You know that guy? I see that guy on all the boards! 
All this changes when you have to move and you suddenly have to justify spending money on moving boxes of stuff that is still in the same box you last moved it - and that was 10-20 years ago.
So moving or at least doing major remodeling is a great excuse to clear out stuff. Once you have to physically haul something around its value goes down.
They say two moves are as good as a house fire.
My camping gear is the best example of this from my real life. I love camping, but it’s been years since I had time to do it. The gear would cost a lot to replace, so I don’t really want to sell/give it away. Even if I did want to get rid of it, if I had time to bundle it all down to the Goodwill, I might have time to actually use it. So it sits in my garage reminding me that I don’t have time to do the things I enjoy anymore.
I have a few other things that I bought expecting something wonderful, but the product never lived up to expectations. Some of those I get rid of immediately, but some sit around for quite a while.
Regarding games, I I have a fairly large inventory of Steam games that I’ve never played. Generally they are games that I think I might be interested in and are on sale for something like 75% off So I buy them figuring I’d probably want to buy them eventually and I might as well do while they are on sale.
I’d like to get rid of a lot of my stuff. For the longest time, I dabbled at all kinds of things, thinking maybe one or more of them would stick. None of them did. Last year I finally came to the conclusion that I have the things I’ve consistently proven I stick to (mostly writing related) and the things I “want to want to do” (like play a musical instrument, take up some kind of art, play a lot of video games, etc.) I have not found the time to do these things in over ten years, sometimes longer. And I could find the time, if they were priorities.
So now I’m left with a bunch of items, some of them valuable enough that I don’t want to just give them away, and I lack the motivation to do what it takes to sell them. Hence, a house full of clutter.
I could have written this. I’ve been trying to get rid of stuff for years, and I have gotten rid of a lot, but I seem to accumulate more than I discard. I also have a lot of items that I paid a lot of money for that I don’t want to just toss, but selling the stuff seems like so much work.
In three years I’ll be 50 years old, and I’d like to own about half of what is in the house by then.
There is also aspirational purchasing. I do it with vegetables and cleaning supplies. I WANT to be a person who has a diet mostly of vegetables and a clean house. I am not, but I never will be if I don’t have the vegetables and all of the cleaning things… Right? RIGHT? RIGHT!!!
The main reason is it’s much easier to buy things than it is to sell them. To buy something online, it’s easy to locate a seller, it’s easy to set up a Paypal account or credit card payment, etc. To sell something online, you have to take photos of it, describe it including any wear or defects, grade it, package it, ship it, take returns on it and refund it if requested. And good luck getting any more than a few dollars for it, particularly if you sell it in a garage sale or to a pawn shop. Also, it can take years to sell something online if you want a reasonable price for it.
Our whole economy is based on making it easy to buy things.
My wife sometimes has the attitude that she’s saving money by buying stuff (clothing, toiletries, groceries, etc.) on sale, without considering that she would save even more money by not buying it at all.
Is that the case with Tablets?
since it’s too big for public and too small for inside the house. Plus if you have a phone and a laptop what do you need a tablet for anyway?
The part I bolded doesn’t match the question you asked in your thread title. If they’ve already beaten the game, it’s not something they bought and never used. You could ask why they still hold onto it then, but that’s a different question (and one which has some good answers of its own: They might feel like playing it again some day; someone else might come along and want to play it; having it around reminds them of the enjoyment they got from it; what do they have to lose by holding onto it; etc.)
As for the “thousands of shrink-wrapped games” they’ll never get around to playing, I’ll offer a few suggestions, phrased in terms of video games since that was your example, but they’d also apply to books people buy but never read, movies they buy but never watch, etc.
The pleasures of anticipation. Just as part of the fun of taking a trip is planning it and looking forward to it, part of the enjoyment to be had from video games is from shopping for them and looking forward to playing them. Even if they never get around to actually playing a particular game, they’ve still gained pleasure from owning it and thinking about playing it.
The paradox of the heap. Every individual game purchase they’ve made makes sense in isolation: they bought the game because they thought they’d enjoy playing it. They expected the fun of playing it to be worth at least as much as they paid for it. It’s only when you look at all those games in the aggregate, and see that they have more than they’ll ever have time to play, that it doesn’t make sense to have bought them.
The urge to collect. There’s something in human psychology that drives us, or at least some of us, to want to collect things. If we have some of a set of things, we want to complete the set. If something brought us joy or pleasure or excitement, we seek more of the same kind of thing. Throw in the thrill of getting an especially good deal on something, or the opportunity of acquiring something that might not be available later, and the urge becomes especially keen.
The scarcity mentality. Maybe they developed their video-game-acquiring habits and attitudes way back when the availability and affordability of games they wanted didn’t so heavily out pace the time or motivation they had for playing them, and the rule “Take advantage of every great deal that comes along” made more sense.
The government has labeled me a consumer so I do it for national security and patriotic pride!
I don’t think so. The people I know with tablets use them a LOT. My own tablet has replaced my laptop while my phone is too small to be of much use.
I know that over the years, I’ve probably bought a score of games that I never actually installed, or installed, played minimally, and then uninstalled. Usually what happened was that I got a game that looked like something I wanted to play, then my friends got fixated on some other game, and that other game took up all the time, and then I/we never got back to the other ones.
But in general, I don’t buy games unless I intend to actually play it, so I don’t have heaps of games lying around unopened or unplayed. I usually don’t resell the games though; it’s too much time and trouble to round up all the game crap and then go out of my way to go resell it, and then get $5.
I don’t have a smartphone. My tablet essentially takes the place of a smartphone. Just yesterday I:
played games on it
checked my email on it
used it for directions in a strange place, three times (I had to go to three sites)
communicated with my love on it
It is also linked to my google calendar so it tells me my personal appointments
That being said, this thread is making me crazy. My SO has a slight packrat tendency and I HATES IT, I do. I swear, if I lived alone I’d have like three pieces of furniture. We are moving again in December after 7 years and you bet your freakin ass I am throwing out a ton of shit. I am an avid video gamer and I don’t pick up games randomly (this has changed somewhat with Steam). The thing I have most of is DVDs and even that has gone way down with streaming.
My mom had the same tendencies - throw it out. “Stuff” doesn’t make me happy, it just makes me feel cluttered. I won’t even tell you about how I got rid of hundreds of books a few years back, and now I never buy books. Library + Kindle are more than enough.
I recall reading something where people experience a slight psychological high from purchasing something. It goes back to caveman days as a survival mechanism for acquiring stuff you need to survive or something. In modern society, it’s largely irrelevant as “stuff” is cheap and plentiful.
So basically people get a charge out of buying stuff, but then it wears off and they need to buy more.
A friend of mine who lives up in Connecticut was telling me about how he gets all these high-end clothes for dirt cheap at a thrift store in Fairfield Country. Apparently all the hedge fund guys buy dozens of Brooks Brothers or Thomas Pink shirts, wear like 2 of them and toss the rest in the thrift store bin.
I remember back in the late 90s, I purchased a computer from a buddy of mine. He tossed in like 50 game CDs. I don’t think I ever played any of them.
My laptop is way too big and clunky to take into bed to read. I can read on my phone, but at the text size I use for reading, I only get twenty words on the screen at a time. My tablet is a perfect compromise for certain tasks and it gets about an hour two of use on an average day.