At what point is a collection a burden?

I have a lot of games. Like, a lot. Usually the first thing someone says after they come into my house and sit on my couch is, "That's a lot of consoles." On average there are 12 different consoles setup at the family TV spanning over 30 years of gaming. And that's not even mentioning a similarly big portable collection with everything from original Gameboys and GameGears to NeoGeoPocket Colors, PSPs, Vita, DS, GBA, the list goes on. That's a lot of stuff to store, maintain, and organize...

Making up purpose

A collection, or a mess of "stuff"?

I can't really speak for why anyone else collects, but for me that internal reason that I tell myself has shifted and morphed a few times. When I worked at GameStop, it was a matter of exploring through discounted titles from aging consoles. It's hard to imagine now that the series has picked up, but I originally bought Yakuza 3 for, well, free. It was less than $10 on GameStop's long-standing Buy-2-Get-1 sale. Now you can't find a copy for under $40 despite an HD rerelease just around the corner. I went through a phase of collecting Gameboy games because they were just so cheap I could buy more games for less. At this point, completion wasn't inherently a goal, but I was starting to focus on the quantity of my collection more than any individual title's merit. Now I told myself it was for historical purposes.

I was always big into the history of games and game development. Sometimes the story of how a game came to be is more beautiful than the game itself. That is definitely a passion of mine, but owning, possessing all these games? Is that the same thing? I know Contra: Shattered Soldier has the same lead director as Contra 3, my favorite game, but I hate Shattered Soldier. So why am I holding onto it? I couldn't really answer that question, so I avoided it. "It's Contra," I told myself and dismissed the thought.

Packing, padding, and paying out the nose

Have you ever tried to move with a collection? "Here, take this box to the car, but don't drop it because there's about $1k of irreplaceable technology in there that's built with all the structural integrity of a Jenga tower." It's daunting. A Sega Saturn game case has the same thickness as a normal jewel CD case, but is more than twice as deep leaving it very vulnerable to cracking because it's, well, 25 year old plastic. The slightest bump can require the Dreamcast's lens to need recalibrating and the Xbox 360 is frankly a ticking timebomb of failures. Older consoles didn't always come in black and with them you have to watch their cream colored sections that they don't get too much direct sunlight as they'll yellow. Any hit to a box containing modern games cases could crack several cases at once. The list goes on.

This isn't even touching on the biggest problem with collections of any kind which is size. On average, I've had to pack and move four to five massive boxes of just games every time we've moved. And then I think about our goals of moving and living outside of the USA and I think, "Can I feasibly move with all of this stuff?" And then I feel a pang in my heart about potentially having to let go of a bunch of games I have either never played or will most likely never play again. And then it hits me, "Why is this so important to me? Why am I holding onto this so desperately?" And I can't form an answer.

Admitting emotional dependence on hedgehogs

Just, why?

I've joked many times about the numerous copies of Sonic 1 that I have, but you have to ask, who needs more than one copy of anything? Okay, have it on a convenient console, then own an original boxed cart for your favorite game. That makes some sense. But these collections pictured to the right are all copies bought after I already owned multiple copies of the damn game, Sonic 1. And yet, when it comes to parting with some titles recently, I kept all of them. The PS2 and PSP copies of this collection are literally the same damn thing and I kept them both.

It's at that point it starts to become more clear that my collecting exists to fill an emotional void that I wasn't willing to tackle up to that point. Now it becomes more clear why I have 12 copies of Sonic 1, four copies of Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine, or why I ever thought buying Earthworm Jim on the GBA was a good idea. Buying the thing was something to do.

Spending is easy, but knowing what you bought is not

I've spent a lot of time trying to examine my spending and I was aware I bought a lot of games, but it was only when I tried to cut back on my game buying that I realized I wasn't just buying games, but I was emotionally shopping. Just on Steam alone I own close to 300 titles while the number of games I've actually played on there is closer to 20. The reality is, when it comes to actually playing a game, my tastes are relatively narrow. I like action games, card games, and some racing games. Everything else is generally out of my wheelhouse. Yet, when a Steam sale would come around I would be looking to see what was $1 or $2 that I could conceivably see myself spending money on. All of a sudden, the barrier to entry for my time was much more lax and I would buy $30 to $50 worth of games I didn't even want to play.

It took me close to two years to really break this pattern and it caused anxiety because I was using shopping therapy as a form of blowing off steam and I didn't really know how else to deal with it. This was compounded by the fact that I didn't know that was why I was so compelled to buy random games and that I didn't really have another established way of letting off steam.

The current predicament

Today I look at my games collection honestly as more of a burden than something I take joy in. I see reckless, self-destructive spending, emotional purchases, and reflections of times when I was in pain or lonely. That's not to say there aren't games I love or that some of those memories aren't bittersweet, but that collecting or my image of this as a collection has been soiled by the reality of why I collected to begin with. I collected to fill a hole because I was in pain and I don't want to throw my money into that void anymore.

I recently sold a bunch of things to a local shop and donated the rest to a local Goodwill as well as set aside anything that needed to be returned to friends or family that may have some stake in the game's possession. What's left now all fits on a single bookshelf. I love a lot of the games I have on my shelves, but I'm done with the idea of collecting. I will probably pair down what's left even more over time, but even letting go of what I did was very emotionally difficult despite the fact that most of it was literal garbage. I bemoaned letting go of Sonic's Labyrinth for fuck's sake... It's been really good to let go and I hope I can keep growing past the sad kid I once was into something brighter.

Thank you for reading.