I guess it’s only been a few days, but I feel like I’ve been chasing my tail in circles trying to figure out a way to track the time I spend playing games in a way that Krikket and Naithan do. I feel like I’ve spent more time futzing around with quantifying my gaming than I have actually gaming.

Kevin Brill’s TempusGameIt is excellent if you’re primarily a PC gamer who focuses on Steam games, but it currently seems to have trouble when a game is being launched from an alternate service like Amazon Games or Xbox Game Pass. I’ve made Kevin aware of this and I’m sure he’ll sort it out but for now given that a lot of my PC games come from Game Pass it is missing a lot of my sessions. (Tempus is free and Kevin is building it in his spare time so bless him for giving us such a great system for Steam and other ‘traditional’ PC launcher games!)

I started looking for alternatives but either they were subscription based (and I don’t care enough to spend money every month to do this) or they were open source products that worked but had interfaces that only a tinkerer could love. ActivityWatch is a good example. It DOES work but I couldn’t find an easy/apparent way to tell it not to track when I was using a browser or discord or something, which meant I had to do some heavily filtering since I’m on this system for 8 hours a day for work. If I was in a tinkering mood I’m jump in and figure this out but I just want something that works.

I am still using Playnite which I LOVE as a launcher and a choice paralysis breaker. It does do tracking with an add-on that gives me a rough idea of what I’ve been playing most frequently, at least. The image at the top of this post is a Gantt chart showing what I’ve been playing. In the app I can roll over those boxes and see how long each session was but I can’t seem to find a way to total them up. [If this was a “live” view of the data you’d see most of the sessions are like 10 minutes long.. I’ve been kind of distracted by all of this. I boot a game, play for a few, then quit to see what data I got.]

And then there’s the question of console games, which I also play. Playnite at least shows I’ve played console games. The 3rd item down, Fallout 76, is the Xbox version. But it doesn’t show time played, and of course none of the PC-based general purpose time trackers will be able to see how long I spent on consoles, so I’m never going to have an accurate figure.

I don’t even know why I WANT this info! I just got it stuck in my craw that I wanted to put charts and graphs in my monthly recap because they look cool!! But at this point it’s all kind of becoming a drag. What I need is Raptr! Whatever happened to Raptr??! But really the chart up there is a good refresher of what I played (which apparently is a LOT of different stuff lately.. won’t fit all of that in the recap.)

Anyway… I’ve been trying to keep to writing at least 2 blog posts/week but I’ve been spending so much time on tracking software (and streaming software, but that’s a different post) that I have hardly been playing any games, so I have nothing else to talk about!!!