Using My OCD for Good, Not Evil

So, as mentioned in my previous post I have the compulsion to collect things. It makes me both happy and sad because I find my bank account suffering more often than not due to my lack of control of my spending habits. Once I start buying things, I find I just won’t stop – I’m on a roll. It’s especially bad when my friends start going to comic shops or electronics stores on whims and take me a long. It’s not like they’re holding a gun to my head, but I’ll go if someone is driving… I don’t drive or have a car myself… T_T

Another downside to my “OCD” – I’m not a doctor so I’m not going to officially diagnose myself with OCD – is that I buy so many games that I don’t end up finishing them all. I’ve started most of them, but finished few – and it’s not for a lack of trying or wanting to, but somehow along with my “OCD” I also have some kind of “ADD”. I have a ton of games on the go, some I’ve almost finished, some I’ve just started, but very few have I actually finished – at least recently.

When I was younger and didn’t have the means to finance my addiction (I still don’t technically), I had to rely on birthdays and allowances for my video games, and when I got them I played them to death. I finished them and then played them again. To this day my two most memorable experiences with games – The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and Devil May Cry – are games that I have played again since finishing them. I don’t know if it’s just the nostalgia factor, or if they truly were just great games (I have enough friends that will vouch for Ocarina of Time), but I would totally pick them up again and have.

I’m really baffled as to why I can’t finish games now, however. Sometimes I will literally stop just before the end (Folklore and Persona 4 are some more recent examples of this behaviour for me). Sometimes it’s the grinding, sometimes it’s the rest of my life getting in the way, but for whatever reason – I just can’t finish games anymore…

I’ve decided this habit is coming to an end. Being obsessed with collecting and organizing, I’m also a big fan of excel. When I get the opportunity to make a sweet excel doc at work – I am happy. It’s like a productive form of meditating while working for me. I feel like I’m doing something productive while also somehow zoning out at the same time. I don’t really know how it works but it just does. I am by no means an excel guru, but I’ve got enough knowledge to make some decent looking and relatively efficient excel reports.

One day soon I am going to do an inventory of all my games, played and unplayed, finished and unfinished. Somehow I will prioritize them (probably starting with the ones I’ve started but haven’t finished or am almost finished). This will also probably take me 900 years… but I’m willing to give it a try because I'm tired of missing out on great games that are literally at my fingertips and ready to be played. I’ll keep you(the internet) abreast of when my all powerful excel video game tracker is complete and any time I manage to make a dent in the rather large list of games that I own but haven’t finished….

I HOPE THIS WORKS! O_O