[slumberdisrupt]

Wow, gross people?! Is collecting that perverse of an activity? OK, yes it is, but so is playing video games in general and enjoying retro games "correctly" in particular. Emulation is a "blessing"! Weird and vaguely competitive.

[chucky_z]

Yes. This scalping community is gross. It's not about collecting it's about scalping, let's all be blunt and clear here.

If someone is excited about sharing something that's completing some part of their collection I think everyone is totally fine with that, it's something they're passionate about!

If it's "I found this thing for cheap and I'm going to charge someone hundreds of dollars because they have no other choice," then do it in something other than a hobby space; don't brag about that. Bragging about scalping makes you an asshole.

Emulation enables hobbyists to play games they otherwise can't find -- or much more commonly, can't afford.

[slumberdisrupt]

Actually, right, but it's not about the hobby of gaming in its ideal form (playing the game software). It really is about "scalping" (oof! so much for the entrepreneurial spirit and the sanctity of buying cheap and selling dear) and collecting or some other passionate hobby. What is this other passionate hobby? Emulation actually makes playing games so easy and accessible that the perverse nature of playing them "correctly" (with original hardware) is completely exposed. These perverted game hobbyists insist on the "correct" experience: I want to hold that dusty, magnificent copy of Pokemon Stadium 2 in mine own hands, to smell the corroding copper contacts on its PCB edge, to snap the power switch upwards, to see the dull red oval light up... but alas, I must emulate.

Really, every one of these occupations is gross. Even gaming "ideally" as the poor sap relegated to emulation does is a perversion. And let's not forget those digital collectors. Who reading this thread doesn't have an organized stash of ROM files on their external drive?

Back to the scalper: what actually separates him from the collector? That he fetishizes the money form over the commodity form? In objective terms, the money form really is the purer and cleaner one; it's the commodity form that is marred and gross. Although:

> Whenever there is a general and extensive disturbance of this mechanism, no matter what its cause, money becomes suddenly and immediately transformed, from its merely ideal shape of money of account, into hard cash. Profane commodities can no longer replace it. The use-value of commodities becomes valueless, and their value vanishes in the presence of its own independent form. On the eve of the crisis, the bourgeois, with the self-sufficiency that springs from intoxicating prosperity, declares money to be a vain imagination. Commodities alone are money. But now the cry is everywhere: money alone is a commodity! As the hart pants after fresh water, so pants his soul after money, the only wealth.

But none of this matters if you want to stay constrained to some narrow set of nerdy interests. After all is said and done, don't let me "yuck your yum"! So yummy, that corroding PCB smell, those shallow vertical bevels in the gray plastic, that soft crackle of the compressed music of the Nintendo 64... who am I to take that from you? I am no "scalper"!