My great aunt was a hoarder, the stereotypical kind; had she lived another twenty years, she’d have been on a reality show for sure. Her house was a maze of pathways that wound between stacks of brittle newspapers. Anything accidentally brushed released a cloud of dust so thick it seemed solid. Even her backyard seemed to be holding on to something. It was overrun with rosebushes in rich colors, the smell a sharp contrast to the molding air inside the house. My father and I stayed with her for a few weeks when I was a kid, and the days I spent poking around, trying not to get inadvertently buried under a fallen tower of boxes, left an impression on me. She wasn’t the only one in the family with these tendencies, either.
Now, as an adult, I know any number of things could have caused it. Maybe it was struggles before and after the family immigrated, or undiagnosed mental health issues, a little of both or something else. Back then, though, I just thought her house was a strange place, terrible and wonderful, hiding mysteries I’d never even know about, much less solve.
Now, as an adult, I’ve got a little of it myself. “Maybe I’ll need those critiques from short story workshop five years ago,” I muse, cleaning my office. I don’t, of course. I’ve been working to get better at emptying boxes. At throwing things away. But that’s in physical space; in virtual worlds, depending on storage limitations, I can save as much as I want.
I’ve written before about my penchant for stealing in games. Nothing I can take is safe. But I don’t often talk about my inability to toss things out. I’m forever juggling inventory, chewing my lip, thinking about what I can get rid of. Yeah, I know I’ll never need that fork, but then again….
At times, this has been dangerous; when I played Final Fantasy XI, years ago, I had the maximum number of alts on my main character, and when they filled up, I took on a second account. My desk at home looks like a tornado made of books came through, but those alts were meticulously organized, and I hated tossing anything away. “It might be useful,” I’d tell friends. “You know how they change things.” But it was an excuse. I know that some things aren’t worth the possibility of what if, and yet it’s still hard to throw them away.
I’m languishing right now in my Metal Gear Solid V game, because I too often use my limited play opportunities to go hunt down materials containers. I don’t need them, or vehicles, or anything else — I am in no danger of running out ever, I think, and could probably sail through to the end of the game on what I have, minus funds for some of the final development projects — but I get so much satisfaction of shipping stolen goods back home to base, and more from opening the menu and looking at the numbers. What do my biological materials actually look like? No idea, but I have tens and tens of thousands. Building something? Oh no, have to go farm up 40,000 more, just so I feel okay about things.
I share my Destiny account with my partner, because he accidentally started on my gamertag and didn’t want to start over, and that accident has been a boon. I dump so much into the bank and he meticulously cleans it out. Out in the field, I strip things down with abandon, knowing I’m reaping materials, but once I’m near a bank, for some reason I just can’t let go.
It’s so hard to finish RPGs. I spend all my time stealing and collecting and then I’m just too tired (and too over-leveled) to go on.
We’re moving this summer and I’m cataloguing the things left behind in my old office, now the spare room, that didn’t make the journey to my new office, across the house. Five bottles of nail polish. Why are they in there? I don’t know. A sock, far under the desk. Three boxes of staples I could have consolidated. Notebooks, half-filled, some not even half, mostly garbage, but what if I suddenly need those notes? Four flash drives, all empty. My old Fitbit (it’s broken). Baby shoes my daughter has outgrown.
Every time I think of sweeping it all into the trash. I feel panicky. What if I need that stuff? And isn’t it wasteful? I’ll sell the extra things on eBay, I tell myself. Eventually. When I have spare time (that’s never).
We’ve been working on a system. Anything that’s been in storage in the basement or in the spare room for over a year? The box gets checked (not by me, since I struggle to let go) and if there’s nothing in there worth keeping, the contents are taken away to the trash, or they become donations. In this way, we’re slowly clearing things out, and I don’t have to see it happen. I play the same three missions again in Metal Gear to collect things I don’t need. I retag videos in Her Story, even though I’ve played through it all and have no need to tags. I restart Skyrim and become a real estate mogul just so I can store more things.
I don’t even like Skyrim. But there’s something calming about the act of collecting, of moving locust-like through an area and taking everything I can, of decorating when possible and of throwing junk into a basement corner. I can be messy here. I can keep it all. Here, I don’t have to cope or seek strategies; I can just hunt and collect and store. I don’t know if it’s healthy. It’s certainly not the “point” of the game in any standard sense. But sometimes, after all a long day, all I really wanna do is steal a bunch of virtual junk, and who knows? Maybe now that I’ve begun to realize and admit these habits, that’s helping me clear out my non-virtual home before I start creating my own makeshift walls of books.
