Recently my game shelves have become a little disorganized and I'm thinking of revising them for an insight into gaming history and as a little experiment. I'm thinking of organizing games by year of release rather than strictly by system or strictly by genre. So, for instance, I might have one shelf for 1995, which will probably include a mix of Jaguar, 32x, PS1 and Sega Saturn games. Then I'll have another shelf for 1996, which will be a mix of PS1 and Sega Saturn, a shelf for 1999 with PS1 and dreamcast (I have no N64) - eventually another shelf for 2001 which will have late dreamcast, and early xbox and gamecube games, etc. (I have no PS2 games but would put those here too). One thought I have is that developers are influenced by previously released games across multiple systems, both in terms of gameplay and technical ideas, and developers are also influenced by cultural tropes that are relevant at the time - e.g. games with muscular hollywood action heroes, or animals with attitude, or FMV centric games. All of these influences change very quickly and differ from year to year. As a result, despite not organizing by system, my hypothesis is that by organizing my medium sized collection in this way, I will wind up inadvertently standing games that had multiple similar influences near each other on the same shelf. After this, when settling in for a 30 or 60 minute game session, I will be interested in whether I wind up in the mood to play a particular year of game rather than a particular console or a particular type of game across multiple years. I'll also become more aware of the evolution of certain genres, such as shmups or racing games, not only in terms of the most obvious such as the same genre across console generations, but also enhancements to gameplay styles or graphics that occurred over shorter timeframes on the same console (e.g. a PS1 game from 1996 versus a PS1 game of the same genre from 1998 or 1999). I'm sure there will be outliers and exceptions that frustrate my hypothesis, and this is all subject to games that have been filtered through what randomly seemed interesting and cool enough to me to buy over the years, but I'll be interested to look at the games I own in terms of a timeline and have a better picture of what came before what, an element I tend not to think about in detail.
Sounds interesting, but also messy and aesthetically displeasing. Imagine having a big box SNES game next to a cardboard box Genesis game.
Yeah I agree with what DeChief says. I used to arrange my games buy alphabetical order but regardless of the system cause I thought it would be (and actually was) easier to find a game I had in mind. So lets say Magna Carta 1 on PS2 was right beside Magna Carta 2 on the Xbox 360. However it just looked awful and because of my OCD (CDO for that matter) I just could not stand the look of my shelves. If however the look does not bother you then I think it is a very great and unique idea.
I was thinking I would organize by system by year. So on the 1995 shelf, I would have maybe 4 or 5 32x games next to 4 or 5 jag games next to a bunch of ps 1 games that came out in that year etc. A big flaw with my idea right now is that I do not have 10-20 shelves to dedicate one shelf or half a shelf to one year certainly I can put multiple years on the same shelf but as pointed out, this will probably start looking like a random jumble. I need a taller bookcase and or a man cave.
