How do you deal with family who likes to buy you games that are outside of your preferred game style?

I agree with you.

I'm not a fan of getting stuff I'll never use to either be regifted (i.e. donated to charity) or trashed. Pretending to be thankful and grateful for someone else's vacuous consumerism and generating additional unnecessary waste feels a bit morally wrong to me. Then there's the gift receipts. "Here's a chore I bought for you, now you have to go run errands to turn this into something useful. Because I'm very thoughtful of others."

It's different if someone makes me something for me. I keep everything people made for me, even if such artifacts end up in the "keepsake box" which gathers dust in a closet.

I don't like to give gifts because I always assume the person is simply pretending to be thankful, just as I learned how to do when I was very young. No one is going to tell me I fucked up. Then I feel like I've just handed them this trash burden or chore. I don't want to give people gifts of burden.

I opted out of birthdays starting when I was like 12 so I could avoid gift guilt. It took a little bit longer for people to accept me opting out of Christmas; had to be an adult at 18 before that ended.

Everyone I know impulse buys the things they want the minute they want see it. Occasionally I can do better, like a family member kept playing CAH without knowing much about what other games are out there. I bought them Cyanide and Happiness because I think they would enjoy it more than CAH. They still play CAH with drinking friends because its the only game the drinking friends have heard of. `¯\_(ツ)_/¯` Yet another wasted gift someone is polite about.

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