The Backlog Diaries: A postmortum
Lessons I learned and didn't learn from my year of playing older games
In 2024 I decided to do something very silly. Starting with the assembly of a list of every game I owned but have not played, approximately 165 titles, over the course of 12 months I played, documented and wrote about 62 of them.
Of that 62, I completed 24 titles, I abandoned 25 and I did not finish but would like to return to 11 of them. There are 103 games remaining from that initial backlog (I have added nearly sixty entries to it in the past year, but shhhh!!!).
Those are the stats, but what was this experience like? And what did I learn along the way?
Well, let me tell you all about it.
So listen, right off the bat I want to give you a piece of advice:
Don't do this. It’ll only stress you out.
One of the goals of the backlog Diaries, of course, was to make an active effort to catch up with some of my personal white whales. Games I know I should have played already but always got caught up in the snare of the zeitgeist, the newer, sometimes lesser thing instead of the experience I know in my heart would enrich me.
But the other goal of the backlog Diaries was a little more insidious, and in a way emotionally dishonest. This was an exercise in project management, of deadlines and writing exercises.
Can I tell you a story about a game I otherwise would have little to say about? Can that story be meaningful and enriching to you, dear audience? Is there value to tackling the past as much as one attempts the future?
The actual tangible lesson I've learned from this past year is that I really do not have as much free time as I thought. And that sucks, but it's also been an extraordinarily bad year to attempt this kind of project.
I was trying to work my way through this project while also contending with a huge career defining event in my day job, as well as the emotional fatigue of reckoning with fascist politics both at home and overseas, an ocean of death gracing my phone screen as I try to keep the lives of those being torn apart by the military industrial complex in my heart and mind.
It feels folly to be stressed out about something as stupid as a self-inflicted video project when there are so many more worthy problems to contend with, but then again artistry has always been an enclave amidst hardship, and I hope that even for a few of you out there, that my work has in some way helped you to take your mind off the worries of the world.
In more forensic detail though, here are some further thoughts about the project specifically.
Games take longer to play than you think
I think in picking games for a backlog list one must engage in a little bit of internal conflict. A backlog in the modern era is not simply a collection of games you liked the look of. Sometimes through bundles or freebies or even random gifts from strangers one ends up with a selection of oddities that must be contended with.
What is the likelihood that this piece of work you know nothing about will end up becoming an experience that stays with you forever? I don't know how to answer that, there are certainly experiences in my own collection that I am grateful to myself for sticking with, others less so.
The key is to understand the value of your own free time, and to figure out what it is exactly that you want to get out of an experience, and how long it will take to achieve that goal.
I used How Long to Beat as a general reference for what kind of investment I would need for each game in my collection, but early on in the project I realized that I was going to struggle with some of these games, even the ones I was really enthusiastic about, simply because I did not have enough time.
You don't have to finish something to get the most out of it, I don't think. But at the same time, if you're approaching a longer title, maybe have a think about what else you might be supplementing that experience with.
Because shorter games don't always end up being all that short. And life always finds a way to get in the way. And also bloody hell the number of new games that come out practically every day that somehow demand your attention…
Do not give in to sunk cost
It's not about a game being good or bad. In fact I don't think those things ever factor into the decisions we make, but in this instance you should never feel any amount of guilt in abandoning a game purely on the basis that you aren't getting anything out of it.
A lot of titles I engaged with during this project were things that on paper should have been absolute smoke shows for me, and yet very little actually kept my attention from start to finish.
Some of that was down to time constraints, sure, but more often than not there was a consequence to me understanding that I do actually have very specific tastes and that in many cases what was actually going on in my head was a validation of games as art, the universal maxim that no maxims are universal, and that a thing not being for me is not a iron branded stamp of damnation.
A key example of this was Kerbal Space Program, a game that I know is adored by so many folks. Successful enough to warrant a sequel, a thing to obsess over and engage with for many hundreds of hours, I just couldn't find the enthusiasm for it. I pushed myself to keep playing but in that space I really felt like I was essentially wasting my time.
But I did play it. Had I not, I would have probably wondered for the rest of my life if I had been missing out on something wonderful. Which leads me to my next point.
There is still value in pushing yourself to try things
While the overall lesson I've learned from this year is ‘don’t do this’, there is still a lot that I really enjoyed about the experience.
I played, and loved, things that I probably wouldn't have fired up in the first place otherwise. I gave multiple games a second chance that ended up unlocking the core of what made those works so compelling in the first place.
Wandersong, one of the first games I played for this project, opened up and blew me away just moments from where I had previously left it, and returning to Monster Hunter Rise with a new character and a new weapon set gave me so much appreciation for how varied and sophisticated that game really is.
The stats don’t lie, most people don’t finish games. Most people see only a fraction of what a game has to offer, and whether that’s due to a sort of machine gun approach to trying a bit of everything, or those very specific tastes coming back to haunt you, I don’t think there should be any great shame in leaving things half finished, so long as your reasons for abandonment make sense.
With some games you can see the writing on the wall within the first hour. This was certainly true for many of the titles I engaged with this year, but an almost equal amount found ways to surprise me in their latter acts, not always in some outlandish, paradigm shifting manner, but moreso along the lines of a good stretch of gameplay or an expansion of the core mechanics that elevates the context of what you played already.
It’s hard to judge. I think ‘one more go’ after you’re already starting to get fed up runs the risk of spoiling what was already there, but sometimes that ends up being the key to unlocking a greater appreciation for a work. I think it’s a worthy gamble.
Games should be appreciated, not ‘beaten’
The competitive language used to describe games is a death knell for any nuanced discussion of what the medium means for artistry. I started writing this post at the close of 2024, when many outlets and writers were preparing their end of year lists, and the colossal task of taking stock of the creative output of thousands of artists, coders and designers is one that is inevitably determined more by what those writers didn't play than did.
In a way I appreciate this more than those who deigned to dip a toe in absolutely everything, because being selective about the works you do engage with allows you to appreciate them all the more.
In a way ‘clearing the backlog’ is no less violent a set of words than ‘beating a game'. It evokes a sense of dreaded obligation rather than excitement, like eating your vegetables (although vegetables are also getting a bad rap in this idiom, they're good! You just need to cook them properly!)
So give yourselves the gift of some homework for the new year: find new ways to talk about how you engage with interactive experiences, how you find yourself enriched by them and in turn how you know when your time with it comes to a close. Don’t think too rigidly about it. Just have fun. Or don’t, if that’s the intended experience of the game.
Some final thoughts
I have no regrets about this project, but I did find it interesting as I was preparing to edit volume 4 that Daryl Talks Games, the creator who spurred this idea for me in the first place, published a follow up video detailing his experience having another pop at his own personal backlog.
It was interesting to see that he had come to a less holistic, more specific conclusion about his own experience with treating this weird phenomenon as a journey rather than a job. Less about feelings and more about strategy.
The fact that he wanted to go back in for round two is interesting. I myself have toyed with the idea of quietly chipping away at the collection again over this next year, sans the laborious process of talking about those games and producing a video on the collection. But I think for me, I need to rethink my relationship with games as a medium in its totality.
As I said in the closing remarks of Volume 4, your backlog is not real. It’s a myth drummed up by the lords of FOMO to encourage you to think twice about how you enjoy your precious free time. There’s a balance to be had. The past and the future both exist in some form in the present. What you do with those temporal entities matters more than the fact that you did anything at all.
Thanks for taking the time to read all this, to close everything off, here’s a rundown of every game I played for this project, and it’s completion status:
Volume 1
Alan Wake’s American Nightmare - Complete
Wandersong - Complete
Gato Roboto - Abandoned
Onechanbara Z2 Chaos - Abandoned
Arx Fatalis - Unfinished
Lunistice - Complete
Call of Juarez: Gunslinger - Abandoned
Deltarune Chapters 1&2 - Complete
Even the Ocean - Complete
Left Alive - Abandoned
The Final Station - Complete
Westerado - Complete
Untitled Goose Game - Complete
God’s Trigger - Abandoned
Hotel Dusk - Unfinished
Kerbal Space Program - Abandoned
Volume 2
Rumu - Complete
Aer: Memories of Old - Complete
Sludge Life - Complete
Kowloon’s Curse: Lost Report - Complete
Hitman Agent 47 - Abandoned
INK - Abandoned
Delver - Abandoned
Mini Ninjas - Abandoned
SUPERHOT - Abandoned
E.Y.E. Divine Cybermancy - Abandoned
Deus Ex Invisible War - Unable to get working
Hyper Light Drifter - Abandoned
Superbrother Sword & Sworcery EP - Complete
20XX - Abandoned
Else Heart.Break () - Unfinished
Monster Hunter Rise - Unfinished
Volume 3
Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light - Complete
Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor - Complete
Anodyne - Unfinished
Among the Sleep - Complete
Half Life - Unfinished
The Ship - Abandoned
Dandara - Abandoned
Kingsway - Unfinished
Pyre - Abandoned
Shovel Knight - Abandoned
Penny Arcade On the Rain Slicked Precipice of Darkness 3 - Abandoned
Costume Quest - Complete
The Shrouded Isle - Unfinished
Solstice - Complete
Hollow Knight - Abandoned
Volume 4
Deadlight - Complete
Costume Quest 2 - Complete
Kowloon High School Chronicle - Unfinished
Little Nightmares - Complete
Fear and Hunger - Abandoned
Stubbs the Zombie -Abandoned
Where the Water Tastes Like Wine - Abandoned
While True: Learn () - Abandoned
Professor Layton 3 - Complete
Ys1 - Unfinished
The Messenger - Unfinished
Daikatana - Abandoned
EDF 4.1 - Unfinished
Wheels of Aurelia - Complete
Cthulhu Saves Christmas - Complete