Something in my brain clicks when I organize and track collections. It’s a common sight in video games nowadays – a piece of UI that tracks how many unlockable items I’ve collected or how many trick jumps I’ve gone over. It’s an easy way to engage the completionist that lives in the bottom of deep, obsessive hearts, and I don’t begrudge any designer that puts in a bit of collection visibility in their game.
The same thing goes for my real-world collections, too. Books, movies, games – I want to catalog them all to give myself an idea of how many I have (the ultimate collection game of life?) and how many I have consumed. I once, in college, even started a spreadsheet of every movie I’d ever watched (or at least, that I remembered).
I end up usually leaving these collections half finished. I have many different places online where I’ve tried to catalog the movies I’ve watched by rating them (Netflix and IMDB to name a few) as well as a variety of different freeware and online databases where I’ve tried to keep track of our household’s DVD and media inventory.
It’s not that I actually really care all that much about making sure everything is inventoried for insurance or practical purposes. It’s that same feeling of hitting 100% on something; the rush of seeing your entire collection in a CoverFlow-esque arrangement of art is all I want.
The long and the short of it is that we recently put most of book library up on LibraryThing, which was fun. We’ll see if that excitement lasts.