I don't play games but I own almost every system...WHY ?

[idrougge]

That Bizbiz quote is killing me.

Why collect games if you hate their intended purposes. Seems extremely ridiculous to me. Games like Snatcher might not be played by some gamers, just because they're outbid by people on ebay by people that just 'want' the damn discs.

Thank you for saying the thing I have been thinking ever since I noticed that people were "collecting" games just for the hell of it. They drive up prices and in the end they aren't even interested in the games as games. I don't count people who play games, but to be outbid by someone who will let the game rot in a display case (hoarders) gives me ulcers.

[Radiac]

I find myself in this category. For me it boils down to games being derivative and not holding my interest anymore. As with most of the people here games have been a huge part of my life since I was very young. I have many fond memories of playing late into the night trying to beat some old platformer or shooter. Most of my games from those days were sold or lost before I knew the value of them.

As I transitioned to newer consoles games as a whole started to lose their appeal. The neverending sequels and copycat games just don't draw me in anymore. For every Katamari Damacy or Rez, you have to wade through thousands an thousands of uninspired crap games.

So I started buying the games from my past. Sadly most of them don't hold up too well nowadays. After playing the great games I remembered, I started buying games for old systems I didn't have when they were new. My search for great games ended up with me having many games I 'll never play again. Funny thing is that I realized that the gaming culture is much better than most of the games themselves.

Which brings me to where I am now. The only games I buy anymore are the ones that really seem to be original, or are the absolute cream of the crop in their genre. As one might imagine this means I don't purchase many games. I now focus my collecting efforts on game paraphenalia (kiosks, displays, devkits, signage, etc) and older games that I truly enjoy playing.

For me the nostalgia is better than the actual gameplay experience that 90% of the games (new or retro) provide.

[Iron Draggon]

I definitely collect games way more than I play them now. But it's not that I don't want to play them anymore. It's just that whenever I do, more often than not I reach a point where they become too difficult and I get pissed off at them, so it's less stressful to not play them very much.

I would play all of my games alot more often if most of them didn't become so impossible to play at some point. It's like reading books that you can never finish because some of the pages have been torn out. You can only get so far in the story, and then you can go no further to find out how the story ends. That becomes very frustrating.

Oh just use a cheat device, you say. Well that works fine for the games that allow it, but many times the code that you need to finish a game doesn't exist, and cheats often don't exist to unlock the unlockables that remain locked if you're unable to perform the requirement to unlock them.

Plus having to cheat to get through a game takes away most of the point of playing it in the first place. When I do try to play my games, I much prefer to get through them without using any cheats than to cheat just to get through them. But that just isn't possible with some games. There are many games where it is obvious that they were never intended to be completed without cheating. There may be one person in the world who can do it without cheating, but that person is most likely one of the programmers who created the game. Everyone else will never be able to do it.

Now as for people who collect games without any intent of ever playing them, to me the sealed game collectors are the worst offenders. I only collect sealed games myself, but I collect them to open them and play them, not just to put them on a shelf and look at them all sealed up in plastic.

So if you really want to hate a fellow collector for what he has, hate all the ones who have nothing but a bunch of sealed games that they will never open and play. They are the true hoarders. It's one thing if you also have duplicate copies of every sealed game you own that you do actually play, but it's another if you're just collecting nothing but sealed games that you never intend to play. Especially if you own multiple copies of a certain game beyond one to keep sealed and one to play, unless they are variations.

Like the guy who buys every single copy of Game X that ever shows up on ebay, no matter how much it costs him and everyone knows that he does it. Those sort of people should be banned from ever buying Game X on ebay again.

Now with all that said, for me it all began with playing every game that I bought, and playing them all often. But I just reached a point where I had more money to buy games than I had time to play them, so I began to focus on just buying them more often than actually playing them. And I always said that at some point I would stop collecting them and just enjoy playing them all whenever I had more time to play games than I did money to buy them. But now that I do have more time to play games than I do money to buy more games, I still enjoy buying them more than I enjoy playing them. I guess because now it's even more of a challenge for me to get more games than it used to be.

I still like to think that at some point I will stop buying more games and start trying to play through all of them though. I'm really not very far away from "completing" most of my collections, as far as I'm concerned, and once that happens then there won't be anything left to do with them all but to play them or to sell them, and I seriously doubt that I will ever sell them. So I'll have to start playing them all again.

But for now it is mostly buy game, open game, test game, file game for storage, remove game from want list and add game to owned list. If I become interested enough in it during testing to want to play it some more, I may play it some more later and actually try to complete it. But the other thing that I've found that makes me tend to avoid actually playing all of my games is the amount of time that actually playing them consumes. And it's true that I have nothing but a bunch of time to kill now, but that time still seems much better spent looking for more games to buy or going through my want lists and my owned lists than it would be to spend all that time actually playing my games.

I also prefer to interact with others far more than I enjoy interacting with a game all by myself, and I have no one nearby to play all my games with me anymore, so that is a big reason for why I don't play all of my games more often too. When I first started collecting, I had several friends who were gamers themselves, so we always got a big thrill out of all the games that I bought together. We played every chance we got. But eventually they all moved away and left me with no one but myself to play with. And there are many games that just weren't designed to be played with just one player. You need a friend to help you get all the way through them. So those become very frustrating to try and play them by yourself too. It gets very lonely.

So just play them online, you say. Well, that is an option, and it is a very enjoyable option too, but when you get into that then the game begins to become your life and all you ever seem to do is play that one game. And when you try to stop playing it, your friends come looking for you to play it with them. So it becomes a vicious cycle. I spent three years of my life playing a series of games that weren't even designed to online multiplayer games, but there was an online community for them, and you could trade your own content with others there, so all I did was make stuff to share with others and give feedback on what others made. And it became extremely competitive and ruined alot of great friendships in the process, so I try to avoid playing online games now. There are a few that I would like to play online, but I still have yet to dive into their online waters.

Nope, hanging out here on DP and on a few other game related communities is about as close to online gaming as I really wanna get. I like to talk about games with others alot more than I like to play games with others, at least online.

So I'm still mostly just buying games and talking about them alot now. Making lists and searching ebay and the rest of the net for more games. I very rarely play them.

But someday I still plan to do nothing but play games, all the time. And once in a while I do get really into a certain game and I go on a binge of doing nothing but play it until I complete it. But it's very rare that I do so. I just like to have them and collect them and talk about them alot more than I like to actually play them anymore, for some reason.

Oh and for the record, when I do play my games, I even enjoy playing all the crap games I own that most people hate playing, so I do actually play all of those crappy old rare games that are only rare because they're so crappy, and all of those crappy old games that are just plain crap.

[gum_drops]

I have the same problem, I buy an excessive amount of games, way more then I could ever play. With many of the titles I buy them mainly to collect. Not that I don't have a "desire" to play them but with over 1000 games I realize I will not get around to every title.

Although with some systems like saturn imports, I only pick up titles I want to play as many are rather expensive and I cannot afford to go bananas trying to get every one.

I find it harder to get into games like I used to when I would spend hours trying to beat sonic 2 for the 10th time, or playing MK II over and over just to practice fatalities. Although its still fun to pop in golden axe II or splatterhouse 3 and bash some heads.

And titles like metroid will never get old, just listening to the music for that game get me pumped to play it

[Kevincal]

I have almost 20 systems and about 500 games. I find it is usually more fun and exiting to hunt for games on Ebay and finding good deals. It's also fun to enter snipe bids at the last second and barely win the auction. It's actually a little adrenaline rush if it's something you really want and win the auction. It's awesome when you refresh the page for the last time and see "You have won!" I find myself having days go by without playing any games. Then one day I'll have a marathon and play like 10-20 games. Overall it's a fun hobby and even though I've spend hundreds even a thousand or 2 on it, I could easily get most if not all of the money back by selling it. Which is cool. It's an investment.

[mailman187666]

videogame collecting is an investment in more ways than one. I personally have been sticking to playing a lot of the new xbox 360 games lately (Oblivion) but have towers of older games that span across over 20 different systems. When I collect stuff from the flea markets and what not, not only am i investing the money in hoping the value of the game will go up in the future, but I'm also guarenteed to be able to play those games 10 years from now if i wanted to. You think the NES brings back memories now, wait until its considered an antique and becomes over 50 years old. Thats what I'm trying to do with my collection. Hold onto them in case i want to show my grandkids what it was like and be able to think back to when i was a child playing these games. I may not always have as many games as i do now if i were to run into finacial problems, but i will never sell the games i've had since I was 4. Flea market finds and ebay stuff I'd have no problem getting rid of. But I'd make myself sick if I were to get rid of the first Mario game I owned. The way i look at it is it better to have them and not need them, than need them and not have it.

[mezrabad]

I understand collecting and not playing, and I wouldn't be shocked to learn that people who collect cars don't drive all of them, either.

I play games, but I buy them faster than I can play them though I rarely buy them new or at full price. Consequently, I miss out on the gems that never go down in price (Like Disgaia, to misspell just one example). This gap between having and playing really gets stretched when there's a sale (Like the one recently at Circuit City) and I get half a dozen games suddenly. I may play half of them a little bit, but some are going to stay wrapped for years and it has nothing to do with trying to collect sealed games, I just don't get around to them.

I play games because I enjoy them, but mostly because I'm curious about them all, even the ones I'm fairly certain I won't enjoy. What I've enjoyed doing over the past year, is playing games in chronological order from the "beginning" (1972) and blogging about them. It gets any curiousity I had about them out of my system and I can "move on" from them never to return. Well, not never to return, but at least never to return to the ones I'm no longer curious about and know that they suck.

[ROBOTNIK666]

I do the same thing with my board game collection. I have over 75 of them, half of which I've never played.