How to Deal With The Game Backlog

Posted by Rampant Coyote on May 5, 2015

In a very good year, I’d get maybe 12 – 13 new games. That was back in the 1990s, and I’d end up paying full price or maybe a 25% or 50% discount for something older. Every once in a while I’d score a major bargain and pick up an old title like The Magic Candle games or V for Victory: Velikiya Luki for less than $10, or even closer to $5. But on a tight budget, a new game once a month was pretty much my limit. That was about as fast as I could play them.

Now I get nearly that many games in a single bundle.

Last week I commented to a friend that I “paid for” a full game, but bought about 20. Between bundles and sales, I think I spent about $60. And I got what would have been two years’ worth of games.

I’ve talked about surviving the game glut as a developer. I’m mostly speculating and referencing people who know more than me about that. But what about as a gamer? What do I do when I have 600 games and nothing to play?

Taking a page from Tish Tosh Tesh, I periodically purge my system. I have a 2 TB drive devoted to games. That can’t hold half of my library. So I’ve tried to take the attitude of trying to nuke any game that’s taking up over 1 GB in space. So… if it’s over a gig, and I don’t expect to play it more in the next 12 months, I want to delete it off the drive. Maybe even if it’s less than a gig, but I have more tolerance for little tiny indie games taking up 0.003% of my hard drive space.

I have to fight this completionist programming I have in my head (not to mention a scarcity mindset), where I have to play a game to completion to “finish” it. Sometimes, sure – if it’s good. But I’m trying to cultivate an attitude of “play to nuke.” Realizing how many frickin’ games I have, combined with how little time I honestly have to play games, I try to consider just how worthwhile it is to really pursue completion (or playing past completion). Have I played it “enough,” considering how much more I have yet to play? Last night, I finally pulled the plug on Dead Island. I’d been keeping it on my hard drive for two years, periodically playing it for 15 more minutes, under the belief that maybe, someday, it’ll finally become fun and engaging.

I try to devote 30 minutes a night to just *playing* a game. Sometimes this becomes an hour every couple of nights (not including Rocksmith 2014, which I consider practice time rather than gaming time). It’s weird trying to devote time to gaming where I used to just play all night – but between writing, game development, and all the other activities of life, I really do need to carve out the time sometimes. (The trick of it is – just like writing and game development – that once I get into the “zone” I follow Newton’s Law of Inertia and tend to stick with the same activity far longer than expected). As a game developer, I feel strongly that I should be *playing* games, not just making them.

Another thing I want to do more of is leaving reviews at the distribution sites (Steam, Desura, etc.) for other players. It doesn’t help my backlog much, but maybe it can help others navigate the glut of games out there. I’m not a harsh critic. Not even of AAA games. But if something rises above the average, or descends significantly below the average for some reason, I figure it’s helpful to let other people know it. Especially for indies. It’s hard to get noticed, so I like giving a solid, fun game an extra thumbs-up so it can get a smidgen more attention.

 

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