For a minute there, I was Charlie Bucket. My usual miasma of gloom and disillusionment was swept aside by an unexpected beta test invitation - a golden ticket for Realtime Worlds' forthcoming online shooter APB.

I'm sure you're already aware of beta testing - the increasingly common practice of selecting a handful of enthusiastic gamers and letting them spot the bugs without pay - and I've dabbled in the practice a little in the past. But there's something about APB's premise - cops against robbers in an endless guerilla war of sieges and off-licence robberies - and Realtime Worlds' pedigree - they of Crackdown fame - that's somehow captured my imagination as few other online games have so far, and I got into quite a state over the prospect of trying it out before (almost) everyone else.

Predictably, my euphoria didn't last long; in fact, it was crushed between the pillars of Virgin Media and the Microsoft Corporation three days later. I won't bore you with the details, but thanks to two very specific technical problems I've so far failed to download APB's 6GB of data. And my location in the backwaters of nowhere, with its maximum connection speed of 512MB broadband certainly hasn't helped matters either. (Looking on a map of England, I'm located just under the 'b' in 'here be dragons'. Where I live, The Wicker Man is a tourist information video.)

We'll all be downloading our games soon, of course. The days of physical media are almost over, and in many ways this is a good thing. Our consumption of plastic and cardboard will be radically reduced, and there'll be less fuel burned in the process of transporting games across the world in containers. Games that don't sell will no longer have to be buried in the Mojave Desert, and unsold Robbie Williams albums won't have to be used to make roads in China (and no, I haven't made these up).

Digital downloads are therefore a small victory for environmentalists, but a kick in the plums for me. I like packaging. I like stuff. I'm proud of my shelves of games arrayed like crooked teeth. I enjoy flicking through the manuals, inspecting the cover art, arranging them in chronological order, then changing my mind and reorganising them according to genre instead.

I like my box sets - the Tare Panda special edition Bandai Wonderswan handheld console, the limited edition version of Ico with the little postcards inside. And these are another phenomenon soon to be rendered extinct by digital downloads: no more commemorative mugs or t-shirts, night vision goggles or lunch boxes.

We're heading for a future where nobody physically owns anything; where everybody's clutter is stored on hard drives: novels, albums, photographs, films, newspapers, magazines and games. When DVDs are but another stratum in the global landfill - just above the AOL install discs and Katie Price autobiographies - hoarding will have become almost entirely virtual.

People like me, with junk packed into their houses, still clinging on to their cartridges and their piles of paper and giant plastic coins, will be figures of ridicule.

But there's an inherent problem with downloaded material: it has no intrinsic physical or sentimental value. A boxed game, DVD, CD or novel is a tangible item that you can own, handle, place on a shelf or lend to a friend and never see again. It becomes dog-eared, tatty, faded. It becomes yours, whether you write your name in it, place it on a shelf and cherish it or leave it under the sofa to gather dust.

Downloaded stuff is just that - stuff, data, a commodity. The term 'torrent' is apposite, whether legal or otherwise.Downloaded entertainment is just a pipeline, a stream of content. This is why, to those in the habit of pirating entertainment, it has neither value nor meaning. We've all met at least one person who has every album ever made on a spindle of DVDs that they'll never listen to, or great piles of dodgily downloaded games they'll probably never play.

I'm shouting against a tide, of course; I'm from a generation that will be remembered for its sentimental attachment to junk, pretty boxes and pieces of plastic. But will the next generation derive the same level of pleasure from looking through files on a hard drive as I do when I look up at my bookshelves? Will they look at a folder full of MP3s and be reminded of the happy day when they downloaded them, just as I remember the day my girlfriend bought me a Radiohead album all those years ago?

Possibly, but I'm not taking the risk. You can keep your downloaded content. I'm sticking with stuff.

Ryan writes his gaming column every week at Den Of Geek. Last week's is here.