Isn't video game collecting kinda just hoarding?

[emporerdragon]

I am a home owner now and my house is super de-cluttered and very much minimalist and now I kinda shudder at looking at 2,000+ physical games.

Gotta look at it from the flipside. I shudder when thinking about a minimalist lifestyle. To me, going minimalist feels boring, sterile, and unfulfilling. What enjoyment is there in owning as little as possible?

I enjoy having my own personal library/museum. It is a way to outwardly reflect myself, my interests, and my passions. I enjoy tending to it and cultivating it. Why would I throw that away?

[kamikazekeeg]

I am a home owner now and my house is super de-cluttered and very much minimalist and now I kinda shudder at looking at 2,000+ physical games.

Gotta look at it from the flipside. I shudder when thinking about a minimalist lifestyle. To me, going minimalist feels boring, sterile, and unfulfilling. What enjoyment is there in owning as little as possible?

I enjoy having my own personal library/museum. It is a way to outwardly reflect myself, my interests, and my passions. I enjoy tending to it and cultivating it. Why would I throw that away?

Absolutely this.  I've always been someone to display my interests, whether on my shirt, or on my shelves, or on my walls.  My sister is the opposite, having some knickknacks and such to display on shelves, but otherwise has very little on her white walls, and it kinda drives me abit nuts.  I've made some Pokemon perler beads in my spare time and gotten them onto her wall as a sneaky way to add things to display on them lol.

[sworddude]

I am a home owner now and my house is super de-cluttered and very much minimalist and now I kinda shudder at looking at 2,000+ physical games.

Gotta look at it from the flipside. I shudder when thinking about a minimalist lifestyle. To me, going minimalist feels boring, sterile, and unfulfilling. What enjoyment is there in owning as little as possible?

I enjoy having my own personal library/museum. It is a way to outwardly reflect myself, my interests, and my passions. I enjoy tending to it and cultivating it. Why would I throw that away?

I have seen plenty of people who live that way. They hate everything if it might just look messy, everything that has no function or can be more space efficient has to go.

[hoshichiri]

I don't want say, Sonic 06... anywhere near my collection ...

One does not buy Sonic 06. One comes home to discover Sonic 06 has been added to your collection by a sibling's S.O. who didn't want it and couldn't sell it, so they dumped it on you. Morbid curiosity & the chance to torture friends keeps it out of the goodwill box.

I mean, that's how I got mine.

[marvelvscapcom2]

By the broad definition all collecting is technically hoarding but I think we are certainly different than the typical idea of a hoarder like the show hoarders depicts     The terms are very similar but a collector is slightly different than a hoarder imo and here is how I differentiate. 


The big difference between a collector and a hoarder in my opinion is organization and the curation with the intent to actually categorize or catelog their items.         For example, if I guy just has random piles of trash in a huge pile in the garage that he has saved from years of flea marketing, without any rhyme or reason. He's a hoarder.    But if he has shelving and has his junk cleaned, displayed as relics even if it's baby diapers, he'd be a baby diaper collector. 

   I think the organization and pride in it,  and most especially the sanitation and the curating and keeping a catelog of your collecting.   Is what seperates the two.   


Hoarders kinda just hoard things, with no intent to keep track or have a curated library of their goods while collectors are like curators of a library.  Cateloging each entry in databases like this big digital database that wouldn't exist without passionate collectors.   



Like if you're weeding through a garage and your knee deep in dirty trash, bags of nothing, junk, wierd items and nothing is organized or their really isn't any reason behind him having it other than wanting it at the time than that's a hoarder.  But if you enter a garage and find giant shelf networks like a library but you look at each shelf and it's complete garbage.  But the garbage is clean, labeled, organized, and he knows what he has and why he has it than I think that's a collector even though you don't understand his collectibles.   


I've actually found gamers before that i'd consider hoarders and not collectors.  Just because they have everything they buy just on the floor, on tables, in huge stacks, scattered,  random console lots every which way.  You can tell he was just hoarding it and not "collecting it" .    I think with collecting it's more of a active intent to bring things together in a collection of that similar item.  And not just random tossings. 

[wartoy]

I have a large collection but it's all neat and well kept.My collection is all ready to play at any time on 8 diffrent tvs but Im definitely not a horder. I am proud of my collection but it's not what's really important to me family comes first if my hobby interferes in my family's happiness then I would get rid of it all in a second.

[seether]

Im definitely not a horder.

That’s exactly what a hoarder would say.

[cirno]

I have to question why exactly you joined a forum for a hobby you dislike, and are using that to insult and look down upon the people who take part in it. Like what's your deal dude 

Again-like people have told you ten times in this thread-if it's neat it isn't hoarding. Get off your high horse

[wartoy]

Im definitely not a horder.

That’s exactly what a hoarder would say.

ok you win im not going to explain it again

[metshael]

For me the biggest difference between a hoarder and a collector is that a hoarder can't get rid of anything they "own" while a collector can get rid of what they own if they want or need to, i mean who never sold a game or a system since they started their collection. I put the own for the hoarders in quote because as my uncle, who suffered from it for almost all his life, would say: "I didn't owned anything... it's the things that owned me".

Hoarding disorder can be very grave, i don't really care if you consider that i'm a hoarder because i own 700+ PS2 games instead of 3 (or any number that you would find acceptable), you can think what you want to think about me but by doing so, by not seeing the difference between a hobby and something that ruins peoples lives, i consider that you don't really care about those who really suffers from it.

Im definitely not a horder.

That’s exactly what a hoarder would say.

Okay... that is just insulting, not for wartoy but for hoarders... 

[soera]

Hoarding vs collecting. I look at it this way. Collecting is acquiring something you like. Hoarding is acquiring something period. I mean look at what a lot of hoarders have. Garbage, filth, infestation. Its not acquiring anything they would want to have … its just acquiring.

[kashell]

Im definitely not a horder.

That’s exactly what a hoarder would say.

Okay... that is just insulting, not for wartoy but for hoarders... 

Maybe they're projecting.

[telly]

I definitely agree with everything that's been said so far, but since Seether still seems content on throwing around what makes someone a hoarder without actually understanding the condition, lets actually look at the diagnostic criteria for hoarding disorder from the DSM-5.

• Persistent difficulty discarding or parting with possessions, regardless of their actual value.
• This difficulty is due to a perceived need to save the items and to distress associated with discarding them.
• The difficulty discarding possessions results in the accumulation of possessions that congest and clutter active living areas and substantially compromises their intended use. If living areas are uncluttered, it is only because of the interventions of third parties (e.g., family members, cleaners, authorities).
• The hoarding causes clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning (including maintaining a safe environment for self and others).
• The hoarding is not attributable to another medical condition (e.g., brain injury, cerebrovascular disease, Prader-Willi syndrome).
• The hoarding is not better explained by the symptoms of another mental disorder (e.g., obsessions in obsessive-compulsive disorder, decreased energy in major depressive disorder, delusions in schizophrenia or another psychotic disorder, cognitive deficits in major neurocognitive disorder, restricted interests in autism spectrum disorder).

Notice that the physical act of buying or collecting something is NOT hoarding. It's about 1. refusing to throw things away that aren't needed, 2. cluttering and compromising active living spaces, and 3. impaired social, occupational or familial roles.

You have no evidence that any of the users here have persistent difficulty parting with useless possessions, or that we all live in cluttered houses and can't function without saving every single piece of garbage that we find. That claim is very bold and honestly a little insulting. 

[oleks]

Everyone's different. I don't think collecting is hoarding. I like minimalism and I also collect. I enjoy hunting for games, curating, but I don't like displaying. I rent storage which is super useful not only to me but for the whole family. It's not very expensive to rent a  2x3x3 meter cell.

When I want to enjoy a system or some weird subset of my personal gaming history - I drive to storage, take what I want from my "hoardings", take it home, have fun with it (even if it's just fondling with boxes and manuals) and drive it back to storage when I'm finished playing/fondling. Idk, this approach doesn't sound like hoarding to me. Your opinion might differ.

Just my 2 cents.

[hoshichiri]

Im definitely not a horder.

That’s exactly what a hoarder would say.

Technically, you're both right- a hoarder would never admit to it, and Wartoy's setup hardly sounds like a proper hoarder.

However, Seether- watch your tone. Remember, this is a collector's site- most of us are going to be on the side of 'clutter is relaxing'. If you've come to find it distressing and prefer a clean minimalist environment, that's fine. That's you. But I'll keep my bookcases and be happier for it. Insinuating that mindset makes me, or anyone else here, a hoarder (ie, someone living in filth who needs an intervention) is insulting.