GAMES ARE MY CHILDREN
I find packing games up for a move to be pretty terrifying.
I've spent most of my life playing and collecting tons of games. These aren't just games to me, they each hold memories of their very own. Super Mario World isn't just a Super NES cartridge, it is also the feeling of triumph I felt when finally defeating Bowser. Castlevania for NES is the broken controller and the Game Over screen. I keep all of my games someplace easily accessible, either in my bedroom or in the room where I play games the most. Sometimes I just pull them out and look at them. It's like a book you keep on the shelf, only having read it once, but you take it down every now and then to leaf through the pages. It gives you a reflective moment, that for me satisfies my need for nostalgia.
Packing them all up in boxes and throwing them in a truck is worrying me. It's a pretty horrible/crazy thing to worry about games, most of which I don't actively play any more. I'm the type of person who gets really upset when a game has the slightest imperfection on it's disc or box. I can't help it, it's just how I am. It's a compulsive desire that comes with collecting anything. Comic book collectors of course are known for obsessively preserving their comics in polybags and acid free boxes. Gamers are the same way. Browsing the forum NeoGAF's 2008 Gaming Setup Thread you find many people's gaming areas to be uniform. Games are organized usually by system, then alphabetically. Some people do by developer or series. All of their games are in one place. Sometimes they have a designated "game room" in their home, or sometimes their entire apartment is devoured by gaming.
Then there's this need to show it off, the reason threads like this exist, and have hundreds of pages on some forums. Are gamers just interested in finding the optimum method for displaying and shelving their games? Or are they just looking for some validation? If other people are doing it then it makes it feel alright.
Not that this is wrong. I'm the same way. But is it really healthy to keep all these things around? I have a bunch of Gameboy games just sitting around, but I no longer have a device capable of playing original Gameboy cartridges. I have both a PlayStation and a PlayStation 2 around even though I have a PlayStation 3 that can play all of my PlayStation platform games. I have no use for these items. But am I really going to discard or sell my copy of Pokemon Blue that I sunk so many hours into 10 years ago? Remembering those days is not enough, for a collector there is a desire to keep physical evidence of those memories around because it makes them feel more real.
I've spent most of my life playing and collecting tons of games. These aren't just games to me, they each hold memories of their very own. Super Mario World isn't just a Super NES cartridge, it is also the feeling of triumph I felt when finally defeating Bowser. Castlevania for NES is the broken controller and the Game Over screen. I keep all of my games someplace easily accessible, either in my bedroom or in the room where I play games the most. Sometimes I just pull them out and look at them. It's like a book you keep on the shelf, only having read it once, but you take it down every now and then to leaf through the pages. It gives you a reflective moment, that for me satisfies my need for nostalgia.
Packing them all up in boxes and throwing them in a truck is worrying me. It's a pretty horrible/crazy thing to worry about games, most of which I don't actively play any more. I'm the type of person who gets really upset when a game has the slightest imperfection on it's disc or box. I can't help it, it's just how I am. It's a compulsive desire that comes with collecting anything. Comic book collectors of course are known for obsessively preserving their comics in polybags and acid free boxes. Gamers are the same way. Browsing the forum NeoGAF's 2008 Gaming Setup Thread you find many people's gaming areas to be uniform. Games are organized usually by system, then alphabetically. Some people do by developer or series. All of their games are in one place. Sometimes they have a designated "game room" in their home, or sometimes their entire apartment is devoured by gaming.
Then there's this need to show it off, the reason threads like this exist, and have hundreds of pages on some forums. Are gamers just interested in finding the optimum method for displaying and shelving their games? Or are they just looking for some validation? If other people are doing it then it makes it feel alright.
Not that this is wrong. I'm the same way. But is it really healthy to keep all these things around? I have a bunch of Gameboy games just sitting around, but I no longer have a device capable of playing original Gameboy cartridges. I have both a PlayStation and a PlayStation 2 around even though I have a PlayStation 3 that can play all of my PlayStation platform games. I have no use for these items. But am I really going to discard or sell my copy of Pokemon Blue that I sunk so many hours into 10 years ago? Remembering those days is not enough, for a collector there is a desire to keep physical evidence of those memories around because it makes them feel more real.
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