Someone asked why videogames — that is to say, console games — tend to be so sought-after by collectors, when PC games more often just fade away when their time passes. I’ve covered this before, in some form. Here it is again, though.

PC games are ephemeral. Console games are not. The latter feel real; concrete. The former are kind of disposable. You install them, you uninstall them. You’ll never have a standard experience. In a few years they’ll never work again. Magnetic media decay, and quickly. Cartridges, not so much. Now that everything’s on CD, the lines are blurred a bit.

I think it’s a similar question as to why VHS isn’t as collectable as DVD and cassettes aren’t as collectable as LPs or DVDs. They don’t feel as permanent. They aren’t an investment in the same way, because you don’t know if you will be able to rely on them when you feel you need them.

The whole idea of the collector is to amass trinkets which he will be able to refer to at whim. Often they are kept in as pure a condition as possible, just to preserve them for the future. Every addition is sort of like an addition to one’s extended being. One more exterior node to the mind, or personality. One more anchor to stability. One more reminder that one exists, that there is a certain order to life.

We collect because we want to capture life. Hold onto it forever. It comes from a deep inner need. Anything which can decay is a problem, from this mindset.

Of course, videogames themselves are an ephemeral phenomenon. If anything really does exist in the way we perceive it, videogames fail to do so except in the electrical space between hardware and the player’s mind. Once the electricity is gone, once the infrastructure that supports them is gone, videogames will also be gone. What physical remains remain wil be irrelevant.

Still. We all play our little games in life.