It’s okay if you don’t like organizing; Autosort can help you out.
Post-apocalyptic Grub Hub simulator Death Stranding automatically organizes the items
you carry on your back for optimal weight distribution, which is great!
It also begs the question of why weight distribution is a mechanic if the game is just gonna do
it for you.
It’s a missed opportunity to do something more.
Another “solution” is to let you create inventories within inventories, which does
cut down on clutter, but creates a new problem World of Warcraft players know all too well:
bags, within bags, within bags, within bags within bags, within bags,
It's just bags all the way down!
The mental map you have to keep of where you put all your stuff just gets bigger and bigger.
And just because this stuff is digital doesn’t mean it can’t take a toll on us.
Some people accumulate items and can't make decisions about items in a way that's
compulsive, they cannot break from it.”
This is Jo Ann Oravec, a University professor and expert in all things data.
She’s been studying the concept of “virtual hoarding.”
Virtual hoarding is the accumulation of online materials, of digital materials in a
way that is not functional
You’ve probably experienced a little bit of this yourself.
Thanks to these things, we all have tens of thousands of photos we never look at...
until we need one of them
and we know we took it years ago and we definitely didn't delete it!
Or maybe you’ve experienced it in a video game with massive inventory space.
While a game like Resident Evil 4 encourages you to use it or lose it,
in a game like Skyrim,
you can defeat a dragon while unintentionally carrying 18 wheels of cheese.
When we can seemingly hold an infinite amount of stuff, we just keep collecting it.
This can lead to a troublesome but wicked cool sounding problem
known as Dark Data.
I love the term "dark data", kinda sinister and all of that!
Dark data, that accumulates all of the scraps of files
and files that we haven't quite known how to label, no metadata for, etc.
In games, this could be the misplacing of resources in a Minecraft chest
or the critical quest item that’s been buried seven bags down.
Any game with lots of stuff is susceptible to it.
But it doesn’t have to be.
There is a game where organizing isn’t just a little part of the experience,
but the entire experience.
“Tetris is a beautiful metaphor for life”
Y-yeah, It is a beautiful metaphor for life,
but it's not actually the game I was thinking of.
This is Richard Hogg.
He made Wilmot’s Warehouse,
which is the game that got me thinking deeper about organization in video games.
In Wilmot’s Warehouse, players are given a bunch of blocks with simple if ambiguous
images that could conceivably fit into a number of categories.
You need to find the right place in your warehouse to store them because later,
you’re going to be asked to deliver specific blocks to your co-workers.
This is where you have to start thinking like a professional organizer:
My mantra for organizing is like items together.
Because even if you don't remember where something is stored,
if you have things grouped by category,
you can say "Oh, I don't remember where my lightbulbs are"
"But, all my tools and household items are on this shelf in the closet"
"So let me check there because that's probably where the lightbulbs are going to be"
You want to put similar blocks together so you can quickly and easily retrieve them.
But what those categories end up being is totally up to you.
The ambiguity of the blocks makes the possible categories open ended.
They are really kind of essential to making the game work.
People's sense of what those things are and where they go is radically different.”
Which is cool!
This means that, more than any other game, the way you organize
ends up becoming a reflection of you.
To demonstrate what I mean, I asked my colleague Simone to give us a tour of her warehouse.
[Simone] What we’ve got here is dog toys.
I don’t know why they’re here.
[Clayton] There were some similarities in how we organized.
We both had “science” and “nautical” sections for example.
[Simone] Now as you can see, nautical blends into hats.
It is thematically linked.
[Clayton] But those tended to be the exceptions.
Simone sorted her things into categories I didn’t even use, like ‘transit’ or ‘hats’
[SImone] Here we have ‘red’.
[Clayton] Or kind of red… sort of red? I dunno.
On top of that, we didn’t always see eye to eye on what the blocks even were.
Take this little block, which Simone see’s as “the libra sign.”
And while Simone’s touchstone is astrology, I see the Royal Navy’s executive curl because
I read more military sci fi than I care to admit.
Given total freedom to design our warehouses, we came to very different results.
This level of agency is part of what makes the game so satisfying.
And it’s the same thing that can make organizing satisfying in real life:
Within the context of a video game,
that feeling of like, squaring things away and going,
"Oh, I'm going to put this with these, I'm gonna put this we these."
Gives you little mini bumps of accomplishment,
even though you're just moving things around.
You're not creating something, and you're not winning anything.
There's a sense of satisfaction that comes from organizing things, which is to do with
control of your world, control of the world around you I think.
Organization in games, as in real life,
is fun when you have control over it,
and a chore when it controls you.
* fun music *
So here is a subsection of purple and yellow objects which is called "X's".
Which is why the red and white "x's" are here instead of in the red and white section.
So, that's fine.
What's over here?
Ummmmmmmmm
Miscellaneous!
Here's... blue, red, and white miscellaneous shapes.
With a little red and white overflow.
I hate me.