It’s been over 8 years since I first registered my account on the Backloggery, a website that provides motivation to gamers like me with a miles-long backlog to work on beating the games we already own. As the site’s creator explains,
As a life-long gamer, I had accumulated a large collection of games. Looking over them, became frustrated with myself. I had spent so much money on these games and yet many of them had never been finished. But that was going to change! So I buckled down to beat every unfinished game in my collection.
https://backloggery.com/about.php
That same feeling resonated with me and led me to put my own collection in a Backloggery page. As I wrote on my first backloggery profile (and reposted on this blog),
I’ve been playing video games most of my life, but I’ve never been really good at finishing games. [emphasis added] … Lately I’ve realized just how much I’ve been missing by not playing these great stories through to their conclusion. I hope Backloggery can help me fix this, even if it means pulling up 10+ year old save files to finish games. 🙂
Old Backloggery Manifesto
But I’m not sure it has served to do exactly that, partially because of how active I have been in adding things to my list, partially because of how the industry is changing, and partially because I made it into more of a meta-game to improve my backloggery completion score (and even got a little distracted with trophy hunting in the process) rather than playing the games I want to play.
So now, I’m changing my rules.
Effective immediately:
(or, as soon as I’m able to make all these changes on the site 😅)
I am going to mark games that I have received for free, as part of a subscription (looking at you, years of PS+ membership), or in a bundle (humble or otherwise) as Null unless/until I actually desire to play them. Some aspects of this collection that will likely be affected off the top of my head:
- PlayStation + free games – I have been quite diligent over the years in adding them to my list
- Xbox Live Games with Gold – similarly, I think I have added all of them
- Stadia Pro – I’ve already kind of been excluding most of them due to laziness… maybe I should just unsubscribe… but some of them I really do want to play…
- Humble Choice and bundle purchases – usually I buy bundles if there’s like one I really like to play, because it’s almost always cheaper than just buying that game normally, and it usually benefits a good cause as well.
- Amazon Prime Gaming / formerly Twitch Prime – this is not the primary reason I’m on Amazon Prime in the first place, but I claim them anyway…
- Random giveaways I claim from Steam, GOG, Uplay, Epic Games, etc.
I also am giving myself the right to mark games as null even if I actively purchased them at some point if I’m no longer interested in playing them.
I’m hoping that by doing this, it will reduce the amount of self-frustration that I feel from this (increasingly) huge number of games that are technically in my backlog despite me not actively purchasing them or having a real desire to play them, and help me get back to my actual goal: playing and finishing the games I actually want to play.
Featured image (at top of post): Aiba hangs from a ceiling lantern in AI: THE SOMNIUM FILES nirvanA Initiative. This game just released last week and immediately leapt to #1 on my “to play” list, partially leading to this change.
