Board games are what I'm familiar with.
I've been into the hobby for a few years now and it's been rather baffling to watch how many others engage with the hobby.
For quite a few people, they'll have ENORMOUS collections of board games. I'm talking like 500+ different games. Just think about that for a second. Think of how many that REALLY is.
And these arent the old simplistic mass-market Hasbro games you'd find in stores either. Modern board games are wildly different and in many cases drastically more complicated. But whether it's a complex one, or a simpler one that's quicker to learn, you still gotta go through the rules and make sure you (and anyone you play with) understands them. And then there's the length of playtime. Could be like 20 minutes. Or it could be like 3 hours. It depends. So, when you consider that along with the sheer size of some people's collections, well... how much use are they getting out of each individual game?
There's also the matter of content. A co-op game might be like "hey there's 12 different bosses you can fight and there's a campaign mode!" But some will buy a game like that, get super excited about it, play it like twice, decide it's amazing, and then OOPS, The New Hotness (next game) just arrived in the mail, lets put this one that is soooooo amazing onto the shelf and never touch it again.
And that's how it goes. Buy a game, play it, love it, but they just NEED that new shiny one. They need it. They saw the reviews of it and wow it looks so amazing... nevermind the last 400 times they said that and then put the things on the shelf of eternity after 1 or 2 plays.
I should note also that modern board games are EXPENSIVE. This is not a cheap hobby. It's not uncommon to pay over $100 for one, particularly if you're grabbing a game that has a bunch of expansions and you decide you want to get the whole thing at once. Or there's Kickstarters, and if you're familiar with Kickstarter at all, you probably dont even need an explanation of what that does to both price and hype.
But it's the content thing that really gets me. What's the point of being like "oh gee look how many different characters and scenarios there are" or whatever type of content it is, if you're only going to engage with 10% of what's there before shelving it forever? This is even stupider with expansions. You have Game X, which when new you did the "play twice and shelve" thing, but when a shiny new expansion for it comes out, you GOTTA have that, despite the fact that you didnt even engage with all of the content that already is there? And then inevitably that sort of player still wont use all of it. Because that's just another part of the Buy New Shiny Thing cycle.
I am happy to be able to say that I dont do that. Oh dont get me wrong; I've done my big purchases. Like my two favorite games, Aeon's End and Final Girl, both have had hundreds of dollars thrown at them (because both have A LOT of expansions). But I buy into those knowing that I'm going to keep coming back to them again and again. The purchases were actually thought out, because if I'm going to pay a couple of hundred for something, I bloody well better be REALLY getting value out of it, or what's the point? And indeed I've played those two games a heck of a lot (seriously they're great).
My overall collection after about 4 years in the hobby is only enough to fill a single Kallax shelving unit, and even that's only because I set them in there so awkwardly. I'd rather have a smaller number of extremely replayable games to explore and master, instead of having like 1000 games that each get played once.
And... yeah I just have a lot of trouble understanding why others would buy so many things and get little use out of any of them. Particularly with a hobby as expensive (and expansive) as this one.
That's just board games. I could also rant for awhile about the concept as it applies to video games, but... I'll save you the 10+ pages of that rant.
, I have a number of attachments in my dremel kit.
