Aesthetic Purchases

Yesterday I bought (and by bought I mean stole through Viking equations {Viking + Axe = I get what I want}) a game for its aesthetic value. To those of you who didn't pay attention during school, it means that I bought the game because it looked pretty.

Its name: Machinarium.



I'm not going to talk about its intriguing point and click puzzles or the fact it's one of the few puzzle games that realises that pointing and clicking is only as fun insofar as the animation is interesting enough to distract you from the mundane task of clicking on every viable thing on the screen to see if it will react.

What I will talk about is games and their aesthetic value. How much is a game really worth to you? For example, take my fanboyish delight over owning all the (worthwhile) Final Fantasies, having prioritised my finding and purchasing of these games based on whether they were for the Playstation format.

Is it crazy? Perhaps, considering I could have gotten them all for free if I had simply downloaded them with an emulator. But there is something simply more rewarding about shoving the physical copy in peoples faces and screaming 'HOW FUCKING AWESOME IS THIS!?'

If some of you are shaking your heads and wondering how fanboyism and aesthetics are related, musing as to whether the horns in my helmet have turned upside down and if the world is shortly going to end, then calm the fuck down.

Aesthetic value is in place when something physical evokes a positive emotional response from a subject. It's why you will have 'coffee table books', and Vikings have the skulls of various sea monsters littered across their coffee tables.

Having bought this one game with a sense of the aesthetic in mind, I wondered exactly how many similar purchases I had made without realising it. For instance, if any of you have books in your house there's more than a damn good chance that there is at least one work published by Shakespeare or Dostoevsky or Stephenie Meyer that you'll never read, yet still have on your shelf. Why? Aesthetics. The physical product has more relevance than its actual use.

Looking through my games one of the most obvious 'aesthetic' purchases I can find is Halo Reach. I never really liked the game, I still don't, yet for some reason it's lined on my shelf as proudly as Demon's Souls and Bioshock. Maybe I bought it because even though I didn't like it, it had a huge impact on the history of gaming, and people looking at my collection would note it and be thoroughly impressed. Or I thought it would give me something to review and generally hate on. Either way, it's on my shelf.

In the spirit of NNIB.com.au, and in the spirit of forming a gaming community, this review does not end with my Odin approved scoring methods, but with a question:

What games line your shelves for the purely aesthetic purpose?

Til next time, the gamer with horns on his hat.