Opinion: Collection Or Obsession

Sometimes I like to think of myself as a reformed collector. None of the rooms in my house bear any resemblance to a forgotten branch of Gamestation anymore and my consoles hide quietly behind the doors of a TV cabinet, or sit snugly in their original boxes in cupboards.

Growing older, of course, has played a part – convincing your wife of the aesthetic values of an unboxed pile of Super Nintendo cartridges when weighed against fresh flowers and different sized glass bottles is a burden best avoided. Yet there’s no getting away from the fact that I still own hundreds of games. Across various digital accounts with a number of different companies, these games, or their licenses in most cases, belong to me. There’s no physical product there to look at, no dodgy PAL release artwork, nor worn boxes and manuals, but they are there and I’m still collecting them.

I still remember the first copy of C+VG I ever bought, probably swayed by the X-Wing on the front, and the wonder I felt leafing through page after page of computer game images despite not owning any of the featured systems. Games, and game consoles, were an unbelievable luxury to me, and while I had a much loved Atari 2600 with Mario Bros. and a 52 game cart, I was always captivated by the consoles and games my friends had, with Amigas and Megadrives and games like Street Fighter 2 and Turrican. It’s here that my love of games and compulsion to have them was born.

It was the sad loss of my grandfather that actually led to the start of my game collecting, as with a portion of my inheritance I was allowed to buy both a second-hand Megadrive and a Super Nintendo. Gaining two systems at once was indicative of my future obsession, and as they both came with a number of games, I’d instantly started a collection.

I don’t think I’m alone in taking pride in a shelf lined neatly with game boxes, perhaps ordered alphabetically, or maybe by genre, but as a boy it was to some extent a new found wealth, a visible wealth, that I’d never experienced before. The fact that each of these games opened myriad worlds and introduced hundreds of characters made them seem all the more incredible and utterly vital.

From a literal point of view, gaming is an obsession for me. If you’re reading this then the likelihood is that it is for you too, though as with everything there are differing degrees. I have to wonder whether the collecting aspect of it is, or at least was, an entirely separate obsession all of its own.

As my collection grew, the gaming experiences provided by each game diminished in some ways, as the box condition and inclusion of a manual became more important, as opposed to the game’s quality. My two primary collections, for the Sega Saturn and Sega Dreamcast, were certainly home to some of the most important games of my life, from NiGHTs into Dreams to Guardian Heroes and Metropolis Street Racer, but I also filled my shelves with licensed dross like the Street Fighter Movie and Dragonriders: Chronicles Of Pern.

The key thing is that the buying and ownership of the games outweighed playing them, and there have been many that I’ve owned without ever having the intention of playing let alone actually doing so. Even now, with most of my physical collections sold long ago, I am still buying a lot of games, and while I do now intend to play them, I lack the time. I’ve collected digital versions of games that would probably serve me for the next two or three years of my life, and I keep adding to this new collection. I’m not alone in this.

It’s become normal practise to own a “pile of shame”, a collection of games we’ve bought but never got around to playing. They’re probably not essential titles, most likely just a passing interest you grabbed when on sale in Game or on PSN, but they’re there, ready to be called upon at a moment’s notice. Perhaps they are a comfort, or perhaps they indicate that we’re all hoarders at heart, building our metaphorical pile of gold to curl up on.

I wonder whether I am simply a gaming shopaholic, as after a hard day’s work, I’m just as likely to fire up the PlayStation Store to browse new additions and offers as actually play a game. I have friends with huge piles of boxed titles, many left unplayed but bought as an investment in future gaming time. In my experience, that time is unlikely to ever come, and there’s always newer, more exciting content to override the existing collection. The wealth of content added by PlayStation Plus only adds to the problem. How much of that content goes unplayed?

In some ways, those digital titles now carry just as much meaning as the physical ones of my youth. They’re not so much a sign of monetary wealth, but still a badge of honour that shows where my passions and interests lie. They are there if the mood takes me to replay the Mass Effect trilogy, or return to the world of Burnout Paradise.

The only worrying factor is that we don’t know what will happen to these digital titles as time passes. Will there still be servers with my PlayStation 3 content in 30 years? We already know that multiplayer servers have a finite lifespan, so older games are increasingly losing their original complete form. Physical formats can degrade over time, but so can digital ones, just in a different but no less detrimental way.

The next generation is becoming the current generation, and brings with it a renewed focus on digital content. For those of us obsessed with gaming past, present and future, you have to wonder how long that content actually remains available to us in its complete form.  Perhaps they’ll disappear and I’ll be collecting PS3 discs in thirty years time, but then, will those day one patches still be available?