The Question of Consumption

Yeah, that's a great point. There's some question in there about "luxury goods" which board games definitely are, compared to "necessities" which clothing is, but certainly not in the way in which the latter is produced and consumed in the modern era by wealthy societies like the US. It's a long-running half-joke in the sports world talking about how the pre-printed T-shirts of losing teams in championship games like the Super Bowl end up in impoverished, sub-Saharan African nations, such that teams like the Buffalo Bills and Cleveland Cavaliers have cult followings. But I was watching something on YouTube the other day about the enormous piles of unused clothing that have ended up in the northern Chilean desert and it's really kind of disturbing.

A wholistic approach is needed thats for sure.

The idea of throwing out clothes is weird to me. Clothes die or go to our local community run seconds shop. Same with.... everything pretty much.

As soon as we start saying "its a drop in the ocean compared to...." we have an excuse to do nothing. My entire government uses the excuse because we are not China so what we do therefore doesn't matter. And the more people have excuses the less the behaviour is just a social norm, the less people are thinking about it, and the less pressure they will put on government/corporations to make any change at all (which is important because they are the ones who can impact things and also the ones who will only change with public pressure/sales impact). Sure my donations don't solve anything on their own but, in that instance, they are contributing to my town's norm of giving a shit which goes beyond just me.

I wish I lived in a world where gov/corps gave a ahit but they dont so unfortunately all I can do is be one drop in that ocean and encourage others to do the same. As that taking responsibility for something that my single action wont change, and that govs/corps want me to take so they dont hsve to? Maybe - but they will never do anything if I dont either until forced to; forcing will happen sooner the more people change.

ubarose wrote: Consider how much thought we put into purchasing a board game and how often we throw one in the trash, vs purchasing or discarding yet another T-shirt.

I'm sure it must have happened, like when leaving home to go to college, but for the life of me I cannot recall a single instance of throwing a board game in the trash.

I once found a complete copy of Last Night on Earth: Timber Peak on the side of the road in a rubbish collection.

I have trashed a couple of games but they were half destroyed el cheapo kids games of the sort well meaning family members give your toddler. "Dora the Explorer Matching Game" with cards missing, kind of thing. Complete games are traded, sold or sent up to the co-op as a donation.

Goodwill throws them out for you.

I've never trashed a boardgame. Hell, I have trouble recycling empty expansion boxes.

Sagrilarus wrote: Goodwill throws them out for you.

Mine doesn't. Games tend to be given away free because the main guy doesn't charge kids for anything they want from there. Genuinely, it's a community store - they are more interested in finding places where things are needed than in making any money (for themselves or whatever cause). One of their stated aims is to keep things out of landfill. They don't chuck stuff away and have a network of other places they distribute to. My boy regularly comes home excited about having found something cool up there, which we will have to remind him actually belonged to him at some point in the past.

Goodwill throws out buckets and buckets of materials that they simply have no use for, games and otherwise. It's been covered pretty heavily in the press. People donate materials that have no value, and Goodwill uses sales of donations to generate money for training people. Materials that aren't saleable are just dead weight on their system. But people feel better dropping them off than throwing them away themselves. "Someone can fix my broken toaster and use it" even though it costs more to fix it than buy a new one.

My local Goodwill had about 12 copies of Harry Potter Scene It, which apparently everybody buys and nobody wants, until one day when they didn't. They all disappeared. They may have swapped them to other Goodwills but let's be honest -- every Goodwill on Earth has a couple of copies of Harry Potter Scene It. Plenty of other duplicates too. At some point this material is deemed junk and off it goes.

Most of the games we play have a little more resiliency in their value. They were limited runs and relatively valuable to start for a specific audience.

But the concept remains. At some point everything gets discarded due to wearing out or being no longer of interest. All these "big" games coming out of Kickstarter are destined for landfills sooner or later, and they'll take double or triple the space.

For me personally, it's not about landfill space, it's about my brain's space. I just don't have room either physically or emotionally for "big" games. Frosthaven's MSRP is due to be $250, and at that price it's going to be nagging me to play it, and I can't get my group to play any of my games. I don't want to store it, I don't want to feel obligated to play it, I don't want to deal with another "featured" game that everyone in my game group gets roped into because it has to be set up before everyone arrives. These games are ideal for some people, they're not for me. They're white elephants lying all over the house.

Sorry for being so brief.

There are two places I donate to.
One of them tries hard to present itself as a more upscale kind of shop. It’s entirely for charity, but it tries to give off this vibe because that gets people in there and buying stuff. When I donate to them, it’s going to be higher quality “junk”. They won’t take, or will throw out, anything else.

Another place is less picky and doesn’t put effort into presentation or atmosphere. They get my less desirable junk.

In either case, though, I never give them things that are broken or that I think are just garbage that nobody will want or find useful.

n815e wrote: There are two places I donate to.
One of them tries hard to present itself as a more upscale kind of shop. It’s entirely for charity, but it tries to give off this vibe because that gets people in there and buying stuff. When I donate to them, it’s going to be higher quality “junk”. They won’t take, or will throw out, anything else.

Another place is less picky and doesn’t put effort into presentation or atmosphere. They get my less desirable junk.

In either case, though, I never give them things that are broken or that I think are just garbage that nobody will want or find useful.

Fair enough, but at this point we've lost the plot. Everything we produce ends up in the waste stream one way or another. Though I appreciate hobby games are niche at best, making them bigger than they need to be by a factor of 10 and charging accordingly has an impact, on the environment and on us. That much more oil pumped out of the ground.

I often wonder how people thousands of years from now will interpret our collections of all these little, plastic figurines.

I agree with pretty much all your points Sag. Was just saying, my local place (I am not in the states, I don't even know what a Goodwill is - are places literally called Goodwill? Is that like a chain? it doesn't really matter) I think has the right idea and are genuinely committed to it. I think that they are also fairly anti-consumption, in that, their idea is that people shouldn't need to buy new stuff to get what they need - and they are highly active in this, if you ring them up and tell them you have something you don't need, they'll say, okay, and they'll do a ring around and try and find someone to take it directly from you. You can go and be like "I need a desk" or whatever and he'll call you when one comes in.

Anyway - that's obviously not the norm, and I get that "giving to charity" in many cases is absolving people of the guilt of chucking things away, and I think that ideally that guilt would do more to stop people buying stuff they don't need in the first place.

I also agree with the mental space aspect with regards to games.



As for the people thousands of years from now, I just hope they won't be our easter island statues.

I've decided I want to try and buy games used when I can. Of course, this is a bad time because the changes at the BGG marketplace mean fewer people will be using it. What are other resources for used games? Craigslist? Facebook (ugh)?

I'm not crazy about trading just because dealing with packages always feels like a hassle to me, but I suppose I should try that as well.

What are BGG's marketplace changes? Honestly, at a time when their market share is getting cut up by reddit and the like you think they'd be finding ways to make things easier, not harder.

I'll mention that if you only own smaller, less encrusted games, your shipping challenges are greatly reduced. Last game I sold fit in a cardboard envelope.