[NewsPoster]

So, the Internet has lost its mind at some point in the past few days. If you haven't heard, there was a JPEG of Han Solo being bought and sold on eBay for upwards of $225. Of course, it's not just any digital image, or so I'm told, but a card from the officially licensed Star Wars: Card Trader digital collectible trading card app from Topps.

The Gawker websites talked about this a few days ago. Yes, I'm talking about a card from the Topps: Star Wars trading card app. The card in question? This one:

I'm not here to look down on collectors. I get collecting. I do. I grew up as a tween when Beanie Babies were in vogue, and every week I'd take my hard earned allowance down to the local gift shop and purchase a carefully selected stuffed animal, then take it home and stare at it like it was made out of gold. I currently, as a 28 year old woman, have an acute interest in collecting minerals. I also grew up in a family of collectors. My grandma collected stamps, my Uncle Jay collects coins, and my Uncle Dan collects Star Trek merch. Obtaining things that pertain to your interest, either for the satisfaction of owning them or for the potential profit that can be made? I get that. I'm not scoffing at the act of collecting, I'm scoffing at what is being collected.

When you open the Star Wars trading card app, you're met with a rather poorly laid out design that is supposed to simulate collecting and trading cards. You sign up for an account, get a free pack of relatively useless "white" quality cards (the lowest quality) and then are rushed through a quick trading tutorial. In the Cantina tab, you can buy card packs with credits, buy credits with money, or earn credits by participating in some sort of advertised service like watching an advertisement or signing up for a free trial of Amazon Prime.

The Fan Feed is a weird stream of wanted ads, where people beg for trades in return for good ratings, as well as post legitimate offers. Wading through this constant stream of trades to find what you want is frustrating, to say the least. And there's no purpose to this Fan Feed, other than to beg for trades. You're not discussing the fine points of these cards with these people -- at least not in-app, which seems strange. I feel as though, if you're going to be collecting these things that are essentially just pictures on your phone, you should be given an outlet to discuss said pictures with other people at length if you so choose. But you can't. The only thing you can do is request cards and trade off dupes and hopefully complete your collection of pictures.

And so, the more time you spend with the app, you'll begin to learn the ins and outs of it. Every day, you get a free pack of cards and a ton of credits. Collectors "in the know" spend time hoarding credits for the special packs that are released on Sunday, just to chase the most rare cards. And if they don't get the card they're looking for? These people will find a way to get them, come Hell or high water.

It's worth pointing out that at no point will you ever actually have spend a dollar on a card directly. You can't go into the app and pay money to get the card that you want. No, that's left to the secondary market, which Topps recognizes but doesn't endorse. You'll go onto eBay and have to search "Star Wars Digital Trading Cards" and see what is available. Sometimes there's a plethora of completed series available for anywhere from $50-$100, but mostly you'll see a lot of singles going for anywhere between $3 and $10. Occasionally there's a card that will go for $200 or more which is absolute insanity.

Part of it is an issue of tangibility. When I go into the big box of rocks under my bed, I can pick out a quartz, I can pick out an amethyst, I can pick out a malachite and I can hold them. Because there's a considerable amount of effort in obtaining the perfect rock, there's memories tied to them. I have memories of where I bought them or, for a considerable chunk of my collection, where I found them. With the Star Wars cards, you're collecting and trading these JPEGs at an alarming pace -- hourly, for some fans. Aside from owning these pictures on your phone, there's not much else you do with them other than have them. And chasing down other people to explain your collection of pictures that you've spent days of your life trying to put on your phone? Probably going to get you some strange looks.

That's not to say that tangibility is the only requirement for worth. I'm a gamer, so the concept of digital items being worth something isn't foreign to me. I'm an avid Hearthstone player and have been since launch; there's not a ranked season card back that I don't have. Sure, you can't physically trade cards back and forth in Hearthstone, but the collecting aspect is there. The thrill of the find is there. However, these JPEGs have assigned stats to them. I can use these JPEGs to beat up JPEGs owned by other people to earn gold to get more jpegs. With the Topps app, I get a set of JPEGs that I can then trade for other jpegs that can then be traded for other, different jpegs, or if I'm being lucrative about it, sold on eBay in the heady realm of JPEG hocking.

And even if we're looking past Hearthstone where nearly every card can be crafted from grinding enough cards into dust, there are other digital collectibles that have much more monetary worth than the Star Wars cards. And, if that wasn't enough, they're part of systems I think are done far better. Team Fortress 2 has an elaborate collectors system that features tons of different items that you can collect and trade. You can even sell many of the items for money. And Valve encourages that because you can buy and sell these items through the Steam Marketplace. And some of these items are worth a lot of money. In fact, a lot more than the $225 Han Solo digital trading card.

So again, I'm not saying that an item has to be physical to be an item of worth, but it damn well better be something more than a glorified, albeit sloppy version of Google Image Search. At least in TF2, if I buy a gun from the Marketplace, I can use it to shoot another player in-game. If I buy a hat, I can wear it while I interact with other people who are wearing hats. I can go into user made maps that are designed for trading, discuss the finer points of the game I'm playing, and, in an ideal scenario, a walk away with the item I came for. That's something.

In the world where "everything that can be merchandised will be merchandised," I suppose I should have seen this coming. There's a Star Wars everything at this point. There's a Han Solo in Carbonite shower curtain to prevent water from splashing onto your Stormtrooper bath mat. There's a Death Star tea infuser that you can toss in your C-3PO tea mug. There's an R2-D2 soy sauce dispenser for flavoring those noodles you're going to eat with Lightsaber chopsticks. There's a Star Wars toaster that will burn Darth Vader's face into the center of your toast, for a sad, strange breakfast treat.

I guess digital trading cards suddenly selling for a substantial sum of money on the aftermarket shouldn't surprise me, but it somehow still does. So, that's where I stand. I'm not against collecting things, and I'm certainly not collecting digital things, but I'm not entirely sure why people are going insane for what feels like a pay per-view of Google Image Search. If I really wanted to see ol' Mr. Ford as Han Solo, I can do it as much as I want right from the comfort of my phone and no one is going to charge $200 to do so.

-Amber Neely (@SurferAmber)