Can You Narrow Your Focus So Much That Nothing Fits Anymore?
Amusingly, when I started collecting video games, both physical, and "ROMs", I wanted everything. For the ROMs side of things, storage wasn't cheap, but the games were, so why not collect it all?
Over the years, when storage did become cheap, I figured I'd grab everything. Plus the ROM management tools became considerably better (datfiles quality, organizational tools, naming conventions, etc.)
What I've since discovered in the last few years, is that I don't want to collect everything.1 Do I have 3 gigabytes to spare to just have the complete Sega Genesis library on my PC when I need it? Yeah. But do I want it there? No.
In order to better-facilitate some sort of focus a this stage of my life (age 46), I've narrowed my collecting down to three systems.
- Sony PlayStation
- Sony PlayStation 2
- Sega Dreamcast
This works out nicely, as not only are these the three systems that I collected the most when I collected physical games, but they're my three favorites, just in terms of experiences had with the medium of video games, and the memories made playing them.
However, I've slowly been discovering a sort of cruel irony in the last few years - while I typically enjoy playing games from those systems, I tend to only really get a rise out of replaying games that I previously played back in the late 90's and early 00's when these games were contemporary.
I replay certain parts of games, remember where I was the last time I did that, or think about stories related to what was going on in my life when I was last at this point of a game. More crucially, when I try to play old games from this era that I've never played before, I struggle to be engaged. This is two-fold. On one hand, I have thousands of games, just sitting on a hard drive, and remaining with just one for long periods of time is very hard, because it's just easier to hop to another games after 5 minutes if the one you're playing doesn't grab you. It was a lot different when I was a kid, and I'd get like 2-3 games for Christmas, but might not get another until my birthday. So, I'd better get everything I can out of it. To truly get your2 money's worth out of the game. When things are free, they lack value.
Additionally, at the end of the day, these are just very old games, and it's difficult to go back to 1990's games after playing modern 2026 titles.
Thus, I press on, making subsets of subsets, of subsets, of subsets. The question being: if you keep narrowing your filter of focus, can you narrow it so much, that nothing fits anymore?