Anyone here listen to
Player One Podcast? One of the co-hosts talked through selling-off and getting rid of a massive physical game collection he acquired through the process of working at EGM as well as just general hobbyist collecting through the years, and it's an interesting take of someone who had such an attachment to a pile of games that he admits were mostly in a storage unit and never touched that he panicked when he realized he accidentally sent his GBA collection to the re-seller when he meant to keep them, and how he forced himself to let it go along with the other games he got rid of.
If any of you have moved from home to home, it pretty quickly puts into perspective how much stuff you accumulate stuff and how long it takes to go through all of it, unpack, and sort through things. We moved from North Carolina to Illinois in 2016, and we STILL have a good two dozen boxes and bins to go through in our basement. A good half of it is a collection of decorations for various holidays, there's maybe 2-3 boxes of clothes we haven't unpacked that we're just as well off to toss or donate, maybe another 2-3 boxes of old toys our kids wouldn't miss if we gave them away since they outgrew them.
And then there's my collection of video games. It isn't a massive collection that's completely unwieldy, but it's sizable enough given how many systems I own (Playstation 2, Playstation 3, Playstation 4, Xbox One, Wii U, Switch, 3DS, Vita, NES, SNES), 2+ controllers for each of those platforms, and anywhere between 3-15 games between each platform. That also doesn't take into consideration the Skylanders craze my wife went through, the Amiibo gluttony for year one, NES and SNES classic, and other accessories related to those systems.
It's not hard to passively collect games/accessories/collectibles to a point where walking through a used game store BECOMES the game rather than play the game itself. I found myself buying games not because I planned on playing them right at that time, but because it was a good find at a right price and thought to myself "I'll find time for this later". This mindset feeds into the growing backlog of games I have that quickly outpace a well-rounded person's ability to make time for. You start getting into weird math equations breaking down your spare hours and thinking "ok, if I have 3 1/2 hrs available each night after the kids go to bed, and I don't want to completely neglect my wife, I probably have about 18-20 hours a week for dedicated me-time gaming." I've found compartmentalizing my spare time like that brings more stress about a hobby that should be about nothing but enjoying my spare time when we have no plans, but it's something my mind starts wandering towards given my propensity towards maximizing the output for the time I have.
I've had in mind the ethos of the "Marie Kondo" method of organizing lately. For those unfamiliar, the abridged version is "Ask yourself if an item gives you joy. If it doesn't, get rid of it. Once all you have left are the things that bring you joy, find an organized space for those things and display them prominently".
With that in mind, last night I started the process of organizing all my game stuff and going through each game, and sorting them by 3 different measures:
1) Games I have an attachment to either due to quality or a fondness for.
2) Games I earnestly want to try or play through before deciding what to do with.
3) Games I bought on a whim and didn't ever actually think about playing, beaten and will never play again, or have tried and don't really care for it.
And you know what I found out? I own a lot less physical games in category 1 than I would have thought. So my plan is to excise the games from category 2 and 3, sell them off, and then only buy a game moving forward when I know I will play that game.
Maybe I'll end up regretting it in the long run, but I suspect it'll bring more relief to simplify my hobby and show constraint up front rather than turn it into an obligation to sample everything I have.
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