Lately I’ve been picking up old PC games from like DOS/95/98 era because those are cheap as hell considering most people consider them to be literal trash and don’t have computers to run them. I play them on a compaq laptop running windows 98 that I bought for gaming.

I don’t think you understand the principle of what I’m saying at all.

I think that scarcity of art is a rather bourgeois thing, that the more available art is to everyone the better. Video games were always art the moment someone figured out how to make two pixels move across a screen. We don’t need to prove that to anyone.

I like to look at my games on the shelf too. When I pick up my copy of ruby, I renember the first time I beat the Pokémon league back in elementary school. When I pick up my copy of Megaman Zero, I renember how many tries it took me just to beat the first boss and how proud I was when I finally did. The difference to me however, is that I beleive that video games deserve to be played, that they are made to be played. For as long as our consoles still run, for as long as disks can escape the slow inevitability of disk rot, they should be enjoyed and appreciated. The original experience won’t exist forever. So we should just enjoy it for as long as it is there. My PS2 just broke recently, and I’m buying the part to make that repair to it because I could just not fix it and leave it as a paperweight on my shelf, but I actually care about playing these games.

When you shove sealed games inside a plastic display case never to be opened again, you aren’t getting the same value as someone that will play that game, because playing a game doesn’t preclude you from admiring it on your shelf.

The gaming collection scene isn’t quite what it used to be. Now it’s people trying to flex how big their wallets are, show how many titles they can hoard like a dragon. Scarcity and the decay of old tech will inevitably lead to prices rising, but now it’s all hype and very bad speculative investments. It’s not about the actual games and being able to re-experience that anymore and I think that’s sad.