What qualifies as a collection?

[CatPix]

I think there's a difference between "a collection" and "a collector". A collection can be acquired without effort and doesn't really have a minimum; it's just a shorthand word for a group of like things. It's like a gaggle of geese or a school of fish. A collection of Wii games. It doesn't imply a number.

 

A collector, though, is someone who actively works to acquire a collection. The suffix "or" makes it active. You could be a "collectee" I guess and be someone who just passively receives a collection, through gifts or whatever. But a collector is active. To me that implies but does not require that they have more than a "normal" amount of that thing, just because they're working at it, so you'd kind of expect them to have more than someone who's just buying the latest Madden every year. Even that depends on the type of collector, though; some people only collect rare things. You could have five of the rarest games on the planet, and only those five, and still qualify as a collector because you would have had to actively work to acquire those.

 

tl;dr a collection can be any number of the same type of thing, and a collector is a collector if they're active in collecting.

Good definition.

It's kinda how I defined myself and my collection even if I didn't though about it deeply.

I got NEs and SNES games from my childhood, and I never considered those being "a collection" or "retrogaming" because obviously before 2000 it wasn't really retro, just "old". I considere I started my collection and being a collecting retrogamer around 2000 when I acquired a NES and an Atari 7800, almost brand new, on a car boot sale. (for 15€ each.... If I wanted to sell the NES that would be a massively good ROI - sadly I resold the 7800 quickly because BITD there was NOWHERE to get Atari 7800 games, and 19 years later, even if I acquired another 7800 I still only own 4 7800 games because prices are insane).

SAme goes for my PS1, PS2 and PS3/Xbox 360 collection, it built up over time, I didn't got games to own them but because they were recent and I had interest in them, and as times goes by they became collectibles.