💭 To backlog or not to backlog
It's been a while...and I don't want to start this post with, once again, it's been a while, I'm still trying to find my rhythm, blah blah blah, but here I am starting it like that 🤦🏻♀️
I've been sick. I've been working. I've been away. And I am still trying to figure out...what? I guess I'm trying to figure out how I want to play my games. Which sounds crazy, I know. Gaming is supposed to be fun. Why am I making it such a big job? Why am I trying to maximize and optimize every single part of my gaming, my free time, my play? I think there's a fear that if I don't, I'm going to miss out. But honestly, I think trying to optimize it so much is making me miss out, because I just feel overwhelmed and pressured when I actually go to play something.
I recently picked up Fire Emblem: Three Houses again because Fortune's Weave came out, and my brain immediately started going, oooh, I want Fortune's Weave. I want Fortune's Weave. Shiny new thing. And I have a job now, so I have money coming into my account again. I can buy it if I really want to. That's actually been interesting to notice, because obviously it was easier to do a no-buy challenge when I also had limited funds. I really had to make those choices because I wasn't having much money coming into my account. Now I do, and I can feel my brain going, Oh, but you have money sitting there. You could totally just buy whatever game you want again. And that is not the point.
I am proud that the no-buy challenge, even though it was forced through circumstance, seems to have actually rewired my brain a little bit. I've stopped mindlessly buying game after game after game, and now I'm much more likely to look at what I already own and ask whether something there could scratch the itch of whatever new thing I suddenly want. Which brings me back to Fire Emblem....I wanted Fortune's Weave. I already own Three Houses. So I picked Three Houses back up. It took me maybe a day to reorient myself and remember how everything works because I'm still in Part One. Still, I'm about halfway through, so tutorial time is pretty much over. The game assumes I know what I'm doing, and meanwhile I'm staring at everyone's weapons thinking, Wait, what does Bernadetta use again? But I figured it out, and I'm enjoying it ? (Yes, that is a question mark I used right there...) The thing I'm noticing, though, is that I'm also kind of just trying to get through it. Sometimes I load it up, and I can feel myself thinking, okay, let's make some progress. Let's get through this. Let's finish it so I can take it off the list. And it's like...then why are you playing this? If every time I open the game I'm thinking, Let's just get through this so I can be done with it, what is the point? And actually, I started playing Three Houses again specifically because I wanted Fortune's Weave, and I thought maybe what I was craving was a Fire Emblem game. But after spending some time with Three Houses again, I'm starting to think that maybe...maybe I don't actually want a Fire Emblem game right now 🫣
Around the same time, my friend Christina messaged me and was basically like, "Are you going to get Dragon Quest VII Reimagined? It's on sale right now. Maybe we can play through it together!" And, well...that reopened the Dragon Quest can of worms. I'd already been trying very hard not to buy another game, so at first it was still very much a no, no, no, we are playing the games we already own situation. But then I replayed the Dragon Quest VII demo and really, really enjoyed it again. And suddenly I wasn't thinking about how I should really finish this game first, or get that game off my backlog. I just wanted to keep playing Dragon Quest. I just wanted to get sucked into the world, meet new friends, and enjoy the cozy bedtime-story vibes I get whenever I play Dragon Quest games. So...I bought it. Yeah...I bought it, okay! I know...I know...I just spent several paragraphs talking about not buying more games...and here I am, buying a game. But I think there's a difference. I didn't see Fortune's Weave, get excited, and buy it immediately. I stopped. I went back to something I already owned because I thought it might give me the thing I was looking for. And in doing that, I realized that maybe the thing I thought I wanted wasn't actually what I wanted at all... Are you keeping up? 😅 Maybe that's what I'm actually trying to get better at. Not never buying another game, and not forcing myself to finish everything I already own before I'm "allowed" something new. Just being able to tell the difference between wanting a game and actually wanting to play it. Because I definitely wanted Fortune's Weave. I just don't think I actually wanted to play it.
I think this is also why I recently went through all of the games in my backlog and got a little ruthless about them. I had a lot of games sitting in some version of "need to come back to this." They weren't finished, so they were still in the backlog, even if I hadn't touched them in forever and didn't actually have any particular desire to go back. So I went through and reclassified a bunch of them as either DNF or Satisfied. Satisfied basically means: I played enough of this. I got what I wanted out of it. I'm good. I'm done. And that is a completely arbitrary choice. Maybe I played ten hours of a hundred-hour RPG. Maybe I didn't see the credits. Maybe technically there is loads of game left. But if I feel satisfied with what I got out of it, why isn't that enough? Dredge is one of those games. It was actually part of my original Long Play list, and it's not even a particularly long game. HowLongToBeat says it's something like nine and a half hours, and I've already played around six. So there's definitely a part of me that thinks, Come on. You've only got a few hours left. Just finish it! Except...I don't really want to. I've played Dredge. I understand the mechanics. I enjoyed what I played. And I'm not particularly interested in playing more to find out what happens with the story. So: Did Not Finish. Same with Strange Horticulture. I put quite a few hours into that and, if I'm being honest, I don't really care how the story ends either. Did Not Finish. I was actually pretty savage once I started doing this. I think my Did Not Finish/Satisfied category went from maybe ten games to 82! Which sounds ridiculous, but it actually feels really good. It gives me more space to look at the games that are left and think about which ones I might genuinely be interested in playing, instead of looking at this enormous mass of everything I have ever bought and feeling like it's an obligation.
It reminds me of something I heard in a YouTube video from 8BitJoystick: "A backlog is basically a museum of our idealized stress-free selves." And yeah, that's exactly it. My backlog is a museum of my idealized self. It's me thinking I'd really be a Persona 5 girly, or that I would definitely love ABZU because everyone talks about how amazing it is. Or that Cyberpunk 2077 is totally something I'm going to sit down for and properly get into one day. Maybe I will! The games I choose to DNF or mark as Satisfied now don't mean that Future Me can't ever touch them again. That's the beauty of the collection. It's a collection. It's there for me if I want it. It's just time to loosen its grip on the feeling of obligation to the past me who bought these games.
I like having a library of games. I like having all these different things to pick from, depending on what I'm in the mood for. But somewhere along the way, the library turned into a backlog, and a backlog started to feel like a list of unfinished things that I need to complete. And that... that I definitely do not want in my life anymore.