I’m not interested in frogs.

That is, I’m not interested in frogs until you give me a green one and a brown one and tell me there are more to collect.

This compulsion to collect things is something that a lot of ordinary geeks have and something that affects almost all of us at some point in our lives.  If you have two of something and there’s a third that’s in the same set, it’s almost impossible not to want it because you feel like the items “belong” together, and that getting two and not the other is somehow like splitting up a family.

In terms of gaming, the desire to get 100% completion of a game can sometimes overwhelm an individual, but this is a slightly different issue:  This is more to complete a collection.  To get a full set.   The confusing question that you will ask yourself shortly after completing a collection is obvious, but only obvious once that condition is triggered:  What happens next?

The answer is most of the time simple and a little distressing:  Nothing.

I’ve collected things in the past and found myself getting twitchy when I realise I’ve inadvertently started collecting something without realising.  Although I put it down to clever branding, the Studio Ghibli DVDs are all of a similar style and numbered along the spines, which makes me twitch a little if I put them next to each other and see all the gaps between them (made increasingly frustrating by the fact that one of them is only a gap because it has a different cover).  With physical collections, it sometimes makes sense.  Something like a collection of DVDs for example do have some sort of inherent usage, assuming you like the content contained on the DVD or like expensive games of Frisbee.

However, we can also find ourselves cultivating and obsessing over little digital collections.  Despite the lack of a tactile element, virtual collections can be incredibly powerful all the same.  This is demonstrated by a modern day example of the browser games people sink hours of time into on Facebook.  Things like Farmville tap into the digital collecting vein and tempt you with more items if you play more (I’m generalising slightly as I’m no longer on Facebook and must confess to never having played Farmville itself, but I’ve played things like it).  Even Facebook itself draws you in on the collecting side of things, only this time you find yourself trying to collect friends, which although sounding vaguely sinister, isn’t far from the truth.  Lots of people try and add friends that they barely know just so they can up their friend count and I would argue this is the exact same compulsion.

I started this post by talking about frogs.  This is because the thing that got me thinking about this is a stupid little game I stuck on my iPad called “Pocket Frogs” from “Nimblebit”.  I downloaded it because they made the oddly compulsive “Dizzypad”, also frog related, and that app suggested that I try it so I obeyed my piece of technology and did what it told me to.  The game is a nicely polished, if not incredibly simple, game where you collect and breed different coloured frogs.  The frogs in question are probably a simple two-framed sprite animation that somehow have enough character to trigger the collecting response in me as they come in an array of different colours and patterns and two-tone combination.  I’ll state it again:  I have no interest in frogs.  I’m not interested in frogs as a result of this game either.  Somehow those two facts did not matter and still made me come back on a regular basis to check if my tadpoles had turned into the colour combinations of frogs that I wanted to flesh out my collection.

I don’t know whether collecting is something general to all human beings or just the game-playing geek-dom that I’m a part of, because you see it in games all the time.  Pokemon is a fantastic example of this.  It’s a very simple and basic Japanese style menu-based RPG game with limited combat options, but with the twist that your party is made up of creatures that you hunt down and tame in the wild.  This game also encourages you to train and invest extra time in your collection to get the most out of them and allow you to customise them.

Now outside of games that have the marketing equivalent of a targeted tactical nuke, the idea of collecting and building a team comes up all the time.  In two recent examples I’ve seen it in a less obvious way.  The first is the single player portion of “Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood”, where you can rescue disenfranchised citizens of Rome and train them up to carry out missions for you or call them in for support.  This had me playing team manager to a group of assassins in what will always stand out to me as a truly bizarre HR simulation but had me invested enough that I created a series of colour schemes depending on how well the individual was doing, with my top performers garbed in crimson and my employees who had just passed probation in teal.  At every opportunity I wanted to collect more team members and had the game allowed me, I would have ended up with the whole of Rome on my books (with the exception of the pope.  He probably wouldn’t get back to me after last time.)

The second example is Tale World’s Mount and Blade: Warband, and there is an argument to be made that I’m only including it here because that way I can technically call all of the time I’ve wasted on it “research”.  In this medieval warfare based game, you have to draw together a group of soldiers, peasants, mercenaries and anyone who will join you to fight by your side as you carve your bloody path through the kingdoms and realms that you are dumped in.  This has you once again as HR manager over a collection of soldiers on a much larger scale than in Assassin’s Creed and once again has me checking under every rock for that extra peasant to join my force.

I realise a lot of this might just be appealing to the tabletop wargames player that sulks inside me that I’ve sort of partially maybe grown out of it, or at least don’t quite have the patience for it any more, but I notice that games that include these sorts of things hold my attention long after the initial gameplay mechanic has worn off.

I know lots of people who have a closet collection of some description (by which I mean they secretly collect something, not that they have a collection of closets) and am very curious to know what it is that makes us want to horde things that are ultimately a little bit on the useless side.

Additional Notes:

On the subject of Pokemon, there’s a little anacdote that I heard when it first came out that I can only attribute to “anonymous playground sources”.  Apparently, the creators of Pokemon conducted some market research among their child victims demographic and asked them the simple question “what thing do you enjoy the most?” and they picked out the three top answers.  These were “Fighting”, “Animals” and “Collecting things”.  Hence they made a game about collecting animals that fight each other.

Allegedly the “bloody path” element of how to play Mount and Blade is somewhat optional, but I didn’t really want to play a trading caravan simulator, nor a cattle driving simulator that made me want to launch my computer out of the window.