I had a lil booth in a weekend market from like 2007-2011 where I sold used video games, mostly focused on retro stuff but kept some modern at the time stuff around to keep things flowing. You’d be surprised how many people actually do want older copies of sports games and casually buy them for like ten bucks. It was pretty nice by the time Obama was in office and we had some lil crt TV’s around the booth with a few consoles hooked up so people could test games to be sure things were legit but also just having every system ever hooked up to a few tvs and them being available to play a really good selection of games (there was some expensive shit that couldn’t be played by people who weren’t gonna buy and didnt put down a deposit before testing of course). It was really fun until about the 2md half of 2010, beforehand our biggest priority was guessing what AVGN would cover and getting ahead of that and it increasingly became dealing with awful people. I was the co-star of this operation tbh, my partner at the time who is a woman was the one really rocking it as far as being there running it, I spent most of the weekends the market wss open going to yard sales and cheaper flea markets and pawn shops that sold drugs looking to fence games where they could be sold and especially rental stores closing down who were selling stock in bulk. I was the buy guy. Having a woman as kinda the face made other women comfortable at first and led to a decent amount of women, families etc coming up and checking out cool retro shit that we were there to get people into. But there was just like…a point that even our regular nerds who had been fine got ficking weird. Retro collecting started getting super huge and just fucking up our game and we had also pretty much dried the well locally for cheap ways to get retro games but the people who were coming by to play the games at the booth was also changing and it wasnt fun. Selling an NES with Mario Bros/duck hunt to a mom who remembers it and had a quick try with her 5 year old and seeing the kid light up for like $50 is what we were there to do, not furnish some creepy nerd’s collection. We were furnishing our own collection, thank you
I think the biggest difference migjt have been that the weirdos stopped being low key about it. Cause we got shitty new people but they were friends of long time customers who seemed to be influences in previously cool enough guys. My partner at the time’s family was more a bush than a tree and was very hippie oriented and had a lot of the kind of people who played dnd before 2e, math degree hippies who could game out a living with poker instead of working snd did so even though it seemed way worse of a time. My partner’s uncle who I was living with had basically an open house with a pound of weed and a giant pile of board games and just liked hosting that kinda stuff. It was an open house in thar regard. The way nerds used to operste and do now is so different. We used to play the 0th school of DND, open table, and it was soooo fun. Its like this:
It’s ‘nerd-shit’ turning from what was usually an interplay between the hobbyist, who played and created for fun and community, and the professional, a hobbyist who had somehow parlayed creation into a living, to the interplay between the company, who is only interested in turning a profit and will actively harm a community by exclusively targeting the desires of it’s wealthy members, if it means generating more profit, and the consumer, who does not create but simply consumes and collects for their own individual satisfaction whatever that may entail.
Streamers and critics, are, btw, not hobbyists, they are professional consumers, those who are paid to consume product, the most toxic aspect of the dialectic, as they simultaneously have the loudest and most present voice in the industry, but represent the least amount and most privileged of people. Critics can be useful, but a critic should ideally also be actively engaged in the art of creation to some degree, or at least done so in the past. That doesn’t mean what they created has to be good or groundbreaking, it just means that they themselves understand what it means to create and not simply consume. An excellent critic can often elevate the criticism itself into a form of creation, but that is a rare talent indeed.
I had a lil booth in a weekend market from like 2007-2011 where I sold used video games, mostly focused on retro stuff but kept some modern at the time stuff around to keep things flowing. You’d be surprised how many people actually do want older copies of sports games and casually buy them for like ten bucks. It was pretty nice by the time Obama was in office and we had some lil crt TV’s around the booth with a few consoles hooked up so people could test games to be sure things were legit but also just having every system ever hooked up to a few tvs and them being available to play a really good selection of games (there was some expensive shit that couldn’t be played by people who weren’t gonna buy and didnt put down a deposit before testing of course). It was really fun until about the 2md half of 2010, beforehand our biggest priority was guessing what AVGN would cover and getting ahead of that and it increasingly became dealing with awful people. I was the co-star of this operation tbh, my partner at the time who is a woman was the one really rocking it as far as being there running it, I spent most of the weekends the market wss open going to yard sales and cheaper flea markets and pawn shops that sold drugs looking to fence games where they could be sold and especially rental stores closing down who were selling stock in bulk. I was the buy guy. Having a woman as kinda the face made other women comfortable at first and led to a decent amount of women, families etc coming up and checking out cool retro shit that we were there to get people into. But there was just like…a point that even our regular nerds who had been fine got ficking weird. Retro collecting started getting super huge and just fucking up our game and we had also pretty much dried the well locally for cheap ways to get retro games but the people who were coming by to play the games at the booth was also changing and it wasnt fun. Selling an NES with Mario Bros/duck hunt to a mom who remembers it and had a quick try with her 5 year old and seeing the kid light up for like $50 is what we were there to do, not furnish some creepy nerd’s collection. We were furnishing our own collection, thank you
That is really interesting
I think the biggest difference migjt have been that the weirdos stopped being low key about it. Cause we got shitty new people but they were friends of long time customers who seemed to be influences in previously cool enough guys. My partner at the time’s family was more a bush than a tree and was very hippie oriented and had a lot of the kind of people who played dnd before 2e, math degree hippies who could game out a living with poker instead of working snd did so even though it seemed way worse of a time. My partner’s uncle who I was living with had basically an open house with a pound of weed and a giant pile of board games and just liked hosting that kinda stuff. It was an open house in thar regard. The way nerds used to operste and do now is so different. We used to play the 0th school of DND, open table, and it was soooo fun. Its like this:
https://youtu.be/slBsxmHs070
Nerd shit used to be a social thing
It’s ‘nerd-shit’ turning from what was usually an interplay between the hobbyist, who played and created for fun and community, and the professional, a hobbyist who had somehow parlayed creation into a living, to the interplay between the company, who is only interested in turning a profit and will actively harm a community by exclusively targeting the desires of it’s wealthy members, if it means generating more profit, and the consumer, who does not create but simply consumes and collects for their own individual satisfaction whatever that may entail.
Streamers and critics, are, btw, not hobbyists, they are professional consumers, those who are paid to consume product, the most toxic aspect of the dialectic, as they simultaneously have the loudest and most present voice in the industry, but represent the least amount and most privileged of people. Critics can be useful, but a critic should ideally also be actively engaged in the art of creation to some degree, or at least done so in the past. That doesn’t mean what they created has to be good or groundbreaking, it just means that they themselves understand what it means to create and not simply consume. An excellent critic can often elevate the criticism itself into a form of creation, but that is a rare talent indeed.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy: