A LOT of us have medium to huge gaming backlogs. Most of us are unconcerned with this. We like games, we buy games, but we have limited time to play games so the backlog builds. No big deal. I acknowledge that backlogs are a silly thing to stress over.

And yet, at times I do stress over them. If you don’t, just appreciate that your brain is more reasonable than mine is and take it as a win.

Why do I stress? I’m not even sure. There’s a little bit of “I paid for this and it is wasteful not to then consume it” but honestly a lot of my backlog comes from bundles or super sales or even giveaways. The actual cost of most of my backlog is fairly low. I think it is more “What am I missing out on by not experiencing this game?” At the end of the day, WHY I stress about it isn’t the point of this post.

The point is I learned a couple of interesting tips for combatting your backlog yesterday and I wanted to share. These come from a YouTube video that the algorithm fed me, but like most YouTube videos it is way longer than it needs to be. So here are the ideas that resonated with me.

The author of the video first talks about the mental cost of making choices. We make choices all day long, particularly on work days. By the time you’re ready to play a game, your brain is just exhausted from making choices (so the argument goes) which is why you end up staring at your collection but never actually playing anything.

So the first suggestion is to limit your choice. Pick 3 games in a variety of genres and ignore everything else. For digital games that author suggests finding some kind of physical token to represent the three games, and leave these in a basket by your gaming rig. Now when it is time to play, you still have to make a choice but choosing between 3 games is a lot easier than choosing between 300 games.

Now that you’ve picked a game, put your phone away on the other side of the room, to limit distractions. Personally this didn’t really resonate with me as I don’t find my phone all that distracting, but I get the idea. The idea is to agree with yourself that you’re going to focus on this game for a set amount of time. The author suggests 2 hours but that seems like a LOT of time to spend gaming every night. So you’ll have to pick a duration that works for you.

But here was the (in hindsight, obvious) suggestion that really resonated with me. In your basket with the game tokens (or actual games if your a physical media person) you keep a small notebook. When you’re done playing for the night, make a brief note on what you did and what your next planned task is. The idea is that the next time you play, you can refer to your notebook and refresh your memory and not spend the first 15 minutes of your session trying to remember where you were and what you were doing. This is the suggestion that I’m going to really embrace because even if I play the same game every day I can manage to forget what I was doing from one day to the next.

The one gap in this system is that it doesn’t account for “forever” games. The author of the video is a retro player and his games come from before the time of live service games.

I’m still trying to figure out how to decide when I am “done” with a live service game. In theory it might be “when I finish the MSQ” but I play so slowly that I rarely catch up; new content comes out faster than I can consume it. I don’t play competitive games but those would be even more of a challenge to quantify as being “completed.”

So this is still a work in progress, but I liked the idea of a physical representation of a couple of games, and a notebook to get you back into the fun ASAP when you pick the game up next time.

This might help until I manage to convince my brain that there’s not a thing wrong with having a backlog and there’s no reason to stress over it. These are games, brain, let me just have fun with them!