Barnes on Games #9 - Marie Kondo Is Right About Your Game Collection

I was Marie-ing before Marie was.

I have always kept my clutter to a minimum. I am wholly detached and apathetic to everything I own, with almost no exceptions. To wit, a while back my wife and I had a conversation about “the ten things you can’t live without”; we had to come up with ten physical items that we have a strong connection with, and neither of us could come up with ten.

My game “collection” has always wanted to be small, and now it is. All of my games fit on a single, 6’ shelf. I still have culling to do.

If it doesn’t bring you joy, it’s just junk.

Timely article. I have seen the Marie Kondo meme, and immediately snarked, "I bet that her 29 books have very nice covers that are color-coordinated with her decor." But I have hoarding tendencies and have had to do some de-cluttering in the past. By the time I finally got a house, I was determined to not acquire new possessions unless I was divesting myself of other possessions. But having a house with a lot of storage space has enabled me to disregard that strategy and the clutter is back.

Someone upthread mentioned the class aspect of this topic, and it's true. Wealthy and upper-middle class people have the luxury of casually discarding everything doesn't bring them joy, because they have the financial means to throw away resources and replace them later as needed. I grew up in a working class family where money was sometimes tight if the family business was having a bad year. My parents were often creative about making use of whatever was at hand for whatever problems or opportunities arose. So at least every other month or so, I find myself picking through my possessions and finding just the thing that I needed. But sometimes that search takes a really long time because I do have too much stuff and some of it is not at all organized.

For the second time in five years, I am unemployed and facing a challenging job search. Last time, it was the tail end of the recession, and a lot of my competition came from people who were employed but at disappointing jobs that they had to settle for during the recession. This time, the unemployment rate is insanely low, but some companies are rejecting all candidates. Asmodee North America, for example, has been looking for a controller since September, but they rejected all the finalists that they interviewed in November and now it's January and they are closing the books without that controller. My severance pay ran out at Christmas, and my unemployment is held up until my previous employer responds to an inquiry about that severance pay. With unemployment, I can hang on until next September, but without it, I risk losing my house before summer.

So I will soon be taking a hard look at my game collection. I have about 100 games, and I have a very clear understanding of which games are likely to gather dust and which ones will actually get played. And regardless of the potential usefulness of my clutter, there is a possibility that I will need to sell my house and move back into an apartment, so the clutter needs to go.

For a long time, I have held on to certain possessions due to hope. I hoped that I would have kids, or that I might finally run another Cyberpunk rpg campaign, or I might get around to fixing that old lamp. But I am 53 now. I'm not realistically going to have kids, and I will probably never get around to playing Cyberpunk again. I do have the parts and tools to fix that lamp, though. But it's time to start letting go of some of those hopes and some of those possessions.

My girlfriend is 15 years younger than me, and once joked about what it would be like after I died: she and my sister spending weeks going through old boxes and filling up a dumpster. In response, I started a 20-year plan to get rid of stuff. The idea is that I might only live for another 20 years, so I could try to get rid of 5% of my possessions each year, until I am down to the bare essentials as I approach death. But the plan was put on hold when I lost my job, because my job search takes priority over almost everything else in my life.

This isn’t that far from how I handle collection. The breakthrough moment was finally parting with BSG. It’s the reason why I’m here in this hobby, but I’ve gotten all the fun I can out of it. I held on to it for sentimental value for years, but letting it go made more comfortable with letting go of other things I was less attached to and getting my collection to a point where I can pick any game off the shelf and I’ll be happy to play it. It’s a good feeling.

Side note, the people who I know personally who dismiss her without even taking the time to dig in and try to understand where she’s coming from are without exception the most miserable people I know. I’m not saying there’s a connection there, but I can’t dismiss it either.

What Uba said about Kondo makes sense. And I do tend to put some thought into where to store things for aesthetics.

For example: we put a few of the project GIPF games in our living room to fill out a decorative book shelf. That led to putting a small table and a few chairs nearby, and it’s near a handy window to our kitchen. It all looks very nice, and the GIPF games have now become a bit of a weekend morning ritual.

Spreading games out can be more functional and less an eye sore than clumping them all together in one monstrous wall unit.

Many years ago, I was in a big rpg campaign (Legend of the Five Rings). Normally I was the DM, but sometimes I would step aside and run a character when somebody else wanted to run an adventure. So we were playing at my apartment as usual, and my character and another pc both got taken out early in the first fight. That player and I stepped away from the gaming table and started talking about some other game. I went to my front closet to get the game, and my friend was amazed by the closet. It was a walk-in closet that was just as large as the adjacent kitchen area, and piled high with boxes of my stuff.

I had trouble finding the game, and kept pulling out more boxes into the front hall area so I could go deeper into the closet. My friend did a wonderful thing: he volunteered to help me go through the boxes and get rid of some stuff. Right then, right there. And the way he did it was awesome. He would pull something out of a box and comment on it or ask me about it, with a specific eye to whether I should toss or keep the item. For example, "Oh, you have the spoiler list printed out for the Shadowfist Netherworlds expansion. Didn't you show me that you have a complete set of those cards in a binder? You should toss these sheets in the recycling."

We spent over two hours on that closet before the party got our characters healed. Filled up two garbage bags for the trash and two for recycling, and cleared a narrow path so I could access everything in the closet without pulling out any boxes into the hall.

Sadly, that friend got into some trouble with the IRS and ended up moving back in with his parents in another state. He eventually got back on his feet and now lives on the East Coast. I wish I could have helped him though that, but I had my own challenges at the time.

I don't have a lean "collection" but I try to have a thoughtful one, moving out stuff I don't need anymore and limiting what comes in. For me, I think it's important we as a society break out of the "see-want-get-have-keep" cycle, which results in the generation of more stuff being created to fill a "need" for it, when in fact most of it is just going into an otherwise useless hoard. We're seeing this right now in the absolute glut of games being produced because supposedly there's an audience, but it doesn't seem like a "playing" audience as much as a "buying" audience. There's no difference between getting a themed Monopoly set from a well-meaning relative because you like games and you like dogs or whatever and dropping $200 on a KS because your amygdala fired when you saw it was about Johnny Mnemonic or some shit.

In nerd spaces (here he goes) this especially bugs me because, as a nerd myself, I hate seeing people define themselves through what they own and how much they've dropped on it instead of who they are and what they get out of it. If you play board games or like movies or read comics or whatever, that's great! Let's talk! But I don't care how much of the shit you've personally amassed.

So you're saying you wouldn't back my Johnny Mneminiatures skirmish game? For $250 you'll get some "Dark Keanu" alternate figures that I didn't test the rules on.

There's not much that makes my eyes glaze over more than "shelfie" culture. It smacks of begging for validation. If doing something makes you happy that's great. If you need to have strangers on the internet give you asspats for it, maybe reconsider why you do what you do.

I try a lot of games because I like learning them and seeing where design is going. Most of them don't stick around. They get sold, traded, given away, etc. Seems like that's anathema to a lot of people right now, especially as more and more vocal folks in "board gaming media" are increasingly financially and professionally invested and don't want to publicly get rid of anything for fear of their numbers going down. I feel like we're living in Red Letter Media's parody universe, only our crap is even more space consuming.

I like the 'cherish and let it go' idea before getting rid of items. But the rest of it sounds like a bunch of first-world problems mixed with marketing bullshit. Granted, I could be getting crotchety in my old age.

Maybe I could be a little more thankful for the things in my life and in my home, but that's not a problem that decluttering is going to solve.

So much to comment on...

I don't spend much, largely because I've never been a materialist. I keep clothes for not years, but decades. I wore through both sole and undersole of my last pair of sneakers because my feet weren't getting wet and they were still comfortable. I owned my last car for almost 12 years. Several things no longer worked on it, but they were stuff I could ignore. If it's still (largely) functional, I keep using it and kind of recoil at the idea of spending money to replace it.

The exceptions over the years have been music, books, and occasionally games. Those are the things I spend money on. I have close to 1000 books sitting on shelves in the house. I have around 15,000 comics sitting in the basement. Those are the two things I look at when I think about decluttering. (The music has made a transition twice, from cassettes to CDs and now to electronic files, so clutter is not an issue there.) I'm usually the Marie Kondo of my relationships. Both my ex-wife and my current girlfriend are mild packrats, from my perspective, because stuff tends to fill corners and pile up in places and never gets purged. My dictum to my ex was often: "If you haven't touched it in a year, it's getting tossed." That was usually spoken when I opened a closet and things fell on me.

But to Kondo's thesis: I don't have a problem with our living space. In point of fact, I was just noticing in the last couple days how enjoyable our space is because we had rearranged our bedroom and the living room. I'm kind of militant about everything having a space and, if it doesn't have one, to either find one or remove it from the house. I pointedly do not venture into the kids' rooms because I'd be taking a shovel to them. But those aren't MY spaces. In those that I do consider my spaces, we don't have clutter or situations that annoy me. It is a regular contest between me and my girlfriend's constant interaction with Amazon, but it hasn't become a problem.

As for the game collection, I purged it in a huge way a couple years ago, before we moved into the current house. It's expanded again in the last few months because I've been trading, rather than simply selling and, for example, the half-dozen games I got for my complete set of Descent 1st Ed. take up more space than that one coffin box did. But I've also bought a few more as I've reignited my interest in boardgaming (the vast majority of my posts on the site for a couple years prior to 2018 were about Hearthstone and movies) recently. However, I've confronted the "joy or no?" question again because I look at the dozen or so games I've traded for recently that still haven't hit the table and wonder if that's ever going to happen or if I should just accept that I don't know enough regular gamers anymore and move on. I'm attached to my collection mostly because I want to use it (more) and not simply possess it. But, that rarely being the case these days, I hesitate to purge mostly over the idea of lost opportunity, rather than any sentimental attachment or possessiveness.

Shellhead wrote: Someone upthread mentioned the class aspect of this topic, and it's true. Wealthy and upper-middle class people have the luxury of casually discarding everything doesn't bring them joy, because they have the financial means to throw away resources and replace them later as needed.

First of all, we're not talking about something critical to survival or even happy life here. It's a board game. You can't equate objects key to survival with the vast piles of "stuff" that Walmart and other retailers talked us into buying in 1996. Some of it has sentimental value, but most of it is just flotsam.

One of the conversations I had with my wife as we were moving to the new, smaller house was this -- we'll donate or sell 500 items, and have a legit need to repurchase maybe five of them. But we don't know which five. So the money gathered from the 500 out will greatly exceed to cost of the five in. That's good financial planning.

I think we can leave discussions about the downtrodden proletariat to other threads.

Let them eat Caylus

As a downtrodden proletariat, my lack of financial excess was a significant driving motivation in my reduction of not only my collection of games, but a lot of possessions in general.

But mostly, I was tired of lugging stuff around that remained in boxes, never being used. It's been over 5 years since living a largely ascetic/minimalist lifestyle, and my emotional well being has greatly increased.

I had a friend in the military that moved around a lot who said the same thing Jackwraith did.
If it hasn't been used in a year, it gets sold/given/thrown away.

It's good advice.

I have a lot of clients who live in large and extravagant homes. The funny thing is, while I don't know their personal life to a level of calling them close friends, I notice those who don't crowd their enormous homes with stuff to be much happier people. Sadly, such a way of living seems to be rare for that financial demographic in my experience.

I think that even though Konda is a new face of that zeitgeist, her philosophy behind appreciation prior to disposal is a healthy positive way to bring closure.

I've had relationships end that way. And those are the same people who still happen to be friends to this day. So the philosophy is sound beyond just possessions.

I am feeling very much like a downtrodden proletariat lately, after nearly 4 months of a frustrating job search in a market where some employers are willing to reject all candidates in hopes that the perfect candidate will some day arrive. And in the meantime, I have an excess of free time on my hands. And guess what? Right now, I have a lot of entertainment options in because of the possessions that I have held on to over the years. And I don't have much spare money to be spending on new experiences or re-purchasing things that Marie Kondo would have told me to ditch last year. I put in close to 40 hours a week on my job search, and sometimes I even get to do face-to-face interviews with potential employers, but I also need some entertainment to keep my morale up.