subpport packging Technology or Program application

subpport packging Technology or Program application

Amazon Products packaging machines

Amazon Products packaging machines

The Lost Art of Game Packaging, and the Digital-only Turning Point

Michael’s post over at The Brainy Gamer looks at how digital download services have begun to carry serious momentum and surely can only pick up even more as Microsoft’s XBLA and Sony’s PSN release more content. Many folks over at the Brainy Gamer are just as excited as Michael with the prospect of ‘no more plastic’, but I found myself less excited about the prospect of a future without physical packaging.

Part of those feelings can be chalked up to old fashioned nostalgia - it’s hard to give up fond memories of gingerly tearing the plastic off of a brand new game as a kid, reveling in the pungent odor of freshly printed manuals and carefully unfurling cloth maps of lands a’far. Closely linked to that is another aspect of physical packaging that I think is really important, and we’ve forgotten it in our unquestioned haste to deliver games cheaper and faster. That is, we’ve lost our appreciation of the game packaging as a craft and an art unto itself that provides a tactile engagement with games we otherwise lack.

The chronology of game packaging that Ryan Scott and Scott Sharkey present in their article Shrink Wrapped: A history of PC game packaging trends, from awesome to awful, is a good taste of how packaging progressed from the early years to the present. Unfortunately, a chronology is just that - it doesn’t bring to the forefront why packaging matters might matter so much to us. In this article I do my best to highlight one game with interesting game packaging - feelies, artwork, manuals, etc - and try to show how (for some people) physical interaction with the packaging can transform the nature of the game. I should note that some of the things I say later in the article could be construed as spoilers, so ye have been warned!