Comment by khalilravanna | Hacker News Reader

Comment by khalilravanna | Hacker News Reader

I had this problem but with videogames. What I ended up doing was making a giant spreadsheet in Airtable with every game I've ever played and ever want to play. I have a nice little "What To Play Next" grid of images that I'm constantly tinkering with the order of as my fancy gravitates towards one genre or another. E.g. If I finish a long JRPG I'll probably filter on games of a shorter length or a Shooter for a palette cleanse and move that higher up in the list.

The important parts for me were:

* Don't assume you'll play everything or stress about "missing" games

* Easy visibility into what I'm currently playing, what I liked in the past, and what I've been thinking about playing next

* Try not to play more than 2 games concurrently. Then I end up never finishing anything, I appreciate the games I play less, and then I have less fun playing games overall.

Bonus points with this approach: Since I always have something I'm excited to play next, I'm never in a rush to buy games new. I actually save a fair amount of money because I'm almost always playing games a couple years old and on sale for 50%+ off.

This approach has been so successful and enjoyable for me I even thought about spinning this off into a product online but figured my weird OCD approach maybe isn't that generally applicable to other. Plus you can just create your own Airtable tailored to your own needs.

EDIT

If anyone wants to make their own list and wants some data to start, here's ~1000 games to start with my data with some of the more personal columns pruned out: https://www.dropbox.com/s/guc3tjefoyeyfvr/Games-Library-2023...

Most of the columns are self-explanatory. IGDB = is a games database run by Twitch (https://www.igdb.com/). I use the ID as basically a foreign key to their table and then I have scripts that query stuff in there like their critic's rating and release date programmatically.

Also if anyone knows of any other public data sets of video games and video game metadata please let me know!

I made a drastic improvement in my mindset with regards to media backlogs when I realized that they they exist to entertain me and that my whims are the only thing that matters. I don’t owe that pile of books anything. Now they’re not allowed to generate stress, only entertainment!

I think people feel forced to get the value they put in back out of every single one of them asap as to not feel like they wasted their money which is what is causing that stress to begin with, even though there really isn't any reason for that urge if you look at it. The backlog is going to be there practically forever, just waiting - granted it's not tied to a service which might shut down at any moment.

That's why libraries (or, shall we say, digital libraries) are great, I don't have to worry about running out of media or feel like I need to get value from them.

I also try not to play more than a handful of games at a time. The paradox of choice is real.

I tend to play older games, and games I can pick up and play for five minutes at a time. Think Game Boy. A level here and a level there can feel like you've achieved way more than some longer, more grindy games.

I keep a couple of lists of games.

A massive "sounds interesting" list of games that I hear about along the way. I may never play some of them, but it sounded good at the time. Title and system is about all I put here. If I come back and don't remember what it was, it probably wasn't as interesting as I thought.

The other is list with WIP, started, and finished games.

If something slides into the started pile and I forget where I was, I just remove it. Life is too short to worry about things that are supposed to be fun.

> I also try not to play more than a handful of games at a time. The paradox of choice is real.

In general I'm like this, but I also have games that are exclusions to the rule that I pop back around to from time to time, like the save I have in Factorio that I come back to and tinker with now and then (I keep a text file around with my general to-do list so I don't spend an hour running around the base trying to remember what the hell I was doing, while marveling at various bits of kludged together spaghetti)

As for books, I'm generally working through at least 3 at a time: One on audible, for commutes, one on my kindle, and one in print. I try to keep the kindle/print books varied so I switch between whichever strikes my fancy at the moment.

Yeah I compartmentalize exceptions like these as well. Like I don't count "ongoing coop games with friends" or "long term games" (like your Factorio save, or something like League of Legends) towards my broader "What I'm currently playing" count.

I've got the same issue, particularly with PlayStation Plus, where there are countless games available at minimal cost.

My previous strategy was to begin a game, that would be my main game, while sampling others on the side. If one of the side games caught my interest more, it would take the main game's place, and I might return to the original game later.

This approach was low-pressure, but it often took me years to complete many games.

I used to handle my side projects similarly, starting numerous projects but rarely bringing them to completion. Lately, I've been making an effort to stick with a side project long enough to at least show it to friends.

Now, I'm pushing myself to stay committed to two games at a time. One game is from top of my list that I really want to play. The other is a shorter one. This way I can enjoy that satisfying feeling of accomplishment more frequently.

I'd never considered making a spreadsheet for this, but now I'm intrigued by the idea!

> I used to handle my side projects similarly, starting numerous projects but rarely bringing them to completion. Lately, I've been making an effort to stick with a side project long enough to at least show it to friends.

I've been following the same approach, but also noticed that it's less effective at utilizing my excitement. Every project hits the point where sooner tedious work must be done and I've found myself sometimes stay away from it for a few weeks and not pick up something I'm excited about because I should really work on the tedious thing, so I work on neither.

Ha, are you me? I've got an extremely similar setup.

I used Airtable to solve 3 problems:

1. With so many free games (Epic, GoG, PS+, Gamepass, etc), it's hard to know if/where I own a game 2. With so many owned games, it's hard to pick a thing to play. 3. Keeping track of what games I've played and how I felt about them. I do a big writeup of "my best media of the year" and it's hard to keep track of what I play.

Data wise, I also center everything on the IGDB ID, which gives me a lot of basic metadata. I also store Steam ID if available, because that's a more common foreign key. I've got a custom React extension that handles adding and fetching data. I've got tables for Games, Purchases, and Playthroughs, plus support for replay reasons and genre selection.

I recently did a big migration to add HLTB data, which I sure __thought__ was going to be simple and ended up being a big pain. I'm going to do a writeup for it once I find the time, because it did end up being interesting.

In terms of existing data, I found https://github.com/leinstay/steamdb very useful for collating information (though I had to shrink it a bit with `jq`- those are some pretty hefty JSON documents.

Here's my completed games list: https://airtable.com/shrJvjcnh0psf3ha6/tblF5D5k2qMuzrao8

I've got similar setups for books, movies, and TV shows. They're all linked on my site: https://xavd.id/#my-media-lists

I totally agree this is overkill for most people, but I've also found it super successful for increasing my enjoyment of videogames in an odd way. A bit part of that recently was recategorizing games from a 1-4 scale of interest level to a more human scale of "Play Next", "Play Soon", "Want to Play", "Play Eventually", "Would Like to Play", and "Won't Play". This lets me functionally hide games that I really don't intend to play (especially ones I just added to accounts for free). Narrowing my "Play Next" list down to about 15 games and restricting "Now Playing" to ~ 1 / platform __greatly__ reduces the cognitive overhead of a "backlog" and turns them into "a fun buffet of things I can do".

It hasn't been updated in a while but I have used this games list before. (https://github.com/Elbriga14/EveryVideoGameEver) IGDB sounds incredible though, thanks for sharing. I'm curious if you use How Long to Beat to get the completion time. I've used completion time to produce some helpful metrics.

Yes I use How Long To Beat! I was amazed to see it’s so popular it’s even integrated into IGN’s page for games.

And wow storing them all as JSON that’s cool. I wish there was something with as much data as IGDB but you could download and access as easily as JSON files. Their API is really good but obviously has rate limits, etc.

A strength of a product, particularly where emotion and motivation are concerned, is guidance and encouragement - making it easy to do. Even if you "could" do it without help.

Most people aren't autodidacts... even elite atheletes have coaches.

I would like your wisdom (and Oliver's) but unfortunately I have added both to a Notion webclipper that I will not see for 2-3 years.

I've thought about setting up something like this before for myself. You might have given me the motivation I needed...

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