Collecting: I've had my fill—well, nearly

Still getting some nice catch—but for how long?

I've been collecting games for five blissful years now and that collecting has been a constant source of joy, happiness and satisfaction. It very much still is, but one thing cannot be denied: I'm slowly but surely starting to feel sated.

This evolution shouldn't be too surprising, mind you. The main motivation behind my collecting was twofold: collecting was partly driven by a burning desire to overcompensate for my years away from gaming and to fulfill at long last my childhood dream of being able to purchase games to my heart's content, and partly driven by a firm intention to constitute a pool of gaming systems and games that would be there for the (re)playing in years to come. It's hard to deny that after five years of intense—and intensive—collecting, these two objectives have been reached several times over. My old frustration of not being able to indulge in my wildest game purchasing fantasies has been totally erased and is now but a distant memory; and with five gaming systems and hundreds of games at my disposal, I have enough gaming material for decades. Heck, I wouldn't be surprised if I grew bored of gaming or if arthritis caught my thumbs and wrists before I'm done playing all the games in my collection.

On top of that, collecting games is slowly but surely losing its edge over the years to become business as usual, so to speak. The initial thrill of hunting for games has been dampened by time and hundreds of gaming purchases and I've become a trifle desensitized to the whole thing, going from browsing Ebay and Amazon for hours on end to hunt for the perfect bargain to placing preorders and grouping purchases in a perfectly blasé way. Long gone is the time when getting a good bargain on a game could illuminate my whole day; now I'm purchasing games in a rational and dispassionate way, methodically shearing my wishlist of the moment. Gaming purchases are still a great source of joy and I've not grown jaded towards the whole thing yet, but I could very much become so in the years to come. Heck, I'm already completely burnt out on special editions—what's the next step? I don't want my collecting to go down in my personal gaming history as something that I surfeited myself with, but rather as an pleasant endeavour that I wisely stopped before I got sick of it.

This led me to an crucial decision: I'm going to stop collecting games in the years to come, while collecting is still enjoyable. More specifically, I will ensure that my collecting stops with the 3DS and the Vita. Once these two bail out, I will not shift my collecting to other systems but rather deliberately stop collecting altogether. That doesn't mean that I will stop buying games entirely: I will very likely keep purchasing the odd game here and there, but that will become an isolated occurrence rather than a regular activity. But what about next gen handhelds, you may ask? Well, if there are any AND if I decide to invest in some of them, I will do so in a more carefree and less involved way. I will not collect for them and I will only purchase and play the very best games they have to offer. In a nutshell, future consoles will be nothing more than side dishes, the main courses being my five current handhelds—Vita, 3DS, PSP, DS and GBA, a.k.a. the Fab Five.

The announced end of my collecting endeavours obviously doesn't mean that I will stop playing games and blogging about them—let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater, shall we? My precious collection is sizeable enough to provide gaming and writing material for many years to come, so I won't retire from gaming and blogging any time soon. Thanks for reading, and be my guest anytime!