how's your week going, Beehaw
how's your week going, Beehaw
not much to report, however i i have completed my reading goal for the year (35 books) with several months to spare thanks to The Red Corner: The Rise and Fall of Communism in Northeastern Montana
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Anyone else have the problem of having too many games they want to play but can't settle on one so you play nothing? Facing that a lot lately the last week and need some advice. My backlog gets bigger but nothing gets played.
Ignore the backlog. Backlogs are a mental hangup, they are not a moral imperative.
About a year ago I just gave myself permission to start and stop games at will. 10 seconds. 10 minutes. 10 hours. Didn't matter. If i moved on, I moved on. Let me tell you it has been a treat. I have discovered more games and I've played plenty of games 40 or 50% through and felt like I got what I needed out of it. Gamepass has been fantastic for this as well. I just view it as demos almost.
We don't force ourselves to finish bad seasons of shows (unless we're REALLY committed to the show). Why should we force ourselves to burn 20-40hrs on a campaign or whatever we just don't care about? You're not getting your money back, and you're certainly not getting your money's worth.
This is some great advice. I need to try and remember that I don't need to complete every game. I bought them for entertainment and there's no point continuing if I'm burnt out!
I had someone say the same thing to me and dude I cannot express how much better things are.
Hell the other night I "wanted" to play BG3 - put over 100hrs in. After an hour I was like "I haven't paid attention to ANYTHING this past hour and I'm bored as hell." Taking a few days off. Maybe I'll go back, maybe I won't.
To add on to starting and stopping games at will, take some time to just organize your library of games too! I have mine sorted into several categories...
- Forever games that I'll come back to over time
- Loved games that I may come back to should the mood strike
- "Next Up" games that I want to play soon
- Games I want to play eventually
- Games I'm done with, either I played it for 10m and I wasn't interested or I finished it and got a resounding "meh"
- Zero interest games or duplicated games (ex: the original version of a game when the remastered version was given for free and is in one of those other categories, free VR versions, etc...).
It takes a lot of focus and work at first, and a LOT of flipping between the page in your library and the store page to see if you want to play a certain game. I axed stuff pretty liberally and at different points in my life, I've gone back and pruned that list of what I want to play and see if I realllllllly still wanted to play it. I also found organizing my library a bit of that kind of "mindless enjoyable" that you can just get into a flow state to go through.
Once it's done though, when a new game gets added to my Steam Library, I can immediately "triage" it into one of those categories because it's the only thing not categorized. It's taken my library of what is now almost 1300 games acquired over 15 years and given it some more structure. Of that list, today I have ~250 in some version of "want to play", ~400 in some version of played, and ALL the rest in that zero interest/duplicate category.
That's a great idea actually. I do something similar for the Anime I watch using MyAnimeList.
I've actually started doing this after reading this and Steam makes it super easy to sort through the categories. They even carry over to the Steam Deck as well which is nice. Thanks for the suggestion!
Of course! One thing I'll mention since you said you have a Steam Deck: I split my "want to plays" into a Steam Deck and PC category (some games may be Verified/Playable but I'd rather play them on the PC, others may be unsupported but ProtonDB says they're fine). When I got my Deck, I did a pass through my Want To Play list on the Deck itself with DeckyLoader and the ProtonDB Badges plugin to determine if a game I wanted to play was better there or the PC.
Yeah I have a "nextlist" that I maintain in a Todoist project, that just lists the next book, game, movie, show, podcast, etc.
I add to it and rearrange priorities occasionally, but it's super nice to have when I get into that analysis paralysis you describe.
I have that problem with most things- too many books I want to read, too many games I want to play, too many shows/films I want to watch. And no energy to do any of it so it's back to watching the same thing I've seen dozens of times before.
Don't get me started on books and watching things. I feel like it's been years since I've sat down and focused on a book.
There's just so much content out there and I feel like you're nearly afraid to try reading new books or shows in case you waste your time by not liking them. That always ends with me watching my favourites over and over like you.