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| And Maybe Some Other Stuff Too. |
Needless Disclaimer: This article/rant is not intended to change anyone's mind, especially those who do in fact collect games and video game accessories with the desired outcome to have a "complete" collection. This was purely written out of minor annoyance, frustration, and the state of the cost of living in nearly every category far outpacing a realistic living wage here in the US.
Thoughts about people who collect things for the sake of collecting them crops up every so often, most recently when I was on the phone with my Mom the other day and the Nintendo Classic Mini came up. My Mom had asked what had happened to the system as her initial plan was to get one for each of us siblings (three in total) for Christmas last year and was saddened when she was unable to find any before the holiday season. I told her that they were sold out nearly everywhere and being hawked on eBay and Amazon for 500% above MSRP and that she should wait until stores are restocked and the price goes down, but as we all know by now, that never happened. I could tell that she was let down a bit, because our family grew up playing the NES and SNES and this was something my Mom wanted to do for all of us; possibly so that anytime she came to visit us she would whoop our asses at Dr. Mario any time our parents came to visit.
Which brought up thoughts and feelings again about people who collect games for the sake of increasing the size of their personal collection without any desire to play their coveted games.
Also, I realize that the jacked up price for Nintendo Classic units was not solely because of collectors as it was primarily because asshats knew a hot commodity when they saw one, and decided to take advantage of the situation. Although I have seen a number of people from various sources who bought at least more than one unit, one to play and the other to keep boxed up and to display.
Just a word of warning (again). This is not so much be a think piece as it is a rant, and will potentially irritate some people on the Instagrams (those who I know are avid collectors and who frequently post pictures of rooms dedicated to their shelves of games). And honestly, some of what I say stems from a form of jealousy, but not from not having those games so much as not having the chance to play those games. It is not that I too would like to have a room dedicated to a collection of video games, I instead would like to have a room dedicated to playable video games. What really gets my proverbial goat is seeing pictures of set ups or room with many of the same console that may never see the inside of a TV screen. Petty I know, but there it is.
An unfair equivalent would be someone buying works of art for their personal collection without allowing public access. Which is done all of the time, and you cannot really play a painting. Then you run into the Indiana Jones Syndrome where anything of historical value apparently belongs in a museum. And I too am guilty of having objects of semi-historical value that I have not shared with the greater public because, well, I love dinosaurs and those fossil fragments were a gift.
The point is, that there is something that annoys me and so the Internet becomes a blank canvas for me to publicly disclose my annoyances, even though I too am guilty of partaking in the collecting for the sake of collecting, but not the things that presently annoy me. And while we're on the topic of minor annoyances (that could still be in the realm of CftSoC), is the advertising of selling video games that are shrink wrapped. After having worked in a video store (back in 1999) and shrink wrapping movie boxes that were opened (in order to remove the movies and then turn the boxes into display boxes), I realized that it is not that difficult to shrink wrap anything. Movie boxes, video game boxes, styrofoam blocks, sandwiches. . . most things really, except hands, don't do that. The point is, just because something is labeled as "shrink wrapped" and claims to be new, does not mean that that item is as new as the day that it was first produced.
Alright, I feel that this is semi-incoherent enough to be proud of and post it for all to see. Maybe I came off whinier than I thought or not as whiny as I was anticipating, either way, and again, there it is.
~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian
Sitting In A Sluggish Vertigo
An unfair equivalent would be someone buying works of art for their personal collection without allowing public access. Which is done all of the time, and you cannot really play a painting. Then you run into the Indiana Jones Syndrome where anything of historical value apparently belongs in a museum. And I too am guilty of having objects of semi-historical value that I have not shared with the greater public because, well, I love dinosaurs and those fossil fragments were a gift.
The point is, that there is something that annoys me and so the Internet becomes a blank canvas for me to publicly disclose my annoyances, even though I too am guilty of partaking in the collecting for the sake of collecting, but not the things that presently annoy me. And while we're on the topic of minor annoyances (that could still be in the realm of CftSoC), is the advertising of selling video games that are shrink wrapped. After having worked in a video store (back in 1999) and shrink wrapping movie boxes that were opened (in order to remove the movies and then turn the boxes into display boxes), I realized that it is not that difficult to shrink wrap anything. Movie boxes, video game boxes, styrofoam blocks, sandwiches. . . most things really, except hands, don't do that. The point is, just because something is labeled as "shrink wrapped" and claims to be new, does not mean that that item is as new as the day that it was first produced.
Alright, I feel that this is semi-incoherent enough to be proud of and post it for all to see. Maybe I came off whinier than I thought or not as whiny as I was anticipating, either way, and again, there it is.
~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian
Sitting In A Sluggish Vertigo
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