The Gaming Backlog — An Experiment

I’ve always had the problem of postponing when I’ll play games — I see a fun-looking game, but I say, “I’m playing too many games at the moment” or “I’m not really in the mood for it right now”, and just throw it into my wishlist without ever thinking about it again. It got so bad, in fact, that I had upwards of 150 games on my wishlist until I finally cleaned it up. Realising it’s a problem, I wanted to try an experiment of sorts — what if I put a deadline for my entire backlog? Or, well, at least most of it.

Now, obviously, deadlines aren’t something anybody likes, but what if they do help? I wanted to see if I’ll be able to play through every game in my backlog and — more importantly — if I’ll enjoy playing like that. I set the deadline to be a year, from the 1st January 2024 to the 1st January 2025, and I’m still doing it. I decided to give myself an entire year because there are almost a hundred games on the list, and I wanted to play all of them without cluttering my days with only videogames.

As of writing this article, I’ve finished seven of the games in my backlog, and honestly, it seems to be helping. Sure, my pace is not the best, considering it’s been four months already, but it’s much better than if I had just picked games at random. It feels to me like I’m enjoying the different experiences, and I’ve already had two games I found to be just perfect. That’s not to say there weren’t some issues: there are games I started a long while ago and haven’t gotten remotely close to finishing yet, and the stress from wanting to complete all the games I have in my backlog makes me just start new ones. 

There are also some games I gave up on for various reasons. The first game I gave up on completing is going to be a controversial one — Breath of the Wild. It was pretty fun, and I did plan on 100%ing the main storyline, but at some point, I got to a boss battle that was just so hard I couldn’t be bothered to continue trying after the 30th try or so, but I did keep the game in the back of my mind. After that, I lost the save somehow and really didn’t want to restart the game, so I just completely gave up on it. This could be that I just didn’t want to get all of my progress all over again, but there’s a big chance that I was discouraged by not wanting to spend 50+ hours again just redoing it.

Now, is there a chance I can go through the entire backlog before the year ends? Probably. But it isn’t very likely, so from now on, I’ll go about it in a slightly different way. I’m going to give each game an hour, and if by that time I don’t like it enough to want to see the ending, I’m just going to immediately give up on it. That is obviously not a really good way of judging games, and I might miss some bangers, but for my goals, it should work better than spending upwards of four hours in a game before finding out it’s not really for me.

In the end, I don’t know what I’ll think about this once the year is over; I might think this was a really good idea and recommend everyone to do the same, or I might absolutely hate myself for trying this. Either way, I’ll write an update article here every month or two, and if anyone wants to track my progress live, here is the spreadsheet.