Occasionally, I’ll see someone online say they want to finish all the games in their backlog before they buy anymore. It’s a nice idea that increasingly feels (to me at least) like saying you’re going to become the President of the United States. You know you can’t just… do that, right?
Well, maybe some people can, but they seem like the kind of people who don’t have big backlogs in the first place, because they don’t buy more games than they can play. Instead, they play one game at a time and move onto another once the credits roll. I don’t understand this approach to gaming. How can you have the discipline to pick up a game, play it until it’s done, then move onto another? And, more importantly, why? Why handle your hobby with that degree of rigidity?
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24 Hours Divided By One Million Games
This is how I feel about all long-form hobbies. I give movies my full attention for the two hours they require. But when it comes to TV, books, and video games, I’ve always got multiple things cooking at once.
Right now, my wife and I are toggling between Curb Your Enthusiasm, Detroiters, and English Teacher during dinner, and I’m watching my way through Futurama and Common Side Effects on my own. I’m currently reading one of the final Brandon Sanderson books in my Cosmere readthrough, The Lost Metal, plus the Hemingway memoir, A Moveable Feast, a pair of nonfiction books about desalinating water and Steven Spielberg, and a collection of all Succession’s second season scripts. And, in gaming, I’ve got playthroughs going in Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, Monster Hunter Wilds, Citizen Sleeper 2, and like six or seven games I started last year that I want to get back to.
In my mind, the backlog is not a concrete stack of games that gets ever bigger. It’s more like a game of Tetris. You start one game, and it takes up a set amount of space in your life. You start another, and it takes up more. Eventually, you reach a point where the games you’ve started are taking up too much space, so you delete the ones you haven’t played in the longest amount of time, and free up space to start the process all over again. Sometimes you finish the games, and that’s great, but just as often you yeet them off your harddrive so to make room for a Call of Duty update or whatever.
The Patience To Take It One Game At A Time
I’ve always been this way, even as a kid with more limited access. I rarely finished games and would, instead, swap to something else when I got stuck. I was fortunate enough to grow up getting games more often than just my birthday and Christmas, but my collection was still extremely limited by my current standards. For a recent article, I calculated that I own 292 games on the Epic Games Store, and paid for five of them at most. At a time when storefronts like the Epic and subscription services like PlayStation Plus, Nintendo Switch Online, and Xbox Game Pass are handing out new games like candy — each with its own multi-hour time commitment — how can anyone possibly be disciplined enough to only play one thing at a time?
This is the blessing and the curse of the subscription service age: you have access to more TV, movies, music, and games than you will ever have time to watch. A world of art is at your fingertips, but you still have the same amount of time you’ve always had. Actually less, when you consider that, as a kid, you had time off from school and limited responsibilities. And maybe that means I need to learn from the people who can sit down and play one game at a time until they finish their backlog. That is practically monastic self-discipline in a world that is pushing the opposite. When there’s so much to play, maybe taking the time to really sit with something — rather than racing to play everything — is the path to experiencing more.
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