easymode

There's a lot of games out there. Unlimited games, even. So many games that if you put a newborn baby on an island for 50 years with only the things it needed to survive and a gaming system with every licensed game from the 8-bit to the 64-bit era, they probably wouldn't even make a dent in the NES library because they would be too busy scrolling through all the other more interesting-looking games.


Having grown up with retro games, being introduced to emulation and hacked game consoles early on in life, and understanding just how unbelievably small these games are in comparison to what we have today, something that I constantly run into with emulation is having an overwhelming choice of games to play from, all accessible at the press of a button. You can fit some 30+ years of video game history onto a cheap MicroSD card.

When given the choice of the entirety of gaming history versus your favorite game, it feels impossible to make a decision. What if the greatest game of all time is sitting right in front of me and I don't even know it? Which one of these games could radically change my outlook on life? What if my favorite game sucks in comparison?

I would constantly encounter this issue whenever I would boot up my 3DS. I had several folders of massive games that required anywhere from 10 hours to upwards of 40 hours to complete. I knew I wasn't going to get around to any of these. I could barely get around to the games that I had already started and really enjoyed playing.
I had been talking with my little sister about it, who had been running into the same thing with her 3DS. Unlimited games, but no games. Finally, I was fed up. I took time today to downgrade from a 64GB card to a 16GB card. Even with 16 games of varying complexities and playstyles and a handful of retro games, it still feels daunting to actually sit down and play a game.


Do you run into this issue too? What have you done to get over it?
For me, I've been thinking about starting up something like a book club, but for games. We would vote on one game we all play through together--multiplayer or otherwise--invest a few hours a week into the game, meet up and talk about it, and help each other out or give each other pointers. The times I remember games being most fun was when I was actively playing with others or talking with others about them. Outside of a select few games, they're pretty hard for me to care about nowadays without having other people involved in some way.

I feel your pain. My digital libraries are so large that I have my own, personal discoverability problem... so yeah. There are games that I purchased and really wanted to play... but I thought, "I'll do this after I finish this work." Next thing you know, I have 10 more games from a bundle or something and the other game gets buried. That doesn't even touch on all the emulation and such... like you say: "You can fit some 30+ years of video game history onto a cheap MicroSD card."

Lately, most of my gaming has come from my physical collection. I will walk past the shelf and see Red Faction or something and think, "I never really played much of that..." so now I'm into it and it's pretty damn good. Before that it was No One Lives Forever and Ultima Underworld... both due to me seeing them on the shelf.

I really love playing obscure, small indie games... but I forget what I have at times. I played about 20 of them in a matter of a few days a while back, but that was for "research," purposes... Still fun.

I think there needs to be a system that almost forces us to stop browsing around our library and actually play something... Maybe a 10 minute timer? Going to Blockbuster was like this. Your parents wouldn't wait forever, so you had maybe 10-15 minutes to look through game boxes then you had to decide what you'd be taking home to play for three days... and for three days, it was going to be your world. How do we achieve that again?

One of the reasons I started this forum was to work toward a game of the month club. I know that'll be difficult since there are so many games and genres and some may be into one thing more than others. I have a hard time with jrpg menu-based combat, for instance... but I'd give it a shot.

Do you think we are big enough to get this started?

I relate big time to a lot of what you have both said thus far...I used to force myself to only play one game at a time, but that just made the problem worse. Now I just kinda say fuck it and play what I want when I want...I find that staring at my back catelog just made gaming feel like a chore. Putting on whatever I felt like after a quick look at my library on a whim has helped a lot. It's like a less phusical version of what Ward talked about with picking a game off a shelf.

My approach has its issues, mainly that I do play a lot of old classics several times over and that it takes me way longer to complete a new game than most people, but I find that for me it has made gaming fun again. Trying to come up with rules and restrictions made it feel more like busywork....

As for a game of the month club, I'm all for it!

@ward Physical collections absolutely help. I've found that separating games by collections in Steam can help a lot too; I have a small list that just says "Please play this." It sits at the top of my Steam library so that it's the first thing I see when I go to look for a game to play, although recently that game has almost exclusively been Hades II.

I think there needs to be a system that almost forces us to stop browsing around our library... and actually play something... Maybe a 10 minute timer? Going to Blockbuster was like this. Your parents wouldn't wait forever, so you had maybe 10-15 minutes to look through game boxes then you had to decide what you'd be taking home to play for three days... and for three days, it was going to be your world. How do we achieve that again?

This is the biggest struggle. There's a few ideas bouncing around in my head but I have no idea of how I would go about executing them or how well they would actually work. The core feature for me would having it be a shared experience.

• An opt-in "broadcast" system that beams a game on a weekly/monthly basis onto your device. These games would be bite-sized; small indie games, roguelites, puzzle games, or even demos of larger games to whet your appetite.

• Rotating leaderboards for a given game with a thread for discussion and friendly banter. Maybe very small tournaments with unconventional rules to keep things interesting (e.g., Smash with items; everyone has to play the same character; Tetris but you can only rotate in one direction.

I think a game club would be a lot of fun! Even if it's only a handful of people and we just play small non-committal games to get the ball rolling. It's a lot of fun to see what people are playing and hear about their experiences, and it's even more fun to see how people experience the same game in different ways.

@Casey The "Fuck it, I wanna play this" approach is pretty good honestly, but I agree that the new game fatigue gets pretty tough. If I don't feel like I'm making meaningful progress or I get lost, I tend to drop what I'm playing, even if I really enjoy it. I get a weird anxiety about unfinished games that ultimately stops me from playing the game.

The amount of times I've been able to sit down with enough time to actually play a game and waste it just endlessly scrolling my libraries has been more times than I can count. Now I've taken the time to go through and divide my games in a "to play" list and I set a priority on which I want to play. Now when I get some actual time to play I can quickly go through the list and select a game to play. I have found it's important to make sure I don't let that list get too big or again I run into the same issue. I often will allow only one of each genre in the list so depending on my mood I'll have something to play. In the same vein like @bumbervevo I have limited the amount of storage my box has to limit the amount of installed games.

When it comes to emulation I have to limit myself to certain games I know I want to try out otherwise I just get lost in an ocean of titles, which can be fun on it's own. Play this game for 15-30 minutes to get the feel then move onto the next. The fact I can run a ton of systems on my smart phone is insane but again makes it difficult to actually stick to something.

I have not been able to do the physical thing due to work travel but I have used desktop shortcuts to act as "physical". That way when I log in I have a selection of games I'm either playing or want to play so I never look at the digital libraries. There have been multiple times I'd pick up a game, have a blast, then get busy with work for a few weeks, and completely forget I was working through that title. Only to realize way too late and realize I forgot how to play that game. I don't know it anyone else struggles with this but it happens far too often to me.

Another thing I struggled with was the cost fallacy with some games. I would find myself no longer having fun with a particular game but I kept playing because I had "invested" the time already so I might as well see it to the end. Once I dropped a game I was no longer enjoying was such a feeling of relief I wished I had starting doing it sooner.

One last thing I'll add this isn't only a game thing either but all media. I have books, shows, anime, movies, other hobbies, etc I want to do but, at the end of a long work day the last thing I want to do is make yet another decision so I often fall into familiar comforts. Generally for gaming it's a SimCity game or Rollercoaster Tycoon.

My way of addressing not being able to pick a game to play was to separate my games into groups like currently playing, on-deck and completed. Then I also have a list of all my games that I never look at. This works really well in Steam because I'll keep every category except for currently playing collapsed so when I go to pick a game I only have to choose from the ones I want to play right now.

There is a book club like group on the fediverse for playing games that does what you talking about. If you search for #VideoGameClub you should be able it. The guy the runs it post a pole every month with some game suggestions. Sometimes they're suggestions for the group and other times there's a theme that he goes with. It used to be more active, but it feels like for the last year or so fewer people have actually been discussing the games picked. It has been fun because it got to play some games that I've always been meaning to play like Chrono Trigger, and play games I wouldn't have picked myself like Oxenfree or Night in the Woods.

My spouse and I watch eachother play games, and picking games for eachother to play helps us with the decision paralysis.

I'm also autistic and I really enjoy categorizing things, so I work on a list of games that are special to me on backloggd.com and I'm always trying out new stuff to discover games I might be able to add to the list!

I definitely relate to a lot of what's been said here, my backlog that doesn't even include emulators is large enough for a lifetime as-is, then if you count emulators...just....good lord lol. I've tried to keep a "cool to try soon" list going on Steam and have hid some stuff I got in bundles I know I'll never bother with on Steam. I tend to stick to a few familiar co op/multiplayer titles these days, branching out occasionally. Some of my favs the past few years have been Stalker Gamma/Anomaly, DayZ, Diablo 3/4, 7 Days to Die, The Forest, Sons of the Forest, Valheim, Tarkov, Marauders(but it sadly seems to have died out...), and doing some ghost hunting in Phasmophobia. Did my share of DBD but it's gone very downhill to me personally. HumanitZ looks cool and it's cheap enough, kind of like a top down DayZ. For the most part, I tend to like multiplayer/co op against ai/npc in PVE stuff rather than hardcore pvp so much as I've gotten older...used to really be into Battlefield/COD back in the day and even some Arma

I try to keep a list I update every so often in Notepad of the "major" titles of each year dating back to the 360/PS3 gen I missed that I'd like to play through. If I don't keep it curated to that, I definitely get lost in the anxiety of choice overload. I find that as I get older, super long games tend to overwhelm me at the thought of even starting them. As pretty and cool as it may seem, I really don't see myself doing Crimson Desert for example.

Truth be told, life has been so hectic since 2019 that once I recover from some craziness going on, something else happens lol. So I stick to comfort stuff or just browse online. I think I'll definitely have some more fun with Tarkov and Stalker Gamma once I hopefully get this ganglion cyst out that's pressing on my right ulnar nerve, got some very good news today, a nice hospital is referring me to their actual in-house hand surgeon to get checked out, I've been getting the BS runaround from a different one that my regular PCP referred me to months ago to simply get an MRI.

I mostly only played the vanilla Stalker Anomaly mod until GOG came out with the one click install for Gamma. It seemed a bit daunting to attempt prior to that, but when I looked up how out of curiosity, it wasn't thaaaaat bad to mod out.

I'd really like to play BG3 finally, and the Oblivion Remaster from last year, but, emergencies irl have basically been taking away any spare money I have for awhile now sadly so I haven't really been buying many games.

I highly recommend anybody try out the free Stalker Anomaly if you'd like a big free roam very atmospheric and spooky shooter to get lost in. Considering it can be modded out or a big modpack DL'd, I could play it essentially forever, making up your own rules, trying a harder mode out, trying permadeath mode, roleplaying your character hardcore as their faction, etc. Gamma is basically a giant modpack for Anomaly. It's offline and can be saved and paused at any moment too