The world you neither open nor delete

Pocket edition. This is a shorter version of a longer article; you can read the full edition when you have more time.

It's there in the list, with the date of the last time you went in: two years ago. You have no intention of playing it and you can't bring yourself to delete it either. It takes up a few megabytes and takes up much more than that.

The psychologist Sherry Turkle has spent decades studying what she calls evocative objects: things we don't value for their function but because we think and feel through them. Her finding is that certain objects stop being property and become part of the self, which is why getting rid of them doesn't feel like throwing something away but like losing part of your own life story.

A saved world ticks every box. You didn't buy it: you made it, decision by decision, including the bad ones. The narrow corridor because you misjudged it, the half-finished tower, the temporary house that stayed for eight months. Each of its quirks records a moment of yours, it can't be repeated, and on top of that it has the date on it.

That's why the question isn't why you can't delete it. It's why you feel you ought to be able to.