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Collecting - The Disease
An anonymous reader writes "Gamers With Jobs has an interesting piece this morning on the nature of collectibility in games. While primarily a personal account of one man's journey into the hell that is Magic: the Gathering, it raises interesting questions about the difference between real-world and virtual-world collecting, and the economic motivations behind both." From the article: "I sit down. I play. I get schooled by a 12-year-old for two hours as he teaches me the ropes with a condescension reserved for teenagers with grownups by the throat. Each game is a bet — loser gives the winner the top card off his deck: Ante. I leave a dozen cards short. I had discovered a great game, and people to play it against. But that's not why the night sits burned into my brain with razor sharp clarity. No, it's because that Tuesday night in San Francisco, I became a collector."
I just love playing games with stakes other than just for the fun of it. I must admit to playing Magic in the distant past. We used to cut the Deck for the ante cards prior to playing. You certainly don't give up as easily if a valuable card is drawn for your ante.
Thurgood Marshall is in a group for people who are addicted and need help.
Thurgood: Hi, I'm Thurgood.
Entire Group: Hi, Thurgood.
Thurgood: and I am addicted to marijuana.
Entire Group groans
Addict: You in here for some marijuana?!? Marijuana!?!? Man, this is some BULLSHIT!
Bob Saget: Marijuana is not a drug! I used to suck dick for Magic: The Gathering cards!
Addict: I seen him!
Bob Saget: Now that's an addiction man! You ever suck some dick for Marijuana?!
Addict: HUH?!
Thurgood: No, I can't say I have.
Bob Saget: Yeah I didn't think so...
Addict: Boo this man! BOO!!!
Everyone "boos" him and throws bottles and trash at him
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
once you realize that the value of your collection doesn't lay in it's internal value (they're just cards or china or whatever) or your enjoyment using the collection (most collections are sealed away. Even if you do use them, how could you possibly get real use out of 100 cars or 1000 beanie babies?), then the only thing you have left is monetary value and bragging rights. And you only have monetary value and bragging rights, really, with other collectors. Did you tell your aunt polly about your Star Wars figure collection? What did she say? "Bad-ass"? Sure she did.
I have been caught up in the collecting bug in the past and as soon as I'm done, I just wonder where all my time/money/space/soul has gone.
Where are you Pogs now?
TW
When we'd get a pack, my friends and I would sniff the wrappers, always commenting "they lace it with just enough crack to get you to buy just one more pack..."
So many wasted college nights...
I would say gamers with rich parents, because that game requires one to invest a lot of time in it as well as money. The cards are constantly changing and what may be a decent deck one year will get smashed the next(provided you aren't playing with the uber-powerful, uber expensive cards)
Money and time are the reasons I gave it up.
Monstar L
I may lose a few, but I build my decks myself, from cards I get either from lots, pre-built decks from WotC (which I buy to get used to new mechanics, and usually rip apart after a few games) or booster packs. When I beat someone, it's with a deck I built, not one I copied from someone else.
psmylie's dictionary: Godzillion (noun) Any number large enough to destroy Tokyo
one of the wonderful things about magic is that its not as fast changing as other card games. cards stay "powerful" or "usefull" for longer, especially when you compare it to other games such as say... yugioh.
Magic world championship
It looks likes it's only 50,000 - but that's understandable given the somewhat smaller player base/television exposure/connections to real-money-gambling/etc...
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
And, what did I get out of it in the end?
The friends I made playing casually weren't interested in much else, and subsequently, I found that I wasn't much interested in them. Tournaments and pre-releases are filled with trash-talking, cheating, and rules-lawyering, making them decidedly unfun. And the money I spent on cards could have been better spent on something that's more fun, more social, and just as fitting to my geeky lifestyle (like, say, video games.)
In other words, I got nothing beneficial from it, aside from the occasional interesting friend, triumphant tourney moment, or excellent deal on old cards. Consequently, this summer I made the decision to sell my entire $2500 collection via CardShark. Now, I'm raking in a load of cash, which I'll probably re-invest in music or games (i.e. things that are actually fun), all for a bunch of pieces of cardboard.
And that's not even getting into my whole rant about how Wizards hasn't given a damn about the gamers since the Ice Age block. But that would be getting off-topic.
So, if you take one thing from this post, let it be that, if you're on the fence about quitting and selling your collection, do it. Your life and your pocketbook will be all the better for it.
Many Bothans died to bring you this sig.
Thank You.
OSGGFG - Open Source Gamers Guide to Free Games
You see, I once used to collect innocent things...Star Trek figures, Star Wars figures...I even had a few CCGs...Star Wars, Overpower and M:tG come to mind. None of these really broke my bank. I worked a steady job in high school and since I was really only paying for gas and insurance, I had loads of money to spend. I actually had somewhere near $2000 saved up before college, so I didn't have to work in order to eat out and have fun doing things my parents weren't paying for (which was just school and books, and that nasty meal plan).
Well, now my new "toys" are computers and electronics. When I spend money, it is a lot less frequent, but the items I am buying are much more expensive. I guess it comes with my more grown up interests. I have tons of DVDs and buy many used CDs now. The real disaster comes from my electronics though. I am about to purchase another computer. (Well, build it myself, but you know...) I own a Dell Inspiron 8600 and recently got a G3 iBook (nice and white, 800MHz, DVD/CD-RW, etc.) on ebay for $300. I also have a lot of electronics, HDTV, media player, and audio-phile 5.1 system.
My other interest include guns, which are not cheap by any definition of the word either. I have managed to curb some of my PC/console gaming, though I really think I am just stashing up until it comes time for the Wii. Actually the new PC is mostly for Oblivion and maybe the next UT. The fact is, even these are typically 10x or more expensive then my old habits and I am not really making 10x as much as in high school. Well actually I am, but I now have real bills...like electricity, water, gas...oh and that pesky rent...
The point is, any hobby or habit can get really expensive. I guess it just eventually comes down to what kind of money you are willing to spend and what you find interesting.
"Some days you just can't get rid of a bomb."
I thought this article was a bit... light. It gives you a good sort of back-of-the-cereal box review of collecting, but it doesn't go any deeper. I won't be expanding on the article, but I had a few thoughts relationg to the topic.
Collecting is here to stay. It will never go away. That's pretty much a given; it is important, however, to differentiate between two types. First, monetary collecting: your Magic cards, Warhammer figures, etc. Second, non-monetary collecting: "earned" items in MMOs, unlockable costumes/endings/characters, etc.
The good news with monetary collecting is that the internet helped implode a lot of markets. With Magic: the Gathering, I remember in the late 90's one card, a Juzam Djinn, carried a pretty hefty price, upwards of $150 if I recall correctly. It should be $175 or $200 now, if we're to believe increasing returns on collectibles and inflation (or eBay sellers with 0 bids). But quick look on eBay shows prices in the $100 area, per card. The most expensive card, the Black Lotus, also goes for about half of its previous price ($1000+).
(Now, some Magic player is going to rebut about how the changing of tournament rules is affecting cards. That might be true to a point. But in the past ten years we've seen the same thing happen with sports collectibles, comic books, term life insurance, and countless other markets; opening a market will have the effect of reducing prices since it reduces scarcity).
Now, monetary collecting in gaming is pretty bad in my eyes, especially for games kids play, since it puts kids without well-off parents at a distinct disadvantage over equaly skilled kids whose parents give them huge allowances or equally skilled working professionals with large discretionary budgets.
Thankfully, in non-monetary collecting, time and skill are the real investment. Most "collectibles" in these games require no money: unique armor for your MMO character, unlockable costumes for your fighters/adventurers, or hats for your Nintendogs, etc. Still, there's some inequality, as people with time but not money constraints pay for training, gold, etc.
Collecting, be it virtual or real, is intrinsic to gaming, video and otherwise. What's a sports player always work for? A Super Bowl ring. Or the Stanley Cup. Or a gold medal. Or any number of physical objects that represent victory. There's a reason there are physical things attached to these victories. It's not that the jewelry is more important than the championship, it's just that it's an object. In MMOs where items serve (usually) a useful purpose it's nice to get a trinket to show you defeated some boss. But it's nicer to get Ashkandi, Greatsword of the Brotherhood.
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
... then eBay is the cure ;)
Why MTG sucks?
Because the one with most money wins.
You can build an uber deck and pwn everyone with a common deck. You can build unbeatable machines. Some rules have been adjusted to prevent heavy abuse but... I got a taste of this playing the computer version of MTG with older ruleset. A deck consisting of LOTS of black lotuses (now forbidden), +3 mana), some gravedigging cards costing less mana to restore used cards than the black lotuses produce (so you have a perpeetum mobile, produce mana over and over), then more cards for pulling cards from library to hand (never run out of them) and finally a few that deal immediate damage to the enemy proportional to mana used.
Such deck would cost some $2000 or so.
So the gameplay looks like this: I use up all the black lotuses producing lots of mana. Dig more cards from library, some more from graveyard, then keep producing mana. Then in one or two blasts (two in case the enemy drew some "reflect" instant, one if I know he doesn't have any) I kill the enemy. In one round. Sometimes just for fun hitting for 60 damage. They don't get to use anything other than an interrupt if any.
Now if someone designs similar InstaGib deck, what fun is playing it?
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
I thought he was talking about collecting real games! I've got well over 2000 cartridge/disc games for various console game systems, some that most slashdotters haven't even heard of. (Arcadia 2001, anyone?)
Yeah, sure, I got some of those stupid cardboard things, but I get stacks of 'em at a nearby thrift salvage store. If I find a card I don't have, cool. When I'm tired of it, I'll sell 'em.
What's the difference? Those cardboard things were made to be collected, with intentional artifical rarities. The video games weren't. A rare card is often highly desirable when playing a CCG; a rare video game is usually rare because it's a total stinker.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
Magic is really big at my high school (well, I just graduated, but still). There's a regular club that meets every Thursday, and there's easily over 70 members who play. However, the club is divided into two (not disjoint) groups: those who play with real decks, and those who play with proxies. Basically, the half of us who enjoy the game, but aren't willing to pay hundreds of dollars (we're in high school) for the latest and greatest cards, simply design our decks on paper, go on the internet, print out the neccesary card faces, and glue them onto basic land cards. It's no secret, we're not trying to cheat -- you just announce that it's for a proxy deck, and as long as the opponent doesn't have a problem with that (within our school, almost nobody does), you're good to go. You get all of the fun, without the cost. And since it's easy to print off a new deck, there's lots of interesting deck designs since there's no financial commitement involved in trying out a new idea. You would think that this would lead to a whole room full of people playing uber-decks of outrageous cards that they found deck lists for on the internet. But in practice, none of us are dicks, and we all end up having a lot of fun. Of course, we can't enter any tournaments like this, but there's so many of us in the school alone that we can sustain our hobby just fine.
Dr. Phil would say "grow up and give the crap away." The problem is that collectors are often with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD). That's a treatable problem that has nothing to do with "growing up." The article also touches on the elements of gambling addiction. If you have a problem collecting too many things, a therapist can easily determine if you're OCD and to what degree.