A while ago, I wrote an article called “All single player games can be multiplayer if you want them to be”. It was about how I started playing Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 with my son, swapping the controller so we could both enjoy the experience. While it didn’t last long, it made me realise that you could do that with any single player game. Nothing new and I’m sure many people have done it over the last few decades but it made me think about gaming differently.
Another gaming perspective that I’ve developed lately revolves around its art. Think of trading cards and older game cover art. If you’re into those kinds of things, you’ll know how the markets are ridiculous and everything is vastly overpriced thanks to scalpers and higher demand that there is supply in a lot of cases. But the thing is, it focuses a lot on popularity and making a quick buck from that engineered scarcity rather than “this thing had a limited run so of course it’s going to be expensive if I sell it to you”. That leaves us with more common cards or games that can go for very cheap but still feature incredible artworks from a variety of artists who you may not have heard of before. And that made me realise that instead of looking at these things as franchise commodities, I could see them as art.
Pokémon TCG has a ton of awesome art on cards worth a few pounds and pennies because they’re not “desirable”. They’re not exactly portraits you can hang up on a wall but you’re not buying them for their capital; you buy them because they look awesome. And the same goes for retro games with nice cover art and manuals. Naturally, you should also play the games you buy but even if you end up not liking it, you just spent a relatively small amount of money on beautiful pictures that you can look at again and again and actually own it.
This isn’t anything new and I haven’t just discovered collecting but the concept of collecting items for their beauty even if they aren’t officially classed as collectibles goes a long way to enjoying the craftsmanship and care that someone put into them. And I think it’s a lot rarer now for someone to collect things for their art when perhaps people don’t see them as art. You could do it with CDs (again, you should listen to the physical music you buy), physical copies of movies on older formats like VHS, or even books (one time where you could judge a book by its cover but once again, engage with the media!)
What’s something that you collect that you don’t think is classed as a collectible? Do you collect it for the art or something else that isn’t the primary reason others collect it for? Feel free to email me and let me know or write about it on your blog and link back to this!
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