for me showing pics of my Nice Old Game Stuff exposes a tension between
- wanting to show ppl something cool on socials
- showing off
- acknowledging that yeah, i was super fortunate to have middle-class economic privilege growing up and currently have a solid job
gaming is an expensive hobby / pastime / time sink that not everyone gets the same opportunity to enjoy. it has always been so but as a comfortably-off teen back in the '90s i was fairly oblivious to that, and becoming more cognizant is a still-ongoing process.
the tension's more obvious than ever to me since the recent spike in retro prices has made the physical collecting hobby yet more impractical. personally, i don't think it's worth the cost of entry these days unless amassing these artifacts really speaks to you on some level.1
i'm very thankful for tech like ODEs and emulation and MiSTer FPGA and so on that remove physical ownership from the equation, at least for the software. sure, nothing can replace new cart smell or whatever, but just as i'm usually willing to trade the physical comforts of real books for the efficiencies of ebooks, so too am i happy to trade room-filling nerd hoards for more modest setups that retain 95+% of the functionality (and often, greatly improve user quality of life).
let's be blunt: i am thrilled so-called "piracy" is so easy these days, and is so good. i also feel tension around saying that, like i will offend various creators who might hear it.2 i do think "piracy" is a net good though. games should not be luxuries limited to the economically privileged (me, here), and variously marginalized folks have more pressing things to budget for than ensuring Nintendo's coffers remain flush.3 (Oddly, also me: I'm a trans woman who's had to pay tens of thousands o.o.p. for medical care and is worried about future well-being once current job goes away.)
anyway, i hope this doesn't make me the target of Discourse, i'm just some random nerd chosting on a blog. but i do think everyone deserves to enjoy games [movies! books! culture!], capitalist hellscape or no, and thus "piracy" is a net good. i am grateful for it.
- i personally feel weighed down by all the junk i accrued during my "collecting" days and have been progressively getting rid of it. the compactness of solutions like ODEs and MiSTer is a huge benefit imo. countless worlds of content stored on micro sd cards vs. shelves and shelves of physical media. clear win.
- usual disclaimer about supporting smaller artists / outfits when you are able. truly, it's a good thing to do and helps support other people struggling to make it, a far greater outcome than boosting Square Enix's Q4 sales or whatever.
- despite the incredible amount of people constantly playing Nintendo's ROMs for free they still seem to be doing spectacularly. weird.
