It felt great as a child of the 80s to just come home after school and put a video game into my NES. No Internet connection required or company servers that will eventually go offline, no huge day-1 patch to download, and if I got tired of it I could just sell or trade it to one of my friends. It was simplicity at its best.
Then the personal computer came along and more importantly, computer gaming came along. My NES, GameBoy, and SNES took a back seat to Voodoo3 and Sound Blaster add-on cards. When Steam came along and turned into the digital juggernaut that it is, I said I was done with consoles. As broadband Internet become more accessible, it was just so convenient to download games. You need to pay money to play multiplayer games on your console? I just open up GameSpy and connect from my computer. As people swapped out their Playstation 1s for Playstation 2s and then Playstation 3s, I laughed and just upgraded computer components as needed. Turns out, I missed out on a lot of great gaming over the last twenty years.
Now that I’m older, moving boxes have been replaced with housing stability and a riding lawn mower. The convenience of having a digital gaming library isn’t the big benefit that it used to be, and the question of “if you can’t hold something in your hand, do you really own it” really hits home. I have a nice Steam library of games, but there’s really no way to leverage that. So I started going out and buying physical games and some consoles to go with them. And then I put everything for sale on Facebook. Not that I have to sell anything, but anything I do sell just allows me to go back out and buy other games. If it sells, it sells. If it doesn’t, it stays in my collection.
It’s time to see what I’ve been missing.