Game Cultures of Collecting

The cost of mod­ern­iza­tion has dri­ven peo­ple into cities where we earn increas­ing­ly iso­lat­ed liv­ings. A per­son feels as alone in their car crawl­ing along in grid­locked traf­fic as they do on a crowd­ed sub­way, head­phones serv­ing as a seal against the noise and the crowds. These and other daily neces­si­ties of city liv­ing result in our liv­ing dis­tinct and dis­con­nect­ed lives, in which per­son­al rela­tion­ships suf­fer and are replaced with the allur­ing sim­plic­i­ty of sur­round­ing our­selves with objects -both phys­i­cal and vir­tu­al. Videogames fit this behav­ior neat­ly. Like Narcissus — who stared at his reflec­tion for an eter­ni­ty until he became a flower — gamers prac­tice a form of self-obsession by proxy. We spend hours focus­ing on improv­ing our vir­tu­al avatars and accu­mu­lat­ing in-game pos­ses­sions. This is reflect­ed in all stages of play, from char­ac­ter cre­ation, to armor upgrades, to in-game col­lectibles. As we build our avatars, we in turn build our­selves. If, as mem­bers of con­sumerist soci­eties, we are urged to define our­selves by our pos­ses­sions, it only fol­lows that we inter­pret the pos­ses­sions of our in-game avatars as exten­sions of our own identities.

What makes col­lect­ing trin­kets in a game appeal­ing? Why do we often prize and pri­or­i­tize such an activ­i­ty above its alter­na­tives? In our lives there is very lit­tle that we can con­trol. Only in games can we find some degree of fair­ness. Markets swing­ing a few per­cent­age points in either direc­tion can cost us our sav­ings. People, in their end­less com­plex­i­ty, can sur­prise and dis­ap­point. Finally, time moves irrev­o­ca­bly for­ward, and the prospect of death stares at us both from a remove and around the cor­ner at once. Games can usu­al­ly be mea­sured, and we can usu­al­ly assume that effort put in will pro­duce pro­por­tion­al and fair results. Even more impor­tant­ly, games pro­vide us with a sense of growth with­out need­ing to ever con­crete­ly sup­ply evi­dence of it. By leav­ing a trail of bread­crumbs to fol­low, games offer us a kind of men­tal tread­mill; a device with which to act out our need for self-improvement through rote accumulation. ….continue reading on Ontological Geek