Man, going through the process of eliminating a bunch of stuff because of a move has deflated my desire to buy, well, anything. Seeing all the stuff that has ended up in boxes or on shelves, untouched in literal decades, makes me wonder why I spent all that money in the first place.
I can understand this sentiment, but speaking personally, it's one that I've worked hard to unlearn over the years.
Nassim Taleb, author of
The Black Swan (which I'm
currently re-reading), uses the term
antilibrary throughout the book, positing that "read books have far less value than unread ones" (where "value" means personal value, rather than economic) with regard to how we think about knowledge (something which always reminds me of Lao Tzu saying that a bowl is most useful when it's empty).
I really should start a thread about this, but for now I'll simply say that there's value in the concept of a "gamer's antilibrary," which is all the gaming books that we own but haven't used in play. Similar to how Umberto Eco
once said that "Those who love books know that a book is anything but a commodity," I'd say that those who love gaming know that game books are anything but a commodity. While cost and space remain very real concerns, there's absolutely value in those books which sit on your shelves and never get used.
I mentioned in
another thread that tabletop games have more
potentiality than virtually any other medium, in that gamers are inspired not just by what their campaigns are, but by what they
could be. You might not ever have used that sourcebook on deserts, but you could have, if the players had made different decisions, if a different mood had struck you, or even if the dice had rolled a certain way. The value of those books is, as Eco said of all unread books, akin to having medicine in your cabinet even if you don't need it, except instead of solving a problem this "medicine" opens up an entirely new avenue of imagination, inspiration, and entertainment. The potentiality of that is something that I think all of us gamers, on some level, are aware of. It's why game books are a siren song that keeps luring us back in, regardless of banal questions of practicality.
My gamer's antilibrary is somewhere on the order of two thousand books, magazine issues, boxed sets, and other gaming materials, most of which I've never used and probably never will, but that doesn't detract from its value. It just has a different
kind of value, which I personally hold in very high regard.
)
