I used to think this was bad, but honestly? It’s just games. Some people buy tons of digital games they literally never even play. If they were physical games, imagine all the e-waste.
And what’s the point of physical games? So you can play the game in 30 years from now on some retro console you’ve diligently maintained?
Get over it, you’re not going to do any of that. There’s no mythical third act where you go through some library of physical CDs and reminisce about an old ass game. There’s constantly new games coming out all the time, you will just keep buying and buying games, you play them for a bit, and then you move on. It’s not “buy it for life”, it’s buy it for right now have fun and move on. Live in the present, don’t worry about the future.
Even people who have retro consoles and collect physical copies seem to mostly do it for collector purposes. When they die, their kids will send all that to a dump or pawn it off. Pointless.
There are a ton of amazing games that people still enjoy today that would be essentially impossible to get ahold if they were only available through DRM'd digital downloads. I agree the physical media is more of a nostalgia thing in principle, but a) that doesn't make people's enjoyment of that part invalid, and b) it's not a like-for-like, because digital downloads on the whole do not allow the resale that physical media does, nor apart from some notable exceptions do they even guarantee continued access to the game. I feel like what you're saying here is implying that there is no value at all in older games and you would rather people stop enjoying them.
I agree with most of this, which is why emulation is generally better unless you specifically want to operate/show off a museum.
Maybe things will be like the Nintendo BS-X where people will reverse engineer consoles with games downloaded to extract the game from it.
That being said I do have a physical Atari 2600 with a few games. Astroblast with paddles is still a fun game today, and Video Olympics (the Atari VCS version of Pong) is extremely fun to bring out at parties.
the Atari 2600 is probably my favorite console to collect for. The games cost next to nothing and old games like that are fun to just grab a stack of and play each game for 5-10 minutes each
>There’s no mythical third act where you go through some library of physical CDs and reminisce about an old ass game.
Huh? You won't replay every game, sure, but once in a while you'll find a game that you keep coming back to even many years after first playing it. The last time I played Pokémon Red all the way through was only a few years ago. I have permanent Deus Ex, Crysis, FEAR, and Duke Nukem 3D installations on my hard drive, so I can run them for a bit whenever I feel like. Maybe once you put down a game you never pick it again, but don't assume what is true of you is true of everybody.
Maybe remember the experience but grow up?
Do you mean "grow up", or do you mean "stop enjoying things you used to enjoy"?
If you enjoyed something as a much younger person, and enjoy it as a much older person, it is very unlikely that it is the thing itself that you are enjoying. To test it, you can try giving that thing to someone your age and see if they enjoy it (they will most likely think it's a nuisance). To experience it yourself, you can try what kids are into these days or even better try something that people used to like long before you were born, in which case you will very likely see these things as pointless quite quickly. If you observe these things, it is easy to see that nostalgia is enjoyable because it is about associating your youth and naiveté with the object of nostalgia. If you grew up, you would see that it is just some distraction that merchants brought to you to profit from your stupidity. If you realize this, you'll enjoy not having to deal with that shit a lot more.
I'm not even understanding the topic of discussion. Nostalgia bad?
Your enjoyment isn’t pure in the sense you genuinely enjoy the thing for what it is.
You enjoy it mostly because you’ve enjoyed it once before.
Regardless, it is not even an argument for physical media, you don’t even have physical copies of these old games, and even if you did, holding the physical copy wouldn’t add anything to your experience besides a bit of novelty.
Physical discs should be obsolete.
>To experience it yourself, you can try what kids are into these days
What do you mean? I'll try anything if I think it will appeal to me, but I don't know any children to ask what they're into to conduct this experiment.
>or even better try something that people used to like long before you were born, in which case you will very likely see these things as pointless quite quickly.
Like how long? I like classical music. I don't really like theater. I read Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and liked it; I read Martín Fierro and hated it. What conclusion do we draw from all this?
>If you observe these things, it is easy to see that nostalgia is enjoyable because it is about associating your youth and naiveté with the object of nostalgia.
No, I don't agree. I don't agree that I derive nostalgic enjoyment from the examples I gave previously. I think that I can enjoy them because they're familiar things that I can engage with as a matter of routine. I can enjoy them for the same reason I biked to work through the same route for over ten years straight without getting bored. Someone completely new cannot derive that same routinary enjoyment. For example, DOOM is basically just as old as Duke Nukem 3D, but I only played it many years later, and so I never finished it (but I also don't think I would have liked it as much back in the day; the gameplay is just not as good. I should try other Build games to see how they compare). As another example, I should definitely feel nostalgia for Saint Seiya, but I tried multiple times just couldn't get through it. It's just for children, an adult can't miss the obvious plot holes. But I saw The Lion King in the theater and then dozens of times on VHS, and then dozens more times off my NAS 20+ years later, and loved it every time -- as an adult I just could better understand why it was so good.
>If you grew up
You're asking to be told off.
>you would see that it is just some distraction that merchants brought to you to profit from your stupidity. If you realize this, you'll enjoy not having to deal with that shit a lot more.
I don't "deal with" the things I like. I like them. Engaging with them is not something I'm forced to do that I have to cope with. Are you an alien? What do you do for fun? Stack rocks on the beach? Or is fun a foreign concept to you?
Replace 'games' with 'books' in your comment. Would you feel the same way?
No because shelves full of books make great decorations and sound proofing in between walls.
I'm sorry, is that it? Have you ever seen how a collection looks like? They have a lot of charm as well.
Once they used to be even better because they'd come with manuals, posters, and more inside the case, but unfortunately they already took that away from us...