The Gamer Urge to Hoard Items

An exploration of holding on tight

How often do you listen to your favorite song?

Maybe (probably) I have a strange perspective on this; I suspect that for a lot of people, their favorite song is just whatever they’re listening to most at that moment in their lives, “favorite” and “frequent” intermingling in an ouroboros of tastemaking.

Not for me, a too-in-his-head weirdo. No, for me, my favorite song is sacred, a spell of power and comfort that requires an emotional ritual to cast. I can’t just casually listen to Bruce Springsteen’s “Thunder Road” — I have to prepare to listen to it, to need to listen to it. I must summon it only when the feeling it gives me becomes a necessary boost to my emotional state, lest it lose its power by dilution.

Because I track the albums I play, I can tell you that I listened to my favorite song a total of three times in 2024.

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Like the gamers referenced in the meme above, I’m an item saver. I really clocked this behavior in myself the first time I played Final Fantasy VI in my adult life. I went into the final battle with Kefka with something like 9 Megalixirs, refusing, of course, to use them any earlier in the game, because I might need them later!! I did end up using one during the Kefka fight, and I was proud of my thriftiness. “Good thing I saved those Megalixirs,” I thought. I had 8 left when the credits rolled.

This is a common enough trend among gamers that, well, people make dang memes about it. If you search Google for “gamer hoarding,” you’ll find a ton of chatter on Reddit, YouTube, and the like. Honestly, I never even really thought of it as hoarding (in the psychological sense) until I started diving into this piece, but man, that checks out. There’s something about games and gamers — of the adventure/RPG genre in particular — that encourages us to hold on to our items and never let go.

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Living under capitalism, we get a lot of conflicting messages about money. On the one hand, the cultural apparatus around us is designed to get us to spend all the time. This is, ultimately, the entire role that advertising and marketing fulfill, little psychological prods that instill the dreaded FOMO if we’re not always spending money on things our friends, our neighbors, or beautiful cool people are. On the other hand, being a thrifty saver who holds their money tightly is celebrated — maybe a leftover from the Protestant morality baked into Western culture, but certainly coopted by the elite financial class, who tell us that we could all be homeowners if we’d just stop buying Starbucks and avocado toast every day. They shame us for spending while getting richer off every transaction. Maybe the dissonance is the point?

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My instinct when thinking about hoarding items in games is to make it one of personal responsibility — for myself, for the other players engaging in this behavior. But, while reading more about the trend, I’ve learned that a number of critics approach hoarding from the perspective of game design instead of play. One of my favorite YouTubers, Design Doc, has an excellent video essay entitled “How Can I Stop Item Hoarding in Games?” that I’ll embed here, as it makes a lot of really clutch points. But, to excerpt the key ones —

The video’s thesis puts it simply: “Hoarding is a player behavior driven by design decisions.” In the vid, the Doc calls out five design choices that encourage player hoarding:

1. High inventory limits

2. Items that are too powerful

3. The rarest items being too rare

4. The game difficulty not meshing with the items given

5. Lack of clarity regarding what players should be using their items on

Design Doc caps off this overview with a direct call to action for designers: “To fix hoarding behavior, remove player anxiety over scarcity.”

Surely that philosophy couldn’t apply to systems outside game design, could it?

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In real life, at least when it comes to stuff, I’m not a hoarder. A collector, yes, certainly, and there are a handful of things in my collection I’m somewhat precious about, but I don’t have any psychological shackles to the process of acquiring things. In fact, having recently moved, I took quite a bit of joy in letting go of a bunch of boxes from my storage unit, items that just didn’t feel compelling to own any more. I like to keep my collection displays orderly and intentional, and I try to monitor when I hit a critical mass of “stuff” so I can cull as much as I bring in.

But, emotionally… I mean, Jesus, I just told you I save listening to my favorite song until I feel like I really need it. So obviously there’s something there.

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I’ve been playing Metaphor: ReFantazio a lot lately¹, and I’ve been trying to get better about my item hoarding. In keeping with what that Design Doc video says, Metaphor makes some choices that encourage my journey. Okayish items are often more available than in, say, a Final Fantasy game (it’s not uncommon for a Metahpor dungeon to have an item dealer hanging out in it), but the game difficulty — specifically its scarcity of Magic Points combined with how the action economy of its Squad Battle system works — makes the need to use items feel much more present. It’s hard to be super precious about hoarding your most valuable items when your whole crew is just about out of magic, and if you don’t use one of your handful of restore-all items, you’ll likely get wiped by the boss next turn.

Metaphor in general is a game that makes you think about the balance between using and saving — items, MP, even how you spend your in-game time (do you spend extra days tackling a dungeon, or do you spend extra resources on the dungeon to get time back?). It’s a fascinating give-and-take that helped break me of my preciousness with RPG items, although I must admit I did save one “restore all MP” item for the final battle, and I did end up needing it. But I didn’t need a second!

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When I talked about Super Mario Wonder back in 2023, I mentioned something I call “the Grant Morrison school of game design,” an abstraction based on Grant’s writing philosophy of never holding ideas — of just throwing everything you can think of out there (on the page, at the table, in the code) and trusting that you’ll think of a way to get yourself out of any corners and top yourself next time. This is a creative philosophy I adore but can’t quite bring myself to embrace — I don’t trust my instincts enough, but I’m working on it.

I’m also, as it happens, working on it when it comes to the real-life resource of money. Of course this isn’t a one-to-one correspondence, as you probably literally cannot survive if you spending all your money. And I recognize that what I’m about to say comes from a serious place of privilege. But — having a decent salary for only the second time in my adult life, I’ve been working on finding the balance between being responsible and enjoying myself. I could have saved so much money if I hadn’t moved back to Chicago, but I wanted to be with my people. I could have found a cheaper apartment, but I wanted one that would feel like a home. I didn’t need to buy Rilo Kiley reunion tickets, but the cost of missing one of my favorite band’s first shows in two decades felt higher than the $150 + travel I spent for me and some friends to go.

Just like those 8 Megalixirs I had in the pocket didn’t do me any good once I beat Kefka, having an extra $150 won’t do me any good when I hit my own Game Over screen (what a metaphor! What a stretch! lol). “You can’t take it with you” is trite as hell, but it’s also true. And right now especially, I’m willing to spend a little extra for the comfort and joy of myself and my friends. Retirement is future Eric’s problem (maybe!). Grant Morrison trusts me to figure it out.

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And yet… there are some things I can’t bring myself to take out of the bank, metaphorically speaking. I can’t see a day where Born to Run becomes just an everyday album I listen to. It’s just too powerful, and the game too difficult for me to use it willy-nilly.

You know the last time I listened to “Thunder Road”? A month ago, as I got in the truck full of a lifetime of collected items and hit the road to my new-old home. What else could I have done? I hit top speed and Bruce yells “it’s a town full of losers and we’re pulling out of here to win,” and the ritual is complete, its energizing power dispersed for now, left to reamass for the next time I need it.

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~~The Plugs Section~~

Mortified Chicago is back for our annual Valentine’s Day show at the Athenaeum Center this Friday. Tickets have been selling super well (probably our best in two years?); it’s gonna be a packed house. If you’re a Chicago person who wants a cute date (or anti-date) night Friday, I think this’ll be a cool thing to go to. It feels weird, and honestly a little important, to be doing a show about love right now, even a silly comedy show. I’m really looking forward to it.

1. I’m making it official: March on the Substack will indeed be “Metaphor Month.” Oh, I’ve got stuff to say.