Backlogs – seemingly the nastiest thing that a video game collection can become. Once, you were just amassing a few games for hibernation season, or because they looked cool, but then you are shocked to find that all of a sudden you have more games than you know what to do with.

For myself, this is a large issue that I’m just really coming to grips with now. My backlog is a craggy, mist-wreathed mountain range, filled with peaks, hidden valleys, and strange little towns dotting the range. My question for today is, what constitutes a backlog and what do you do about them?

I am a definite collector of video games, as well as books – I have tried to cut back on collecting statues and other random collectables, for the most part. Games, however, have a way of amassing themselves, especially RPGs. Roleplaying games are insidious, as they are often priced relatively cheaply but stretch out for potentially over a hundred hours. That’s a lot of gaming time, something I am getting less and less time to do the older I get. The problem with seeing games this way – as things to be completed, as lengthy (even mandatory) time investments rather than immersive experiences – is that all of a sudden much enjoyment is lost when you’re playing a game. Recently I hopped back into Furi, a game I thought was awesome but put down one day and never picked back up again. I found myself, in my anxiety about limited time to play and the huge number of games that still wait for me, wishing a particular boss was over. The boss themselves was genius; they were like a more refined version of Crash Bandicoot 3’s Dingodile, with added use of symbolism and metaphor. It should have been exactly the thing I am interested in – challenging, slickly controlled and paced, and with an awesome soundtrack.

Yet for some reason, that particular play session, all I could think about was the burden I had saddled myself with. I had suddenly framed it as a mission, a task for me to complete. And with that comes a sense of obligation. That obligation can easily be twisted into something definitively negative, something that corrodes what should be fun free time and instead turns it into something anxiety or boredom inducing.

I have cleared a few games from my backlog already that were not so good, and yes, by the end, those games most definitely felt like obligations. But Furi was the first good game in my backlog that I hit that all of a sudden I wanted to be over early. This negative attitude surfaced from my approach to video games, this sudden feeling that I had a problem and I wanted it desperately to be fixed.

I know for a fact video game collecting won’t go away for me. In fact, I’ll probably collect countless more games and consoles as the years go by. I’m one of those people who’d love a gaming collection room, as well as a library – I’ll see if I can ever make it happen, but still. It’s a goal. The psychology behind actually playing through a collection is fiendish, though.

Each game becomes a potential risk. If you want to see every game through to the end, which I don’t necessarily want to do if it’s that bad, then by starting a bad game you inadvertently waste time you could have spent clearing a good game off of your backlog. Hopefully if you have a backlog all you have are good games, but sometimes games that even get rave reviews just don’t gel with you. I’ll be elaborating on some of those later in some further analysis pieces, but for now, suffice to say that even “all-time classics” aren’t so classic after all sometimes. Every game played is a subjective experience and there’s no way to know whether a game will be “worth it” (regardless of whatever metric you use to determine a game’s worth).

The solution to seeing your purchases as a problem to be solved rather than as an experience to be enjoyed, at least for me, was to stop starting new games, or, most importantly, to stop replaying games I’d played a million times before. No more booting up Pathologic, for instance, or jumping into another hundred hours of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. I could hardly clear my backlog if I just stuck to the same old games. That being said, I did just play through Silent Hill 3 four times in the last six weeks, so maybe there’s still some room for improvement there too.

That’s where a big problem lies for me – my conflicting desires to get really into a game and to understand what makes it tick, whether that be story-wise or mechanically, and my other desire to actually play new video games that I bought with money. I’m sure there’s a happier middle-ground to be found that I haven’t actually located yet, but right now I’m struggling with my love for certain games. Silent Hill 3 captured my imagination over the end of the year, and I found myself running through it again and again simply because it’s that good. I saw all three endings, unlocked all the extra weapons, and managed to clock a “Possession” ending (that’s the hardest ending to unlock, requiring most of the game’s enemies dead) in under three hours, also obtaining an 8.6 star rating out of ten. While it might not sound that impressive, that was a cumulative effort made into understanding how individual enemies should be approached, how quickly Heather moves, blocks and shoots, and the spots where ammo and health are located. It made me appreciate even more fervently the intense thought put into the design of survival horror titles, and without all those subsequent playthroughs, I don’t think I would have loved it as much as I now do.

New games are an unknown, a risk. Why play a new, potentially mediocre game (because there are way more mediocre games than good or bad) when you can settle back into a comfortable rhythm? It’s a tricky thing to justify, even after I spent money on obtaining a game, as well as the time I spent researching it to see whether it would be my style of game or not. But as my backlog has grown through the years, I’ve come to realize that if I wait much longer, I will have outgrown some of what I’ve bought. I’m a bit sick of point and click adventure games – if they aren’t well written,  I just put them down. But somehow I have so many of them to play through! I suspect Humble Bundle was a bit of a contributor to that, but goodness. I’ve no idea how I ended up with so many of them, or why. Maybe I just really liked those first two Monkey Island games, as well as a few other noteworthy ones (Lion’s Song was a good one, off the top of my head), but boy. Expect some more rumination on point and clicks as the year rolls on, of course alongside more classic horror analysis.

So, playing games as well should never feel like an obligation, I’m sure you’d agree. When I started to get anxious about my progress, I took a step back and realized that it didn’t matter whether or not I finished all the games, more that I was having fun with the one I was playing in the moment. If I wasn’t, I should put it down. This is starting to sound like some kind of minimalist philosophical advice for decluttering, but it’s surprising how much I needed that philosophy as I started really getting to grips with the length of my backlog.

Long games, things I once savoured as I could luxuriate for hours in an immersive world and thrive with ever-evolving gameplay loops and challenges (at least, the good ones let me do that), now seem more like obstacles towards a backlog-free future. I have roughly fifty RPGs in my backlog, and each of those will take probably a good chunk of a year to finish. I’ve decided that the best way to approach these would be to either a) stream it, giving me an excuse to spend some more time on it, or b) have one on the go while I complete shorter games on the side. But these will likely be soul-destroying if I let them, as I feel that my backlog gets further and further out of reach. “But HGA”, you say, “why not just not buy new video games?” Well… I’m not going to dignify that with an answer.

I see the next few years as potentially the last time to get to grips with my backlog before it spirals inevitably out of control as I grow older and time slips away from me. That is unless I somehow manage to make some money out of playing video games and justify the time I spend playing them! I think that having a backlog isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Certainly I shouldn’t have as many games in my backlog as I do, mainly because I have frittered away way too much time replaying games, but the fact that I’m now willing to do something about it indicates that I’m growing as a person.

Engaging with my backlog will be a process that will generate more thoughts for this website than before, and I hope there’ll be plenty more “You Should Plays”, and perhaps even a few different review categories that will allow me to build a larger backlog of stuff for you, the readers! Video games are an ongoing fascination of mine, and as the mainstream industry evolves into ever more terrifying places, I will likely remain a staunch critic of thematic inconsistencies and a champion of games that dare to try something even remotely different. Or just games that give me a good scare. You know how it is.

Here’s to a great new year ahead, filled with more video games than I’ll ever know what to do with.