I reached two milestones in the year 2015. In September, I played my sixtieth game for the blog. It doesn't seem like an especially significant number, but it is the number of games I owned at the beginning of this project. If I hadn't bought any more, I'd have finished it months ago.
My other milestone is that 2015 was the year when my list of unplayed games reached 100. It was thanks to things like the impossibly great Star Wars bundle, that got me fourteen games for 21 dollars. At the time, that seemed like a great deal I couldn't possibly pass up. . .
But, looking back over the year, despite having a slightly higher post-per-month average in 2015 than in 2014 (24.25 compared to 23.5), I am now 17 games farther away from my goal than I was at this time last year. At the rate I'm going, I will literally never finish all my games.
This has prompted some soul-searching on my part. Is the Decadent Gamer blog to be my life's work? What about my other interests? These are questions I grappled with over the course of the year. I still haven't come up with any definite answers, except "maybe don't buy quite so many games in 2016 and see if that helps."
My goal for the year is, by Jan 1, 2017, to have 60 or fewer unplayed games in my Steam library. I feel like if I can make back to my original starting point, I may actually have a hope of completing my goal. In theory, this should be relatively easy. All I have to do is not buy any more games.
Last year, I made a similar resolution, but I left myself wiggle-room with the qualifier "frivolous." No more frivolous purchases. Which, in retrospect, was obviously bullshit. As a value judgement, "frivolous" can change from moment to moment. I don't think any of my 2015 purchases were quite as speculative as things like The Last Remnant or Morphopolis, but if I were really thinking, I'd have admitted I was only interested in about a third of that Star Wars bundle.
Finally, I'd like to once again thank all my readers for sticking with the blog for another year, and especial thanks goes out to those of you who sent me games to play. I've really enjoyed most of the games I got to play this way (I'd feel bad about using a qualifier in a message of thanks, but Sakura Spirit was on this list this year, and I will never forgive that. Never.), and as much as I might stress out about my own excessive spending habits, I've never felt burdened by my reader challenges (again, except fucking Sakura Spirit).
Here's to an exciting and fruitful 2016. I hope we're all productive in advancing our goals.
Clearly, our imperative is now to gift you with games such than you cannot meet your goal and must continue the blog forever. Except that overwhelming you with games might cause you to despair and quit. We shall have to carefully husband your list of games....
ReplyDeleteI enjoy this blog very much, from its mission statement to the great thought you put into your examination of your games and yourself.
If I could put in a request, it's to keep up to date on the links under the challenge list. I wanted to revisit the horror that was Sakura Spirit after the above mention, and it isn't a link.
I tried once before to send you a game on Steam, but it didn't take for some reason. Time to try again!
-PAS
I've received your game, Hyperrogue, and it looks very interesting. Thank you.
ReplyDeleteAs for the links on the side, those are actually only 2 days old. As I was preparing my End of Year Retrospective, I realized that there really should be links to the completed games, and that this was a feature that should have been in there from the beginning, so I started changing the sidebar. I got all the way through 2014, and will do 2015 tonight.
Oh, good. I thought I remembered checking them for links ages ago and seeing that they weren't. When I checked again and saw that some were, I assumed that I must've been mistaken.
DeleteI hope you enjoy Hyperrogue. I sure did!