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February 2024

Video Game Backlog Chronicles: Game Selection Methodology

As I mentioned in the overarching post: I needed to pick some games to play.

I think this is a deceptively easy question. Wouldn’t you just play what you have? Why not just pick a game from your Steam library at random? Isn’t there something you’ve been wanting to play? Shoot, you could even pull up a top games list and just start from there.

That may work for some people, but I have bad habits and a lot of psychological blocks to clearing my catalog.

I have a Steam library of over 300 and games spread across (unclaimed) Humble Bundles, physical copies for multiple consoles, phone/tablet games, GOG, Battle.net, and Twitch. That’s a lot of games! Those Humble Bundles and Steam sales really do get your paychecks…

Here is the real problem: I need to play all of these games and they need to matter and it can’t take forever.

I am human. I have natural rhythms. I have likes and dislikes. And those change. Some days I am feeling adventurous, some days I want a comfort game. Some months I want to play 3 or 4 games at a time, other times I want speed through just one. I want to push myself outside of my comfort zone and learn more about what kind of game I like.

I can also get easily overwhelmed at my library. The long list feels insurmountable. It is filled with games “I’ve been meaning to play” for years. It is also filled with games I never intend to play. It has games that intimidate me. Ones that I regret spending the money on. Ones that I want nothing else than to play. There are too many ways to kill my motivation.

Lastly, I love writing. I love reflecting on my experience in a game world to brag on it or critique it. So, I also need built-in time to reflect and write about how it was. To open time and space to just talk about the game I played.

To accomplish this, I need a system that works for me. It needs to:

    • Catalog all of the games I have
    • Catalog all of the games I want, but don’t have
    • Note how long they take to beat and genre information
    • What platform the game runs on
    • Whether I want to stream it
    • A log of my experience playing it

So, naturally, I started with someone else’s system!

Here is the template I copied. Unsurprisingly, it comes from Daryl Talks Video Games. As uninspiring as a spreadsheet is, it freakin’ works. At least it does for me. Here are the changes I have made in the past few months:

    • Added a “Platform” column so I can track where I played the game just in case it matters for the write-up.
    • Added a “Stream” column to track whether I played on Twitch.
    • Added a “Backup” sheet for when I finish the initial list.
    • Added new sheets for all of the other platforms where I have games purchased. I don’t claim all of my Humble Bundle games so I can give them away if I want. For Humble Bundle, I used this script to pull the full list! Here for Steam! I manually did the rest as they have very few games.
    • Instead of logging my thoughts in a new sheet, I use plaintext documents and upload to my website. Just personal preference.
    • I use green for complete, yellow for in progress, and white for not yet played. I don’t use red or blue as I am not doing this on a timeline.

And that’s it! While it took a few hours to get everything organized, it was overall a pretty fun ride just putting together the list. I even found a few games that I had purchased more than once :|. Now I had an easily searchable list for creating the backlog list and to double-check before making any future purchases. Then it came time to pick which games make the backlog list.

Which Games?

I know, I know. I already have a list of everything I own so I shouldn’t add games to this list I have to buy. Right? Maybe not…

Hey, we aren’t all perfect, alright?

Here is my process of picking out 80 games that I want to finish!

    1. My Libraries. Simple enough. Now that I have everything pulled into a spreadsheet, it was easy enough to scroll through and pull out names of games that I already want to play, have a strong community rating
    2. Word of mouth. Ask your friends! It’s easier to get a sense of what you might like when you know the person recommending. As gamers, we have such diversity in what we will and won’t put up with in a game. Also, a huge bonus that you can chat about playing someone else’s favorite games!
    3. Top Games Lists. Here is where I found most of the games I don’t already own to add to the list. I looked at 20+ top 100 games of all time lists. It all really does get homogeneous at a certain point so it eventually lost its value.
    4. How Long to Beat Lists. I think this is a pretty clever one. HLtB tracks Top Playing, Most Completed, Best Rated, Most Backlogged (lol), Most Retired, and more. While not the most representative sample, I think this is such telling data. Most Backlogged just screams “I was told this was so good, but I don’t seem to want to play it.” And Most Retired feels like “I just couldn’t push myself over the finish line” – my Skyrim. This helped me cut through the reputation of a game versus whether I would actually think its fun.
    5. Podcasts, Streamers, and YouTubers. I consume a fair amount of video game content. Whether the NoClip and AfterMath podcasts, variety streamers, or the litany of YouTube videos, there is a lot here! I found game of the year discussions and game reference lists in videos to be quite helpful in finding less popular titles.

If I wasn’t sure, I would use a couple of websites to make a judgement call. MetaCritic, IGDB, and HowLongtoBeat. Each of these would give me some insight as to whether the game would be worth playing or not. I’m not saying this are perfect or objective, but they helped make decisions based on reasonable evidence, so they are good for me!

If I was on the fence, then I would add the game to the backup sheet. There have been a few times that I pull a game from the backup and add it to the backlog list because I learned something new about my taste.

How Does the System Work Out?

If I need to pick a game, I have quite a few variables I can sort and filter out to find what I am feeling. I can simply ask myself a few questions:

    • Do I own it? Or, more realistically, can I afford a new game?
    • How long is it? Do I want an 80+ hour RPG or a short indie?
    • Do I want to push outside of my comfort zone? My excitement rating is recorded before playing, but nothing below a 7 was on my original list. Games that are out of my usual genre or I am unsure whether I will like can be easily spotted now.

By clicking around and hiding a few things, it is pretty easy to zero in on the next game. Also, this is a pretty abbreviated list compared to everything that I own, so I am excited to play every single game! The feeling of highlighting a row in green feels like box checking euphoria. That’s huge to both developing a habit of regularly playing games (rather than never playing or binging) and getting through the backlog!

That’s it! 13 games down, a few more to go 🙂