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

SuperflyTNT wrote: Capitalism and abject poverty can coexist, does, and always has. Capitalism is just a way to describe normal human transactions when people are left to their own devices.

I don’t understand the first sentence IRT what it has to do with what we were talking about before, except that I agree with you, I think?

As for the second sentence, I’ve already broken the glass on my “Somebody Is Wrong On the Internet” alarm, and I’m going to wait here quietly until the fire department shows up.

@GorillaGrody - yeah, that's a little abusive to the definition of 'capitalism'. Trading is as old as humanity, but trade != capitalism.

There's a scene in Chuck Palahniuk's 2009 novel Pygmy where the protagonist (a North Korean spy posing as a high school kid) goes into an American store and is overwhelmed by what he sees—not just the sheer volume of goods, but the sheer "volume" of packaging all crying out for attention, desperate to be purchased, every last item rapidly decaying through an advertising half-life. At some point soon everything there will be outmoded and undesirable.

Every nonessential purchase happens because we feel it is imperative, we are driven to it one way or another through the unconscious and into the emotional until we loosen the grip on the banana we climbed the tree for and trade it for that thing we just have to have. When I look at my too-large game collection I see products with all the imperative bled out of them—I bought them believing I was also buying the time and people with which to play them...

These days I'm much more cautious, usually waiting until the end of the year to think about adding games that caught my fancy in the preceeding twelve months. Has it stood the test of time? Does it really do something different than what I've already got? Is there something I already own that I'd rather play instead? Can I actually get it played? "Stood the test of time" is funny inside a year, but these days that's long enough for the hype machine to start eating its own shit, choke, and die. Besides, I'm actively trying to purge my collection down to the essentials—and after a lifetime of play I know exactly what those are.

As an aside, I've found it's much harder to shift used games these days—everybody has too many bad ones they're trying to get rid of (thanks, Kickstarter!), and so I've taken to giving them away (harder than you'd think) and donating them to college libraries.

HiveGod has spoken.

Colorcrayons wrote:
Hence Kondos point. Why have vast library in your own home if you don't need or enjoy them constantly? That's what public libraries are for.

Our local library uses an algorithm to dispose of books that nobody has checked out for x years. My neighbor the librarian said, "we're a lending library, not an archive." Categorically, the books I have been buying are no longer at the library. As I write that, I'm thinking of Denis Johnson's Tree of SmokeTree of Smoke , just sitting there for a dollar. A national book award winner, but the reviewers at Amazon give it 3.5 stars. It has mixed reviews everywhere.

For the past couple of years I have obsessively gone to the surplus shelves, put the ones I wanted on a high shelf, then returned on dollar bag day to claim my booty and experience the sweet dopamine burst from getting something for almost nothing. Now my shelves at home are filled and my daughters mock me for not reading anything.

What Barnes said about collecting trophies, or nostagic totems has stuck with me since I first read it. I've cleared out about 1/4 of my clothes (my wife has an investment in some of them) and I plan to hold a neighborhood book sale soon, although it is going to hurt.

Here's a poem by Denis Johnson:

Passengers
By Denis Johnson
The world will burst like an intestine in the sun,
the dark turn to granite and the granite to a name,
but there will always be somebody riding the bus
through these intersections strewn with broken glass
among speechless women beating their little ones,
always a slow alphabet of rain
speaking of drifting and perishing to the air,
always these definite jails of light in the sky
at the wedding of this clarity and this storm
and a woman's turning—her languid flight of hair
traveling through frame after frame of memory
where the past turns, its face sparking like emery,
to open its grace and incredible harm
over my life, and I will never die.

I really like Johnson’s poetry. His fiction has always left me cold, which seems to be the opposite of most people’s reactions.

“It is nothing but the definite social relation between men themselves which assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things. In order, therefore, to find an analogy we must take flight into the misty realm of religion. There the products of the human brain appear as autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own, which enter into relations both with each other and with the human race. ” Karl Marx, since we’ve already complicated things—can’t think of any better entry into a discussion of commodity fetishism than through Marie Kondo.

www.reddit.com/r/Socialism_101/comments/...o_me_what_commodity/

I have about 150 games and feel no need to purge or to stop buying. I love my collection. I have about 8 games I've set aside to trade/give away and the only reason that feels good is because it means I have space for more games

I took five boxes of mediocre books to the used bookstore for credit yesterday.

Hivegod wrote: “. When I look at my too-large game collection I see products with all the imperative bled out of them—I bought them believing I was also buying the time and people with which to play them...”

Every hobby I get sucked into is really an attempt to buy time and friends. Ubarose discussed that identifying too closely with your stuff may be associated with autism spectrum disorder. There’s a lot of mild autism in my family. And I am writing this at 3:00 a.m. ecause I took prescribed methylphenidate yesterday and it has apparently not purged itself from my system yet.

Finally, I grew up relatively poor and my mom is a hoarder.

So I have three boxes of old or semi broken electronics sitting in my room that I have been meaning to sell on eBay for three years. It goes to Deseret Industries today.

I also regret getting rid of every game that is now out of print.

I haven't seen the Netflix show, but I have spent a lot of energy culling my game collection over the last two years.

Like a lot of gamers, I keep track of my playing stats - but I also keep track of my Board Game Staying Power.

paperdicegames.com/2019/01/22/board-game-staying-power/

This helps me decide which games to keep, and which games to get rid of. Overall, it's served me well.

My game collection is mostly used for playing - obviously people who collect games for ownership, would be best served considering something else!