Backlogs and their effect on enjoyment.

[partious]

Like others here I'm sure, I have a massive backlog of games, between Steam and stacks of hoarded games for every console from nes-ps4. If I had to make a fairly conservative estimate, I'd say I have about 500 games that I actually chose to buy due to being interested in them (ie, not 500 shit steam games from humble bundles like many people mention when talking about "backlogs") sitting unplayed/unfinished in my collection. Most of those are arcadey games, so I'd say there are about 100 story type games.

 

I want to play them and recently after years of just jumping aimlessly from game to game and completing nothing, playing arcade games etc, I've been choosing one story/linear type game and playing through it before I go on to the next game and also trying to exercise some willpower not to buy cheap old classics etc, which is tough as I live in Osaka.

 

Thing is I'm finding it hard to actually enjoy the moment to moment gameplay without thinking "when I get this one finished I only have 99 left" and pretty much just constantly looking forward to finishing the game so I can tick it off the list, as opposed to actually genuinely enjoying the experience of playing it.

 

I am aware that this is idiotic, but I'm wondering if this is just a natural consequence of having too many games on the "to play" pile.

 

Has anyone overcome this?

What's the solution? Sell all my games? Put them out of sight in a wardrobe? 

Zen meditation?

[Captain Kelsten]

I'm the same, but slightly worse in that I don't generally buy arcadey games, so I'd estimate 95% of my collection is story-driven, single player focused titles, which feel worse to leave sitting gather dust, and I've probably got similar numbers to you, if not more (not counting stuff you get free from ps+ or Xbox live gold unless I'm genuinely interested in playing it). 

 

I've not yet figured out a way around this. I think in 2017 I've finished about five games, and honestly I'm not even sure that figure is right, as stuff like Uncharted 4 I may have actually finished last year. 

 

I've thought about perhaps just trying to do it alphabetically, because that seems as good a system as any for getting them finished. 

 

Perhaps I'll set myself the challenge over the Christmas break. 

[simms]

You’ll probably never play everything.  My method at the moment is to prioritise the games I really want to play.  For example if you have a favourite series play the sequels or prequels you have yet to play and/or focus on playing games in your favourite genre.  I have 3 games on the go at any one time perhaps from different genres so I don’t get burnt out on one game.  

 

[Broker]

Games are supposed to be fun, not some task that you need to grit your teeth and finish. I’ve got hundreds of games, but I never worry about them at all, here’s some tips:

 

Firstly, play whatever makes you happy, whether that’s a new game every week, 100 games for five minutes at a time, a methodical crawl through everything you own, or one game for 500 hours whilst ignoring everything else you own. The key is figuring out what you feel like playing and having fun with it.

 

Don’t be afraid to sell things. There may be monetary value in buying games and keeping them, but there’s no value to you personally or your happiness keeping more games than you can ever physically play. Every thing you hoard and don’t play is something someone else could actually be enjoying. If you’ve never actually played a game and don’t feel like you’re going to want to, sell it, give it away or best of all, TRADE IT. There is no shame in turning it into something you’ll actually enjoy, even if you lose some money. If there’s something you might have trouble finding again (like UK PDS or Star Ocean 2 or something) MAYBE consider keeping it, but if you can get £50 for it and buy a new game that you’ll actually play then do it.

 

Stop feeling like you need to experience every big game, or every critically acclaimed game. There’s a few ways to do this, firstly, identify genres you don’t really like and accept that unless it’s a transformative game or something has changed in you, you’re not going to enjoy it so don’t punish yourself by trying to play it. This is not the same as never persevering with games that don’t click immediately. I kept hearing that Dark Souls was perfect for me, so I kept trying and eventually it clicked. My friend suggested Battlefield and I wanted to have fun with him even though military things and FPS stuff usually bores me, and BF4 totally converted me. But I know I don’t like driving games, and I’ve not enjoyed one for years, so I just ignore them no matter how amazing the reviews are.

 

Don’t feel bad about playing a game for ten minutes and deciding you don’t like it. Spending £40 on something that you enjoy for all of ten minutes is shit, but not as shit as wasting hours of your life doing something you don’t enjoy. Don’t feel like you have to 100% a game if playing just the story is enough for you. Play as much as you want to then bail on it whenever you want to. If it’s really right for you then you’ll pick it up again and try again, even if that means buying another copy and losing money buying and trading and buying the same thing four times.

 

Even if you feel like you hate them, try playing online with your friends. Feeling like you’re doing something social makes it feel much more acceptable to ignore your other 400 games and just play one thing. In the same way that “I don’t like books” is a silly statement because there are some you would enjoy, there are online multiplayer games you would enjoy out there. You have not tried them all, so make a start. Also, everything is more fun with your friends.

 

Accept that the human mind is a fickle thing that you will never fully comprehend. Maybe despite you having 1000 awesome, highly rated games on cutting edge consoles, you just want to play Drop 7 on your phone. That is fine! If it makes you happy it’s fulfilling the point of game time. I bought the Witcher 3, but I never played it. I’m not sure why, I just never felt like it. It seems like the kind of thing I should love, but I just never felt like I wanted to start playing it. I’ve played tonnes of long games with slow starts since then, but not that one. Eventually I traded it against something for fuck all compared to what I paid. That’s the way it goes.

 

You don’t have to enjoy anything. Just because you love RPGs it doesn’t mean you have to love the big new one or even bother to play it. Just because you live Mario doesn’t mean you need to play the new one, or bother to play through the one you missed. YOU ARE SUPPOSED TO BE ENJOYING YOURSELF! That’s why you’re spending money. Sometimes the money won’t work out how you thought it would. That’s fine! Now you know. Try to learn, but follow your passion and prioritise fun over everything else. Fuck what you think you should be doing, fuck what other people think. What do you feel like playing right now? How long for? Because that’s the right thing to be playing for the right length of time. 

[Down by Law]

I haven't had a backlog in years. I play a new release then go back to my multiplayer of choice, then on to the next new release or I'll replay something on my shelf.

 

If i'm not going to play it straight away/in the very near future then I don't buy it.

[Vorgot]

I have a had a backlog for years and concentrated on a few games this year and finished them, with gave me a shed load of pleasure. Helped that I was stuck on PS3. Now I have a PS4 the list is manageable for the time being.

 

I also have started prioritising games I really enjoy. So at the moment I am playing on Horizon Zero Dawn, Yooka Laylee and Danganronpa 1/2 reload. Very different but love playing all three. I have other small games I might dip in to, but I want to finish these first. I have the Witcher 3 sat ready that I am sure I will really enjoy, but it can wait, and I'll be all over Persona 5 when it's cheap enough. If any game becomes a chore, I tend to just stop playing it, life is too short, and I persisted with so many games because I thought I 'should'.

 

Case in point is No Man's Sky. Thought I would love that, and it was Kindly donated by a forumite. But I just found it dull, unfocused and a pain to figure out how to play so I ditched it. My 2 boys absolutely love it though, they will play for hours. But I 100% agree with @Broker, you are supposing to be enjoying yourself!

[Floyd]

Anything that doesn't get played for awhile, gets traded. Then if I ever do want to play that game again, I'll probably be able to pick it up again quite cheaply. Then there's some games what I will always go back to so I keep them around, like GTA V and Minecraft. And also I don't buy a lot of games anyway

[Marlew]

I spend most of my gaming time downloading and redownloading games I already own so my various dashboards are perfectly balanced, with no subpar titles (or icons) sullying what will be the perfect gaming menu on the hypothetical occasion I will want to sit down and just play games rather than manage my library. I have often bought a game because I have imagined that it would be the ideal replacement for something else on my dashboard. I've just bought Rive on the Switch, in fact, to replace Deemo, because it has a less 'mobile game' icon.

 

On PS4, I have a maximum of twelve games which I will sometimes reduce to a solid core of nine titles I would 'definitely want to play at any time'. Either way, multiples of three there, seems to suit the dash, with twelve generally being the optimum. Four chunks of three, newer stuff to the left, all-timers on the replay to the right.

 

On the One X, I am a little more frivolous with my quality and quantity because it's new but I've recently culled the majority and trimmed it to a rock solid 18 and been happy with that. Almost everything there I would like to play. Only AC:O and Dishonored 2 are really irking me because they're both obviously boring pretty games which 'show off' my new console but to whom? They'll be deleted soon, I know it, just as quickly as I can replace them with quality. Fifty quid down the bog in about a week. Nice icons, though, and they feel quite right on the dash, just very hollow when I consider playing them. Tomb Raider is similar, as is Quantum Break. Batman, all that shit.

 

The Switch is my biggest challenge to manage. I have spent hours deleting and redownloading games. I have about ninety or so, probably twenty of which are dross, and another thirty/forty which are never to be completed. Either arcade type games, too simplistic to put more than an hour into, or just things which sully the dashboard or my perception. Stuff like Disgaea 5. I've tried it, I'm never going to put the time in to appreciate it. Mario & Rabbids. It's a twenty quid game for me, max. One world was enough. I get it. Move on. Monster Hunter XX in Japanese, one of my most redownloaded games. "It's Monster Hunter!" I tell myself. "In Japanese." I realise, every time. I trimmed my dashboard down from 72 (12x6 is quite pleasing, balanced) to a solid 18 of big titles and indies with depth. I'll never play Thimbleweed Park or Oxenfree unless I am hospitalised or something. Isaac, Cave Story and Gungeon, and the rest are all ARMS, Puyo Puyo Tetris, Odyssey and the like. Top tier shit.

 

I've got three really nice dashboards now, it's taken me a long time and a couple of grand but I've never felt happier. 

[Strangelite]

One bored Sunday I'd worked out I'd spent an estimated 50k on my games life time, and decided that most of that was a sunk cost for "buying new" on the day of release...  Nowadays I spend 15 quid a month and 'flip' most "AAA" games in under 3 days. This is why I use BoomerangGameRentals nowadays - A great example is Gran Turismo Sport, I had it on rental from release played the heck out of it, saw that it's got DLC on the way in December, and I've sent it back. I might get an itch to play the game again when the Single Player DLC comes out and by that point it'll either be 15 quid in the shops (like it was on Black Friday) or it'll be free on PS+ one day. Or I can just simply rent it again, I don't really "own" many games any more. I ebay'd my entire collection a few years back and it was extremely liberating - paying off years of your mortgage for the sake of a few dream cast games...

 

Basically, Boomerang has a little "You have saved £XXXX with boomerang" and I'm at about 6000 now, I play everything on or near release and don't need to worry about ebay'ing or losing cash. (I keep a strict "return it in a maximum of 2 weeks" policy so no single game costs too much)

 

I then have something bigger [which I call my 'core' game] like The Witcher 3, Fallout 4, Skyrim which i play between postage of the other stuff... big games like this with quest logs are great because they can be picked up and dropped off and are meant to be enjoyed more like a book experience. I platinum'd Skyrim and all it's DLC over the period of a few months, I'll never play that game ever again (and I kept Lydia alive throughout the entire bloody thing) - I'm currently whacking through The Witcher...

 

Obviously, I buy PC and digital stuff, but much more rarely and usually only when I want to support that developer directly.

 

 

 

[Unofficial Who]

I used to buy a lot of games due to a combination of having a much higher income as well as having to grab games if I even thought they might be interesting due to local issues involving uneven distribution and scalping by speculators.

 

Some practical factors involving space and money have forced me to cut back, although I still have a sizable backlog. A backlog I've started culling. Digital has helped as well. It eliminated the distribution / scalping problem which led to more rational buying decisions. Here's what else I found helped with my pile of shame.

 

The "What Games did you complete" thread (which I can't seem to paste a link to at the moment.)

 

I get through a lot of games, partly because my partner LOVES playing them with me or watching me play them. However it's nowhere near as many as I thought I would get through before recording them in this list. Even when I was unemployed I could only get through about one game a week on average. This opened my eyes to how much money I was wasting and I cut back on my purchases a lot just based on my own entries. Keeping a diary or a blog is a great way to get more out of your games as well as possibly focusing your attention to what you like, what you don't and what you might want to ignore. Like a food diary it gives you a more realistic record on what you actually consume and how you felt about it afterwards.

 

Subs to PSN, Gold or Humble.

 

If you're addicted to the novelty of having something "new" to try every month you can recreate that experience by subbing to one or more of these accounts for the cost of a new game each. My Gold account has stopped me buying random 'tat for my old 360 and my PSN sub brings me enough new things to play that I've dropped back to buying one game every two or three months. Probably not what you want to hear if you're a developer but there it is.

 

This leaves me with enough of a budget to buy games new or near new from some favourite developers.

[gossi the dog]

I find I have to be ruthless. Too many games sat on my to play shelf, invariably means I barely play anything. Thus, for all the current and last gen consoles I only own a handful of games for, and these tend to be games that I adored and don't mind having sat on my shelf even if I know that I'm highly unlikely to ever play them again.

[CheekyLee]

I find that entertainment continually gets in the way of my backlog. To be honest, I wouldn't have it any other way. Buy what I like, play what I like; if you're doing anything different then you're doing it wrong.

[Vimster]

It's a tricky thing but I like to think I'm getting there as far as trying not to build a pile of shame.

 

Current-gen, I've been pretty good and only own 10 or so physical PS4 games, a few of those were gifts too. I recently played Dead Rising on PS4 and despite giving it a good couple of hours couldn't get into it. Similarly MGS V just didn't click despite me giving it a good go. The fact I'd given them a fair go and not enjoyed them made it easier to abandon them. As has been said, it is okay to not get on with a game. Realising that has made things a lot easier.

 

It's a bit different when it comes to retro games though, mainly because I still have that feeling if I don't grab it now I won't find it again. That will be a tougher nut to crack. It's not like I even have a nice load of shelving units to show stuff off, all my unplayed retro stuff is in plastic crates.

 

One thing I've found that has helped me keep on top of it is keeping lists of physical games I have for a system. There's nothing like seeing a list of stuff you have to help you prioritise and ultimately get shot of games. It sounds all record-collector but it's worth a go.

 

Lastly I generally seem to play games longer these days, although I can't put my finger on why. I'm not making a conscious decision to stick with games longer, or forcing myself, I just feel more focussed. Trying not to look too deeply into that.

[Rowan Morrison]

Ha! it's all backlog, nothing but backlog logging back through the ages and it will only ever get worse. The key is accepting that and going with it, like a stalk in the breeze or a drowning man. That's the only real way to justify doing something as demented as buying Skyrim again when you're halfway through Horizon, playing that, starting to think you should probably go back and try to pick up Fallout 4 where you left off, and then buying AC Origins in the sales. And then buying Diablo 3. Fuck it! I'll have plenty of time not to have a gaming backlog when I'm dead - unless Hell is an eternity of games you can never finish, in which case nuts to you, Satan, because I'm already there.

 

If you feel bad about having a backlog of games, just try to think of all the games you're looking forward to as a kind of future backlog - a frontlog, I suppose - that's as unavoidable as its historical counterpart. You can't change it and you'll never catch up because God is dead. And, relax.

[Benny]

Just do this: think about what you fancy playing at any one time. Play that, and stop when you're bored. Ignore how many you own or haven't played, if you don't fancy picking them up, then don't.

[smac]

I think the only consoles I never had a backlog for are the DC and GC; select enough that you could collect all of the decent games AND find time to play them.

 

All downhill since then!

[Captain Kelsten]

8 hours ago, Broker said:

Games are supposed to be fun, not some task that you need to grit your teeth and finish. I’ve got hundreds of games, but I never worry about them at all, here’s some tips:

 

Firstly, play whatever makes you happy, whether that’s a new game every week, 100 games for five minutes at a time, a methodical crawl through everything you own, or one game for 500 hours whilst ignoring everything else you own. The key is figuring out what you feel like playing and having fun with it.

 

Don’t be afraid to sell things. There may be monetary value in buying games and keeping them, but there’s no value to you personally or your happiness keeping more games than you can ever physically play. Every thing you hoard and don’t play is something someone else could actually be enjoying. If you’ve never actually played a game and don’t feel like you’re going to want to, sell it, give it away or best of all, TRADE IT. There is no shame in turning it into something you’ll actually enjoy, even if you lose some money. If there’s something you might have trouble finding again (like UK PDS or Star Ocean 2 or something) MAYBE consider keeping it, but if you can get £50 for it and buy a new game that you’ll actually play then do it.

 

Stop feeling like you need to experience every big game, or every critically acclaimed game. There’s a few ways to do this, firstly, identify genres you don’t really like and accept that unless it’s a transformative game or something has changed in you, you’re not going to enjoy it so don’t punish yourself by trying to play it. This is not the same as never persevering with games that don’t click immediately. I kept hearing that Dark Souls was perfect for me, so I kept trying and eventually it clicked. My friend suggested Battlefield and I wanted to have fun with him even though military things and FPS stuff usually bores me, and BF4 totally converted me. But I know I don’t like driving games, and I’ve not enjoyed one for years, so I just ignore them no matter how amazing the reviews are.

 

Don’t feel bad about playing a game for ten minutes and deciding you don’t like it. Spending £40 on something that you enjoy for all of ten minutes is shit, but not as shit as wasting hours of your life doing something you don’t enjoy. Don’t feel like you have to 100% a game if playing just the story is enough for you. Play as much as you want to then bail on it whenever you want to. If it’s really right for you then you’ll pick it up again and try again, even if that means buying another copy and losing money buying and trading and buying the same thing four times.

 

Even if you feel like you hate them, try playing online with your friends. Feeling like you’re doing something social makes it feel much more acceptable to ignore your other 400 games and just play one thing. In the same way that “I don’t like books” is a silly statement because there are some you would enjoy, there are online multiplayer games you would enjoy out there. You have not tried them all, so make a start. Also, everything is more fun with your friends.

 

Accept that the human mind is a fickle thing that you will never fully comprehend. Maybe despite you having 1000 awesome, highly rated games on cutting edge consoles, you just want to play Drop 7 on your phone. That is fine! If it makes you happy it’s fulfilling the point of game time. I bought the Witcher 3, but I never played it. I’m not sure why, I just never felt like it. It seems like the kind of thing I should love, but I just never felt like I wanted to start playing it. I’ve played tonnes of long games with slow starts since then, but not that one. Eventually I traded it against something for fuck all compared to what I paid. That’s the way it goes.

 

You don’t have to enjoy anything. Just because you love RPGs it doesn’t mean you have to love the big new one or even bother to play it. Just because you live Mario doesn’t mean you need to play the new one, or bother to play through the one you missed. YOU ARE SUPPOSED TO BE ENJOYING YOURSELF! That’s why you’re spending money. Sometimes the money won’t work out how you thought it would. That’s fine! Now you know. Try to learn, but follow your passion and prioritise fun over everything else. Fuck what you think you should be doing, fuck what other people think. What do you feel like playing right now? How long for? Because that’s the right thing to be playing for the right length of time. 

 

Very true, wish I could be this way myself, but I'm not. I also presumably bought most of the games I own because I thought I'd enjoy them (and I might, if I ever actually got round the playing them!). But you're absolutely right in that forcing myself to play them will only make me resent or otherwise dampen my enjoyment of them. Very tricky balance to maintain for the time-limited grown ups we are.

 

 

[Majora]

Be honest with yourself and, if most of your backlog is physical, just sell them instead of having them sat there nagging at you. You're never, ever going to play most of those 500 games. You know it deep down. Unless some of them are R@re!!! then just take a huge weight off your shoulders and sell 95% of them. If you really wanted to play most of them you would have already done so. You can kid yourself that you're just waiting to be in the right mood to play that game you bought on sale 5 years ago and have never touched but we both know you're lying. If you really want to play a particular game you make the time for it.

 

Once you cull your backlog you'll realise how silly you were clinging onto hundreds of games you don't need and are never going to play. There's so many new games coming out nowadays, life's too short to spend your free time fretting about how you haven't played, and are never going to play, all your accumulated crap.

[smac]

I'm actually at the age where I'm looking at my hoard of books, films and games and thinking 'Realistically, even if I retired tomorrow, would I be able to go through all of these before I die?'

 

And the answer depresses me :-(

[Captain Kelsten]

Because the answer is "yes" and you realise if you retired you'd have nothing better to do with your life, and that makes you begin to question your very existence and whether or not you've made a difference and will be remembered? Jesus, dude, it's Christmas. Lighten up!

 

 

[smac]

Man, because I don't have enough time to enjoy all these great old games, never mind all the amazing new stuff out there!

 

But in any case, it's better than wasting your life watching TOWIE...

[freezycold]

I don't get this whole backlog thing. I only buy a game when I know I'm going to be able to play it and actually have a real desire to do so. I never just hoover stuff up during deals or sales. That old mantra "it's not a bargain unless it's something you genuinely needed" really applies. Same with collecting I think. I don't want the burden of physical games, so the idea of "building a collection" is just very unattractive to me. I don't want to just accumulate stuff. The Switch has been excellent for this. I have the physical copy of Zelda and it's never left the slot since I put it in. Everything else is download and it's so freeing. 

[smac]

I fully intend to play every game I buy, Real Soon Now (after buying it). Sometimes other games get in the way.

 

Like, I didn't play another game but the original Splatoon! for a year after I bought it. That gave me a serious WiiU backlog that persists to this day.

[dreamylittledream]

3 hours ago, smac said:

I'm actually at the age where I'm looking at my hoard of books, films and games and thinking 'Realistically, even if I retired tomorrow, would I be able to go through all of these before I die?'

 

And the answer depresses me :-(

 

Yeah that.

 

I culled my backlog of last gen stuff as basically whilst I still technically have a PS3 set up (two actually) one in the bedroom where its a netflix player and one in the conservatory (which is also a netflix player) as they were never going to get played when I have 3 current gen machines set up. We'll ignore the 100+ games never tried on PS+/GoG.

 

Since acquiring said PS4 and a year later a Xbone and this year a Switch I have accumulated a backlog of about 50 retail games (I don't even count the PS+/Games with Gold stuff) but this does not stop me from continuing to buy stuff - because yup new and shiny and want to play (having resisted on release, I have proceeded to buy all the Q4 stuff I wanted this year in the Black Friday/pre Xmas sales despite the backlog) and I am completely unable to prioritise any realistic order of play and basically if I'm lucky I'll clear a game a month on the living room based machines and maybe another on stolen Switch handheld time but I continue to buy at a rate somewhat higher than that.  I've bought Shadow of War, Ass Creed Origins, Star Wars Battlefront 2 and the new South Park in the last 3 weeks - thats months of gaming  at my pace there straight away and um I already had a pile of games still in the shrink-wrap.  Statistically at least one of those is probably never getting opened...(its probably South Park...) 

 

But hey it does kind of make me happy - at least Destiny 2 hasn't turned out to be quite the life still madness the first did so I actually play some of the other games I buy

[Qazimod]

I think the expenditure threads have helped me a lot with the mentality of "only buy things because you know you're going to play them and not just because they're going cheap". I can't say I'm completely immune to freebies and humble bundles, but I often find a nice balance between massive story-driven titles that I buy and intend to finish (Nier, Persona, FFXII) and old arcadey or multiplayer stuff that doesn't really have an "ending" but can keep me busy between releases (Destiny, Street Fighter.)

 

Having said all of that, I don't feel any kind of huge pressure to finish everything I pick up, because some of it can be disappointing and I'd rather spend the spare time with something fun. And are you really going to play through some of the garbage that's been given away on PS+ or GWG because it's free?

[NEG]

It's hard to care about backlog when Sonic3&K already exists.

 

More seriously though, don't mind as much these days. If I get to play, great, if I don't, I was probably doing something equally if not more worthwhile. What I do want to happen however is to be able to move our digital collections to family/new user ownership if and when we pass on. As the law currently is it's a shitty situation to lose all digital ownership.

 

And yes, sure it sucks not to be in on every gaming trend in existence, the developers stories on making such and such game, the memes and spin-offs that spawn out of it, and so on. But there's only so many hours in the day to make our own stories worth caring about.

[Jonzo]

16 hours ago, Broker said:

Games are supposed to be fun, not some task that you need to grit your teeth and finish. I’ve got hundreds of games, but I never worry about them at all, here’s some tips:

 

Firstly, play whatever makes you happy, whether that’s a new game every week, 100 games for five minutes at a time, a methodical crawl through everything you own, or one game for 500 hours whilst ignoring everything else you own. The key is figuring out what you feel like playing and having fun with it.

 

Don’t be afraid to sell things. There may be monetary value in buying games and keeping them, but there’s no value to you personally or your happiness keeping more games than you can ever physically play. Every thing you hoard and don’t play is something someone else could actually be enjoying. If you’ve never actually played a game and don’t feel like you’re going to want to, sell it, give it away or best of all, TRADE IT. There is no shame in turning it into something you’ll actually enjoy, even if you lose some money. If there’s something you might have trouble finding again (like UK PDS or Star Ocean 2 or something) MAYBE consider keeping it, but if you can get £50 for it and buy a new game that you’ll actually play then do it.

 

Stop feeling like you need to experience every big game, or every critically acclaimed game. There’s a few ways to do this, firstly, identify genres you don’t really like and accept that unless it’s a transformative game or something has changed in you, you’re not going to enjoy it so don’t punish yourself by trying to play it. This is not the same as never persevering with games that don’t click immediately. I kept hearing that Dark Souls was perfect for me, so I kept trying and eventually it clicked. My friend suggested Battlefield and I wanted to have fun with him even though military things and FPS stuff usually bores me, and BF4 totally converted me. But I know I don’t like driving games, and I’ve not enjoyed one for years, so I just ignore them no matter how amazing the reviews are.

 

Don’t feel bad about playing a game for ten minutes and deciding you don’t like it. Spending £40 on something that you enjoy for all of ten minutes is shit, but not as shit as wasting hours of your life doing something you don’t enjoy. Don’t feel like you have to 100% a game if playing just the story is enough for you. Play as much as you want to then bail on it whenever you want to. If it’s really right for you then you’ll pick it up again and try again, even if that means buying another copy and losing money buying and trading and buying the same thing four times.

 

Even if you feel like you hate them, try playing online with your friends. Feeling like you’re doing something social makes it feel much more acceptable to ignore your other 400 games and just play one thing. In the same way that “I don’t like books” is a silly statement because there are some you would enjoy, there are online multiplayer games you would enjoy out there. You have not tried them all, so make a start. Also, everything is more fun with your friends.

 

Accept that the human mind is a fickle thing that you will never fully comprehend. Maybe despite you having 1000 awesome, highly rated games on cutting edge consoles, you just want to play Drop 7 on your phone. That is fine! If it makes you happy it’s fulfilling the point of game time. I bought the Witcher 3, but I never played it. I’m not sure why, I just never felt like it. It seems like the kind of thing I should love, but I just never felt like I wanted to start playing it. I’ve played tonnes of long games with slow starts since then, but not that one. Eventually I traded it against something for fuck all compared to what I paid. That’s the way it goes.

 

You don’t have to enjoy anything. Just because you love RPGs it doesn’t mean you have to love the big new one or even bother to play it. Just because you live Mario doesn’t mean you need to play the new one, or bother to play through the one you missed. YOU ARE SUPPOSED TO BE ENJOYING YOURSELF! That’s why you’re spending money. Sometimes the money won’t work out how you thought it would. That’s fine! Now you know. Try to learn, but follow your passion and prioritise fun over everything else. Fuck what you think you should be doing, fuck what other people think. What do you feel like playing right now? How long for? Because that’s the right thing to be playing for the right length of time. 

 

This is such a great post. Take a bow.

[Broker]

Thanks 

[Down by Law]

On ‎18‎/‎12‎/‎2017 at 08:17, Down by Law said:

I haven't had a backlog in years. I play a new release then go back to my multiplayer of choice, then on to the next new release or I'll replay something on my shelf.

 

If i'm not going to play it straight away/in the very near future then I don't buy it.

 

Just to re-iterate on this, my first experience of a 'real' backlog was with pirated Dreamcast games. I could go to a car boot and get 4 games for a tenner. I bought about a dozen of them when I realised that it was a false economy, I'd stick a game on for 10 minutes before rushing to try the next one, and end up never properly playing anything. I binned the lot and went out and bought project justice which gave me hours of entertainment instead.

 

I think it's one of the reasons I still always buy retail over digital, I just love a tangiable product with proper artwork and care put into it (even if physical releases are a bit crap noways compared to the days of old)

 

 

[wretcherd]

I must have deleted Rocket League from my ps4 about 18 times now to force myself to play something new or from the backlog. It is perfect, and so easy to bung on instead of starting Witcher 3.

 

The problem is broadband speed.

I can download RL in 8 minutes.