Bundles aren't that different from other gaming deals, except that they give you more than one game, and some of these games you may not be interested in. In my experience it usually ends up cheaper to buy games I want in bundles than on sales. Clutter the library? To an extent, but as you say, it's possible to give away games that you don't really want, so that's not a huge problem.

The problem is mainly buying things you don't intend to play soon just because they're cheap. Which is a problem for sales too. Should I buy Fallout New Vegas for $2? No, because I won't get to it any time soon. Yet that kind of deal is always enticing.

I realized something: It's futile trying to actively shove the desire to buy games to the back of your mind, subconscious primal repression might work to protect your mind but if you actively repress and you know it's there, it will only resurface with vengeance.
So I've decided not to avoid looking or thinking about sales, even the most tempting ones. I look at them calmly and then honestly ask myself, do I need this? The answer is always no, because I have plenty of games already, no shortage whatsoever. Then I ask why do I want this? Eventually, I realize that it's not these sales that are the problem, the problem is inside me and it won't go away even if I by game number 284573897.
By buying game number 284573897, the brain will be flooded with some positive hormones that shortly reduce stress. They do not however remove the root cause, so the logical course of action is to work on the root causes of stress instead.
Buying games = stress reduction? Well, not for everyone obviously but if someone keeps buying games despite having plenty and wanting to stop, then they are obviously buying games for other reasons. It could also be prehistoric gathering instinct, a subconscious fear that one might run out of games and go hungry and starve but that's too convenient an explanation and not helping.
Anyway, this conclusion is helping me to resist buying games now, I haven't relapsed for over one month now. It's not really a progress because I haven't worked much on eliminating the root causes but at least my wallet is safe, so that's a good thing!



Backlog reduction to zero is quite extreme, I must say! You'd likely be the first around here, at least among those with a collection of several hundred games.
I've thought about it too but I think something along the lines of "finish 10 games and then buy 1 game" which was suggested earlier in this thread is more reasonable and likely to be successful in execution.


Discovering a game you wouldn't have otherwise played is an incentive to buy bundles, sounds a bit like gambling.


Ha, I can subscribe to every word here! The game I want is always in the higher or highest tiers. I've thought about buying bundles for giveaways but I'm a bit reluctant to make unwanted code giveaways because I usually only make giveaways for games I like.

I don't think that's it. Far as I understand it in my case, it's an alternate aspect of the games hobby. Hobbies have aspects other than the specific things you do in them. For example, whether you're gaming or woodworking, you're likely to engage in studying the subject and to want to discuss it with others.

So even though I don't game a lot, I go to some gaming related forums, and I enjoy learning about new games. One of the ways I learn about new games is via bundles. I look at the games and their descriptions and look for reviews if the game looks interesting. And if a game looks like something I'd enjoy, then the next natural step in wanting to find out more about it is to buy it.

Of course in practice I will in most cases not get to play, which is the problem, and here there's a need for a practical side to get in the way of buying, but the idea itself, buying to experience what I've already learned about and think is neat, is the next natural step.

It's not that specific to games, either. The main difference between games and other hobbies is that games can be bought for an extremely cheap price. If I could buy five new graphics cards for a dollar then I can tell you that I would do it just out of the thought that I'll be able to compare them, because I'm also a hardware enthusiast. Digital games also don't take shelf space, so while I might not have bought 100 graphics cards even if they cost 20 cents each because I won't have space for them, that's not a problem for games.

I'm not sure in what way it's like gambling. I mean, any more than buying anything you're not already familiar with is gambling.

Gaming can definitely be a hobby in its own right or even a profession, I certainly agree. There is a huge skill gap between a random punk on Battle.net and a professional Starcraft player so one can say skill is quite measurable in this activity, maybe not with every game but certainly with those that are being used for competition.The skill gap is comparable to things like woodworking where one person can barely manage to carve an Edelweiss flower and another person makes an entire crib of Christ with the stable and all the animals in astonishing detail in the same time. I also agree that games can make you go and study a specific subject such as the crusades, most people will just go and sift through a couple Wikipedia pages and call that research while others will go to museums, try out a longsword instruction class and visit crusader castles in real life and so on. I belong to the second group but my motivation doesn't come from games, on the contrary if I'm playing a game about crusades that's because I'm already interested in the subject and have already spent countless hours in museums, reading books and crawling around real castles. And if I play a pirate game then that's because I already spent years playing with Playmobil and Lego pirates and maneuvered wooden rafts around a playground pond in my hometown. It's very rare that games introduce me to a subject.

Personally, I don't regard gaming as one of my hobbies as I'd feel that would devalue other things I do where I make or do something that I consider has value, whereas when I play games it's pure delectation and pastime with nothing to show for.
Occasionally, I feel that maybe some puzzle games have the potential of making people smarter but I don't feel the increased skill for that has any notable effect on anything outside of gaming. It's the same with reflexes. The reflexes one supposedly trains in games I find quite useless in RL, completely different without overlap of any kind. I haven't played any Wii or Kinect games though so I can't make any judgement about that but traditional gaming seems to have little to no benefits on things other than gaming whereas other hobbies I entertain do improve skills and attributes for other things in RL.

Gaming is indeed one of the most compact hobbies you can have especially if you use a laptop. It's also quite a cheap hobby as long as you stay in the low end sector. I used to spend the biggest portion of my entire savings on hardware and games back when I wanted to have the newest games, now I could keep expenses down to a bare minimum if I would shop smarter. Thing is, I didn't shop very smartly and spent too much so I had to stop doing that entirely for the moment.
On the other hand I'm glad that I bought so many games because even if I should end up being poor for a while, I won't run out of stuff to play. No risk whatsoever.

Gambling sounds a bit extreme and yes, anything you buy without knowing (="cat inside the bag") is technically gambling. Buying eggs without opening the carton to see if any eggs are broken is also gambling.
I consider all my spontaneous and non-wishlist purchases as gambling and even some of the wishlisted ones if I wasn't familiar with the game. Sometimes, I lose and one example is Cossacks. I didn't know the units don't speak when you click on them and that the game has no mojo cool factor, no soul. The difficulty doesn't disturb me but I need mojo factor to feel motivated or else it becomes work and I abandon the game.

Wikipedia defines hobby as "a regular activity that is done for pleasure, typically during one's leisure time." Merriam-Webster defines it as "a pursuit outside one's regular occupation engaged in especially for relaxation".

So I think that gaming fits the bill.

According to that particular definition, gaming isn't a hobby for me because I don't do it regularly. Also, I personally make a difference between pastimes and hobbies in that pastimes don't need to result in anything of value whereas hobbies do. That's my subjective definition as applied to myself which is stated clearly, I didn't say I'm taking over the world and declaring gaming a non-hobby for everyone. Even if that was my evil master plan, I wouldn't casually announce that while I'm still poor and not in charge but I'd wait until I had the power. Then again, I wouldn't do such a thing because I actually value freedom where it doesn't impede on someone else's freedom. So go ahead and freely enjoy your hobby, and I'll enjoy my pastime!

I consider them more like a calculated risk. That's true for pretty much all games except those I already played. For bundle games it's also not much of a risk. Spent $1 on a bundle, enjoyed its games for an hour or two, that's good enough value for me. Even if I didn't like a game, it was still a learning experience, I still go to experience that game and form an opinion. That's worth a bit of money (not much, but we're not talking about much in the first place).
That's okay, we all have our little definitions. By this definition I don't really have any hobbies now, and probably never had many. Karate, dancing, gaming, none of them really produce anything of value.

I can subscribe to that. For example, I never finished Anno 1503 but I still consider it worth the price I paid. Plus it filled the gaps in my total gamedom knowledge - a perhaps useless skill because it can only be applied in debates in places like this forum and I find debates increasingly pointless as people never convert from their stance to mine, they only end up resenting me even if I have a reasonably stated case and more than enough arguments on my side. So in the end knowledge seems mostly useful to enjoy it for its own sake and for your own enlightenment which is fine but it could do so much more. Unfortunately, people react more to manipulation than to knowledge, spitting the latter out like kids react to spinach.

I most strongly (but non violently) disagree, oy vavoy big time!

Karate produces/improves: Reflexes, flexibility, strength, endurance, resilience, increases confidence and reduces ego (under the right circumstances), desire to annihilate enemy turds (under the wrong circumstances), pain threshold on thighs, shins, arms, abdomen.

Dancing produces/improves: Depending on style, most of the above (minus pain threshold unless it's a really crazy style) plus an increased bonus on "non-verbal attraction of healthy females/males for purposes of mating"

Gaming: increases desire to buy more games -> increases backlog -> increases pizza expenses -> decreases confidence and increases ego -> increases fits of rage -> SUFFERING!

All 3 can increase happiness by releasing happiness hormones but I'm not really getting that from games, just peacefully and willfully wasting some time for me with some minor fits of rage here and there that I don't get from proper hobbies but that's entirely subjective.

These either don't work on me or only delay the inevitable, e.g. waiting for sales. One aspect of game purchasing addiction is that you'll wait for sales but because there are so many sales there always seems to be something you want on sale somewhere and that resulted in me buying more than one game every 2 days for an entire year. As for not buying stuff I'll never play, here I just bluff myself by saying "oh I'll get around to it, this will increase my total gaming experience and (useless) total game knowledge"

Haha! I'd like to claim this doesn't work but I haven't bought Fez yet so maybe I'm subconsciously buying into the whole Pescaphobia. Which makes me sad because I forbid myself from shunning anyone without grave reason and I don't really know all the details about the whole controversy and if the game is good then I don't see how the flawed character of the developer is any factor in the equation of buying vs not buying. He looks like a turd though, but then again that's not a justifiable reason not to buy, either. Anyway, first I need to finish Braid and then I'll see if I feel like more platformers, it's not my genre of comfort so I only want the "must have" stuff, though I did get pleasantly surprised by Chronology which is a cute game in its own right and absolutely worth its new price tag imho.

Ah, the infamous veggie thread. I know you meant well, but the thread was ultimately sacrificed to the eternal Flame God :O

Ha, reminds me of when I only had the Shareware version of Shadow Warrior and played the living crap out of that, same for a variety of DOS games (Raptor Call of the Shadows etc etc)

Anyway, the only method that works for me is "don't buy anything and if you relapse, make a giveaway for every game you relapse with". That, and calibrating my internal yin yang. Oh, and having no more money helps most of all, almost forgot that one.

I guess we have a significantly different view on things. I feel that just because something is "good for you" doesn't automatically make it into a hobby. I mean, I could eat vegetables in my spare time and it's not what would make it a hobby.

(You talked about "producing something", and getting benefits from it doesn't actually mean that to me, but I figured I'd switch to what I feel is your meaning and discuss that.)

I'd also argue about the benefits of gaming compared to the rest. Games have a lot of benefits, depending on the game, from reflexes to tactical thinking to language learning. Whether that's more beneficial than what other hobbies provide depends on the person. I personally don't see gaming's benefits as inferior to karate, and I have a very rational friend who left a martial arts class arguing that he gets hit there more than he'd ever get hit in his life outside it, so certainly there are different outlooks on everything.

If I was to draw a line between hobby and pastime, I think it would depend on the breadth of activities I do which related to the hobby. For example if I watched TV several hours a day, that's a pastime, but if I also read about the series I watch, went to TV forums to discuss the shows, bought magazines about TV, then I would consider it a hobby.

I think so too. Arguments aren't typically about knowledge anyway, they're about perception of reality. While knowledge can help convince that a particular world view is more likely or less, it's rarely enough.

I think that I need to turn this group into "stop buying stuff you'll unlikely to ever use" group, instead of just being about games.

I didn't buy a game in the past 3 weeks, and that's good (even resisted a neat looking Android game and a language learning game at Humble bundles, both of which hold some attraction). Still, during that time I bought two e-book bundles and an RPG bundle.

The RPG bundle was useful; I bought it for research, skimmed it, got something from it, and it spurred me to do some planning and further research. Might end up doing something (although I'm a lot better at planning and research than actually doing stuff). So even though it was the most expensive of the bundles and I will likely never play that, I consider it money well spent.

The e-book bundles though, they're just added to my e-book backlog.

Intelligence is needed to use knowledge and wisdom is needed to use it in a beneficial way.

Great suggestion! Indeed, I used to have the same problem with other things. When walking through the do it yourself section of the supermarket, I have often bought random stuff like boxes and containers etc because I thought "I'll find a use for this for sure" rather than having a clear idea of what I needed beforehand. Sort of the opposite approach of Tesla.
Since starting this thread, I've made far less needless purchases in RL but that's because I have no money to spare anyway so it's mostly a correlation probably.

Btw, this group is an amalgamation of all its members/contributors so you can shape it into anything you like. The only rule is that there are no rules which is not meant to be a comical oxymoron but meaning that nothing shall be legislated, all is voluntary and for each person to decide for themselves - which means everyone is responsible for their own decisions.
If for example someone develops serious withdrawal symptoms and ends up running around the streets naked with their wishlist tattooed all over their body, then that's -not- this group's responsibility.

I was about to call you out on the "useful and for research" part but I see that you're already sufficiently self-aware :)

I'm much better at starting stuff than finishing and much better at researching than starting stuff.
Fortunately, I sometimes have the sense to realize when I'm about to do endless planning and have learned to just get started before I get entrapped in research entirely. I keep forgetting this and have to remember it anew but the goal is not to never forget but to remember more quickly.
On my travels I've learned that too much planning is rigidity and plans can therefor break like a twig. It's much better to level up flexibility because that is useful in almost 100% of all situations whereas good planning has a much lower success rate. Flexibility doesn't mean chaos and lack of research though, just means that one isn't empty-handed when plans A through C fail and there is no plan D.


EDIT: Oh shit, Insomnia is up and running...my great nenemis, the ultimate test to my powers of will!

It's certainly not our responsibility, but it's our responsibility to get pictures!

In this case I think it ended up very practical research and design, so far. Not that I got to the actual doing, but it gave me a new focus and something that I think I can achieve without a lot of work (part of the research was how to do it without too much work). I hope that I will get to the doing sometimes soon, although I won't take a bet on that.

I'm a pics or it didn't happen person (unless legally self-incriminating), I think it's especially important on the internet where the shitforce is often very strong!

Figuring out easier more efficient ways to do more with less can be a tricky thing, I have strong suspicions that in many cases I might have achieved more by simple grinding instead - within a given time frame. At least on the short run. On the long run, having efficiency increasing approaches to rely on can be a clear advantage but there is a certain danger one could become dependent on efficient minimalism and as a consequence less capable of the simple grind - which stays the main staple and is hard work regardless of level. Even at the higher levels, grind can never be taken out of the equation. Maybe it's possible, but looking at a wide array of fields over the times and ages I see no clear evidence of it anywhere so I remain suspicious whenever I go into research mode with the aim of cutting corners. "Work smart, not hard" is an intelligent but dangerous thing to say because all the worthy results I can see across the fields I find interesting are first and foremost the results of hard work and lots and lots of simple grind, no exceptions.
And yet, I'm still searching for magic formulas and shortcuts, not because I'm lazy but I'm trying to make the best of limitations - others may have more stamina for grinding but if I could figure out a way around the grind, I could catch up with someone who is well ahead. Sounds a bit like folding space via Spice Melange or some such.

So I'm in absolutely no position to stop you but it sounds like you're well aware of the dangers. Let me know if you ever find your Arrakis!