I used to be quite the game hoarder. Once I got a game, I would usually never get rid of it, no matter how bad it was. It probably doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but I worried that a day would come where I would’ve played all my good games too recently to play over again and still enjoy them, and in order to continue my daily gaming, I would have no choice but to go back and play my bad games. But, at least I’d have something to play. Back then, for me, playing a bad game was better than playing no games at all. And I think another reason why I used to engage in such nonsense was because, when I first started gaming, I didn’t have many games, and so I couldn’t afford to get rid of anything, or else I would have no choice but to replay the same few games over and over again or become quite game deprived, a rather grim fate indeed. And so, with this past need to cling to any game I could get my hands on, no matter how dreadful, I used to really not understand how people could get rid of their games unless they were really bad.

But, I get it now. I don’t know why I didn’t before, but it all makes sense to me now, and I no longer understand why I would ever actually want to keep bad games. I think I must’ve grown up a bit, because it no longer seems worth it to me to waste my time playing bad games, especially now that I have so many good ones. In fact, whenever I get a new batch of particularly good games now, it always inspires me to go through my game collection and get rid of a few I no longer want. Especially lately, I’ve been in quite the mood to thin my collection out to only include the better games, ever since I bought a whole bunch of the old “Final Fantasy” games, and it was after the completion of “Final Fantasy VI” that I even started to get rid of games I never thought I’d actually give up. Because it made me realize, after playing such wonderful games like “FFVI”, how can I ever go back to the bad ones? Once you’ve played some really amazing games, it’s no longer easy to tolerate the cruddy ones.

And there is one other reason for my recent urge to clean up my collection, the reason cited by most people for why they don’t bother playing bad games, a lack of time. I used to have copious amounts of time to play games, and so wasting a few hours here and there playing something awful really made no difference. But, more recently, I’ve run into a time shortage, and so it is far more wasteful than it ever was before to spend time on anything I don’t thoroughly enjoy. And so, that fact, coupled with my already satisfactory collection of games, has really motivated me to cut back on my game collection. So, whenever I decide to clean up my collection a bit, I now ask myself, if I’m busy one day, and I only have a small window of time to play a game, would I want to spend that time playing this game? If the answer is no, there’s a pretty good chance that it will end up in my sell-pile, and I’ve now cleaned out from my collection a good number of games I never would’ve originally gotten rid of.

So I guess this is a rather weird post, but I think as I’ve grown older, I’ve learned some important lessons. Life is too short (well, I think life is a bit too long, but when it comes to the time spent doing what you love, those times are certainly too short) to waste on things you don’t enjoy, including boring games. (Like “Chain of Memories”. Oh my gosh, that game is brutal.) There are so many better games out there, so why waste time on stuff like that? I’ve also learned there are more important things in life (I know, duh). It’s not that I don’t love playing video games, but I recently learned that, after having such a wonderful time at the comicon just the other week, I have other good things in my life to focus on, that I no longer need video games and video games only, you know. I should’ve known this long ago, but it wasn’t until fairly recently that such a thing really hit me. Because, you see, video games have always been a rather big part of my life, quite possibly too big (definitely too big), but as the years have gone by, and as I’ve grown up, I’ve realized that gaming isn’t everything, and so if a day comes that I’ve sold all my bad games and have nothing whatsoever to play, that’s fine. This is a hobby I don’t plan on giving up; I just know now that games aren’t everything. This new realization doesn’t make them any less important to me, but in actuality, really only makes them better, because it’s no longer the shallow pastime where I would mindlessly play anything that happened to be lying around. I now only want to spend my time with games that really matter to me, with games that are meaningful, because those are the games that make gaming worthwhile in the first place.

So, as the title of this post says, I get it. I get a lot of things now. I get that, in order to improve your life and make room for the good, you need to give up a few things, but you don’t even need to give up what you care about in order to make your life better, because we tend to, frankly, have many things competing for our attention that we wouldn’t really miss if it was gone. We think we need these things, and so we hold onto them for years, but a day eventually comes where we realize, if this was gone, I think my life would actually be better off, not worse. If you get rid of the bad things, it only makes it easier to focus on and enjoy the good. And I wonder, now that I know this, if my next years as a gamer will be the best yet.

Duck, Master of Stating, and Writing Posts About, the Obvious