Finally I have come around the main point I wanted to make when I started writing about collecting goals, lo those many weeks ago. It's something that is at once blindingly obvious and very exciting (well, I find it exciting, anyway). The idea is simple: define a small subset of stuff that shares some kind of common theme, and collect the best quality examples of it you can find. This technique has the advantage of being manageable, while giving you that sexy goal of "completion" that collectors love to strive for. I'm calling these subsets minicollections.
Examples of minicollections:
1. CIB examples of all the Atari 2600 games released by Imagic.
2. Complete copies of all the NES Mega Man games.
3. Mint copies of all the games you had as a kid.
4. Every licensed Pac-Man game for every system you collect.
The list goes on. The best part of minicollections is that they're endlessly flexible. Any theme that interests you can be a minicollection, and you can make them as small or as large as you please.
I've completed at least one minicollection, although it was big enough that the "mini" epithet may not be totally appropriate. I've managed to amass complete-in-box copies of all the original American Odyssey² releases. (If you're curious, the last piece I acquired was a Power Lords manual.) My next "mini" goal for it is to improve its cosmetic condition. Most of the games are in good shape, but a few labels are bubbled, a couple boxes are crushed, and so on. However, I expect this goal to remain incomplete for a long time, as mint O2 games are hard to come by.
I have other minicollection ideas in mind as well, but I think I'll save them for later posts.
Sunday, June 12, 2011
Friday, June 10, 2011
Collecting Goals, Yet Again
Yikes, has a month really gone by since my last post? I swear time is speeding up as I continue to age. At this rate, by next week I'll be collecting Social Security. A month from now I'll be dead!
So I guess I should stop beating around the bush and get to the point of my recent posts. How do you continue collecting once your want lists are exhausted, without devolving into Pokémon-style, gotta-collect-it-all acquisition mania? I believe the answer comes down to just one strategy:
Ta-da!!! I admit, it's not much of a revelation. So why did I spend so much time leading up to it? Well, I actually did have a reason for laying all that groundwork (and it's not just that I'm long-winded). In my experience, it's hard to appreciate this strategy until after you've been collecting for a while. When you start collecting, by definition you haven't acquired anything yet, so the world is your proverbial oyster. Anything new improves your collection. So you pick up everything you can, in any condition you can. In the video game collecting world, this usually equates to a bunch of loose carts with tattered labels, manuals with missing covers, and barely-working hardware.
Then, eventually, you hit a point where you've collected practically every loose cart you ever wanted, and then some. In other words, you've exhausted the collecting avenues I described in my last two posts. It's at this point when looking for quality stuff should take center stage in your collecting pursuits.
By "quality" I don't necessarily mean everything should be in shrinkwrapped, mint condition. But torn labels, chipped cartridges, ripped manuals and the like should be replaced with better specimens. Loose carts can be replaced with boxed copies. Again, no earth-shaking realizations here, but the hunt for quality can reinvigorate your collecting passion, much as the hunt for quantity did when you originally started your pursuit.
Of course, quality can be expensive, and if your collection is broad enough, trying to improve it across the board might be too daunting of a task. I definitely felt that way about my own collection. However, I believe I have a strategy to cope with that too, which I'll discuss in my next post. And then maybe I can finally be done with this topic and write about something else for a change!
So I guess I should stop beating around the bush and get to the point of my recent posts. How do you continue collecting once your want lists are exhausted, without devolving into Pokémon-style, gotta-collect-it-all acquisition mania? I believe the answer comes down to just one strategy:
Focus on improving the quality (not quantity) of your collection.
Ta-da!!! I admit, it's not much of a revelation. So why did I spend so much time leading up to it? Well, I actually did have a reason for laying all that groundwork (and it's not just that I'm long-winded). In my experience, it's hard to appreciate this strategy until after you've been collecting for a while. When you start collecting, by definition you haven't acquired anything yet, so the world is your proverbial oyster. Anything new improves your collection. So you pick up everything you can, in any condition you can. In the video game collecting world, this usually equates to a bunch of loose carts with tattered labels, manuals with missing covers, and barely-working hardware.
Then, eventually, you hit a point where you've collected practically every loose cart you ever wanted, and then some. In other words, you've exhausted the collecting avenues I described in my last two posts. It's at this point when looking for quality stuff should take center stage in your collecting pursuits.
By "quality" I don't necessarily mean everything should be in shrinkwrapped, mint condition. But torn labels, chipped cartridges, ripped manuals and the like should be replaced with better specimens. Loose carts can be replaced with boxed copies. Again, no earth-shaking realizations here, but the hunt for quality can reinvigorate your collecting passion, much as the hunt for quantity did when you originally started your pursuit.
Of course, quality can be expensive, and if your collection is broad enough, trying to improve it across the board might be too daunting of a task. I definitely felt that way about my own collection. However, I believe I have a strategy to cope with that too, which I'll discuss in my next post. And then maybe I can finally be done with this topic and write about something else for a change!
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