What's in the box?

February 28, 2025 2:17 PM

Yet as I put stuff into another banker’s box for storage, I started kicking myself for not hanging onto more of that material. A short conversation on storage, accumulation, and game packaging.= between Patrick Klepek and Rob Zacney from Remap Radio.
posted by PussKillian (7 comments total)

A Tasty Red Snapper?
posted by CookTing at 3:15 PM on February 28 [2 favorites]

I'm honestly glad that video games have more or less devolved into DVD cases. The flimsy cardboard was hard to preserve, and the manuals easy to lose or mangle. Though admittedly the internet diminished the need for manuals as anything other than collectors items about as important as the folded poster you might get inside as well.
posted by pwnguin at 3:51 PM on February 28

> admittedly the internet diminished the need for manuals as anything other than collectors items

The rise of tutorials built into games did a lot for this too. Everything the developer thinks you need to know to play the game is laid out in the beginning: go here, push these buttons to do this, now let’s take you through this system, ok cool go fuck around a while, hi! I see you ran into this other system, how about a tutorial for it? Oh you skipped it, you can always access it again from the pause menu!

Admittedly part of that was probably due to internet distribution so I may just be emphatically agreeing with you here, now that I think about it.

I was going to say “everything you need to play the game” but then I remembered the existence of game-specific wikis, though those are more like the digital version of a third party guide book, except with a much more tenuous financial model.
posted by egypturnash at 5:28 PM on February 28

I have plenty of old video games. They don't take up too much space.

I have thousand of board games and they take up a lot of space...

I am old, and am realizing the obsession I have will be a burden for my heirs.

Haven't finished the article, but...

Make me some offers...

Mostly things in my Marketplace or marked for trade.

Seattle, so shipping if you are not here. And shipping is only getting worse...
posted by Windopaene at 6:31 PM on February 28 [1 favorite]

I started kicking myself for not hanging onto more of that material.

The older I get, the less I kick my past self and the more I kick my present self into the future.
posted by fairmettle at 10:53 PM on February 28 [2 favorites]

A carrot?
posted by lock robster at 1:12 AM on March 1

I have been helping a board-game designer and author with a global reputation, who is getting on a bit in age, to find a home for his collection of games, books and papers. As of this week we think we may have found somewhere but it's been a couple of years and lot of work to get this far and the institution in question hasn't started applying for funding to house and look after the collection, fund a PhD student to catalogue and write about it, and all the rest of that. We are probably looking at another eighteen months of work before the gift actually happens, if it does, and this will be a gift and no money will change hands. And this is a designer who, if you know board games, I'd mention their name and you'd go, 'Oh, right.'

And this is not a large collection: the games take up most of one wall of a medium bedroom, plus a few plastic crates of overflow, plus about the same amount of books, and two boxes that came from the estate of another noteworthy UK designer who died in 2020.

You should not assume that anybody apart from yourself and some strangers on eBay care about that rarity from 1985 in the attic. (And, if you're windowpaene, me because that is a seriously impressive games collection - and includes titles from both the designers above.)
posted by Hogshead at 3:46 PM on March 1