Moving is always a bitch; the chaos of packing, the chore of unpacking, the inevitable search for some lost item for weeks to come, only to give up and find it again five years later when you no longer care. But most amazing of all is the amount of ‘Valuables’ found during the course of packing that no longer holds the same sentiments as they once did when I first acquired them. Stacks of Preview CDs, a Spawn figure with a broken (and now permanently lost) leg that I had a mind glue back together some eons ago, a bottle of amazing chilli (Dave’s Ultimate Insanity Sauce) that had already expired; these are but a fraction of my treasures that have accumulated over the years, treasures that now face the scales of reason.

Should I pack them, adding further to my nightmare of boxes, more likely that not to be its final resting place never to be unpacked at the back of some store room, or should I just junk them, and start my collection afresh with new baubles that catch my eye? You wouldn’t believe how many things I ended up junking, and why I had initially thought they were prized personal artifacts.

Our recent relocation exercise made me reflect on the side of gamers…nay, all humanity that transcends real life into the realm of digital pixels – our love of hoarding.

Take this simple RPG scenario: By luck of the dice roll, you loot an awesome quiver of +25 vs Evil arrows, sure of yourself as tomorrow will be a new day that you’ll use on the next boss. Except, you never did use it, finding that the boss was easier to kill than expected, and you hold on to your arrows for the next encounter that will surely be more difficult that the last one. And so on, you play through the game, ultimately finding out that you never let fly a single shaft, or soon find out that they’ve been supplanted by your fresh discovery of +50 vs Evil arrows, whereby the same cycle continues. You probably cannot remember the last time this happened to you because it is a subconscious effort and there never was a Last time – it happens All the time.

Be it FPS, Action or RPG, any game that has an inventory system and items sees the same. During my days of Doom, it was BFG 9K charges. Today, it is ores, gems, leathers, cloth and consumables in World of Warcraft. Should I sell my Righteous Orbs for a tidy sum, or keep them to level Enchanting and selling Crusaders, or to make an Arcanite Champion for my next Alt? The decision was obviously to Keep them, since money can be made other ways, Righteous Orbs on the other hand do not drop from trees. Burning Crusade then came, dropping the price to a tenth of what they once were, and I still hadn’t used them. The new expansion brought me Spellcloth and Shadowcloth which I kept to eventually make Sunwell recipes like the Sunfire Robe. Alas, again, I never saw the drop, and all my cloth now goes to waste as Wrath rolled out the door. Still, have I learned from nearly two decades of gaming? Not at all.

I’m now hoarding Titansteel bars for my Mechano Hog, among other things I need to make in the future for me and my, oh, six or so Alts. In the end, what’s another few thousand gold in trinkets if you will never spend them in the first place.

The point I’m trying to make is not to uncover any nefarious plans by the developers to subliminally push us down this path, nor is it to understand our need to hoard. I’m not even trying to justify whether you should or should not hoard, or talk about the efficiency of gameplay. I’m already resigned to the fact that this is our nature.

My question then is simply to ask you, fellow gamers, what do you hoard?

Zachary Chan
Editor, GameAxis