I miss convention bring-and-buys.
I don’t like NFTs.
I really am bummed out, as I sit here thinking about it, by the negative stigma surrounding regifting.
And I like being able to make stuff.
Look, let’s unwrap this.
The convention-floor bring-and-buy is a staple of two cons here in reach to me: the Cancon Bring and Buy and the MOAB Bring and Buy. These are very simple shopping events, in principle: You bring games or game-adjacent stuff that other geeks might want to the event, you put a price on them, and anyone who wants can buy them. The stall collects a fee. It’s a garage sale where you don’t need to bring the garage and the scope of the whole event means people are often willing to offer some low prices on good things and you can find the specialised interest in some specialised goods. I don’t need thirty T’au fire warriors and a 5th edition rulebook, but someone does, and that someone is likely to be at that event. Plus there’s a tier of Get This Out Of My House pricing, which I will admit, I use a lot.
Thse are in my opinion great events because second hand games are great. It’s a game, but in exchange for a significant mark down from its retail price, you get the game largely intact and you get to continue a chain of enjoyment. I’ve sometimes heard people phrase reselling games as ‘fooling’ people into buying games that they didn’t like, or that there’s something sad or embarrassing about passing on a game after only one or two (or even no plays). This always feels like being self-defeating, like maintaining a cop in your head. Capitalism convinced you to spend the money on this thing at first, but keeping it in your house and life is not necessarily going to be free – and holding onto a game indefinitely even if you think you don’t want it or you’d like the money better is just a way to make yourself feel bad about things you’re not doing and probably can’t for a reason.
Know what I like even better than second hand games? I like regifting games. I like when I play a game with someone and they like it a lot, being able to say ‘you know what? You like this a lot. You keep it.’ That’s why my mother has a copy of Lanterns and a copy of Patchwork because those are games she loved so much playing them that I didn’t take them home with me. I can do that with those games, I don’t need to arrange some sort of downloading save arrangment, and giving her access to them doesn’t involve giving up access to other, unrelated games.
There’s this conversation about ownership signifiers in the gaming space recently because of NFTs, a technology existing so blatantly in the overlapping venn regions of harmful, incompetent, and evil, that I don’t even feel I need to explain why and how I dislike them, and dismissing them and the people who love them is the way I introduce the subject. An idea that NFT fans, the ones who think that the technology has some useful application to games, like to espouse, is a tech that would let you have ownership of components of a game.
This exists, kinda.
See, games I own, physical games I own, I have ownership over the physical components. They do not need some centralised authority to work. No server to check. They are my games. I can mod them or I can dismantle them or I can upgrade them, because the thing that runs the game and makes them function is not an app or a server or some third party thing that can disappear and make the NFT useless, it’s me. Ownership of the game lets me alter the rules of the game on the fly. Ownership of the game components lets me apply them in other games, games that may have no role for those items at all.
The vision of games as having cross-translated pieces is always fanciful in the NFT space – because it imagines an ecosystem of the games as having cross-compatible pieces when those pieces have to negotiate wildly different processors. A human can handle Caracassone where the meeples are trains from Ticket to Ride, but by default, a videogame has nothing inside it that was not explicitly put there. An NFT has to have inside it not just ‘proof of ownership’ but also an infinitely flexible piece of cross-compatible code that can tell every possible game that ever includes it how to encode it into their game space, and what it should do, but that should is going to be tied to the imagination of the person who sets it up, not to its owner.
The limitations of NFTs, which are presented as if they’re new technology, are what happens when you need a computer to interpret them. It’s not about ownership, it’s kinda comically about non-ownership. It’s about the person who made the thing conceiving of every possible application, so it’s more of a really thoroughly designed thing — because going back and changing what NFT smart contracts do is on the blockchain, changing what the NFT can do is either going to need to be in every interpreter (inflating every potential interpreter for every variation on the NFT), or on the NFT itself, and neither is meaningful or viable.
But by comparison, my ownership of the physical board and card games I have mean that I can pass that along. I can transfer it with no oversight.
But part of that is going to be a willingness to regard second-hand games as games, and a big part of that is going to be breaking down some weird social rules. For example: regifting.
My sister-in-law gave me Pandemic Legacy: Season 1 recently. It was her copy. She had gone through it and remade it for the gifting, which means instead of the nicest version of the game, I have instead, a bunch of stickers on a different sheet and some printed out cards. There’s a way to detective with the box components to work out that in fact, these things are likely to happen in this game. By getting a second hand copy, a regifted copy, I’m getting a game that would have otherwise be consigned to trash, and I’m getting to play with it with the effort of someone else having tried to make it anew. Someone who owned it.
I think that gifting people games you’ve played, games you own, is one of the nice things you can do, because you own them. The idea of giving people new things, the idea of giving them untouched things brings with it a sad vision of games that aren’t amazing for you as being somehow bad games, which I don’t like.
Regift games. Accept regifted games. I, personally, would much rather the games I have to find the people who will love them.