I’m a big fan of making lists. Every week starts with me sitting down with my morning coffee and making a series of lists for the week. The chores that I need to do around the house and the errands I need to run. The things I need to do for work, which then gets further broken down each day into daily to-do lists and lists of meetings. I check the (overly long and somewhat intimidating) list of things I want to write and add any new ideas that have been floating around in my head for the last week. I have a personal, hidden channel in my Discord server that I use entirely to keep track of YouTube videos I want to watch, articles that I want to read, and reminders to myself. Lists are one of the best ways that I’ve found to keep my chronically disorganized, mile-a-minute brain in check and actually remember things that I need to do or want to experience.
With all this said, you really shouldn’t be surprised when I say that I of course have a dedicated spreadsheet for tracking my gaming backlog. For those not familiar with the concept, that’s a list of all the games that I intend to play at some point but have never gotten around to actually doing so. The interesting thing about this list is that, unlike the many other lists I keep, I hate this one. It just doesn’t work. Instead of making me feel organized, it makes me feel overwhelmed. Instead of helping me to figure out what I want to play next, it presents me with so many choices that my brain shuts down and becomes paralyzed with indecision. Every time a new game that I want to play comes out, the list reminds me of all the money I’ve spent on games that are sitting on a shelf or in a digital collection un-played and gathering dust. Despite being a list that I put together for fun, there is nothing fun about looking at this list. It is a perfectly cultivated FOMO factory. It is a monument to indecision. It is a prison of obligation. I hate it and I think it might hate me back.
I first sat down and made this list after watching this video from the (awesome and seemingly kinda slept-on) YouTube channel Daryl Talks Games. The title clearly acknowledges that the experiment Daryl was embarking on (finishing his gaming backlog over the course of the next year) was misguided. I would be surprised if most people didn’t find themselves thinking, “Oh, there’s no way in hell he’s doing this” after finishing the first video. But despite thinking that, I thought that maybe the structure and rigidity of the physical list would help me actually clear some games out and make a dent on my backlog. So I sat down and made a first pass just with games that I either already owned in some form, or had access to via the streaming services I subscribe to.
That list would have taken me around 1,400 hours to finish. Considering that I maybe get two hours of time to play a game in on an average day, that would take me around a solid month of non-stop gaming to clear. No sleeping, no working, no writing, nothing but gaming. For an entire month. And that was before every game that came out in 2023 was on the list. Rather than feeling organized and with a clear path forward like I usually do after I put together a list, I felt dejected, overwhelmed, and honestly dreaded trying to work my way through the monster that I had created. Where I usually find making a list to be the first step for me to reducing my anxiety, this was quite the opposite. This just created it.
My therapist taught me a very simple exercise that I now use regularly when something is causing me anxiety. I take a step back and quickly ask myself two questions. Is this thought or behavior productive? Is this thought or behavior pleasant? If that thought or behavior is one or the other, there’s clearly a reason to engage with it. Either it’s helping me get something done, or it’s leading me to enjoy my day. But if something is neither productive nor pleasant, what am I getting out of it? Why am I engaging in that thought or behavior? This list is not helping me to play more games that I want to play. It’s also not a fun list to look at or think about. So why did I make this awful list in the first place?
Why I Did This to Myself
I’m sure many of you also deal with this, but something I’m striving for a bit more recently is to be a bit more mindful about the media that I consume. Over time, I’ve found myself gravitating more and more towards really disposable or “easy” media. Rather than reading one of the many books I’ve picked up over the years and have never read, I find myself picking up my phone and before I know it, I’m reading a bunch of neckbeards arguing on Reddit about the newest Discord update and how it’s our moral imperative to cancel our Nitro accounts because they changed the mobile UI (grass needs touched, my dudes). Instead of watching a movie that I really want to watch, I find myself putting on a YouTube video of a dude eating nothing but food he’s bought from a Japanese 7/11 for a day. Instead of taking the smallest amount of time and applying the smallest amount of effort to purposefully consume media that I will find a bit more meaningful, I’ve fallen into the rut of finding the quickest, easiest, and most shallow of media simply because it’s there and some algorithm is shoving it into my face.
I had thought that by sitting down and making the effort to make this list, I’d be able to avoid that when it comes to the games I play. Rather than doing the old song and dance of staring at my Steam library for 15 minutes before sighing, grabbing my credit card, and throwing another $20 into Magic: The Gathering Arena, maybe I could instead open up this spreadsheet and find my new favorite game of all-time. How I missed the obvious problem that this spreadsheet was basically my Steam library gone Super Saiyan, I have no clue, but obviously this was doomed to fail from the start.
So with that goal of facilitating more mindful consumption in mind, how can I rebuild this list in a way that actually achieves that goal? How can I go from something that is neither productive nor pleasant, to something that is both? How can I achieve my goal of spending more time playing quality games and engaging with meaningful media rather than sitting on Magic Arena waiting for my opponent to time out because they’ve rage-quit after I had the audacity to play a counterspell against them?
One of the things that I’ve learned in my years of borderline obsessive list-making, is that for a to-do list to be good, it must be actionable. Any list that would require 1,400 hours to complete is not actionable. I don’t think that’s even aspirational at that point, it’s just outright delusional. It’s clear to me that for this list to become actionable, it needs to be trimmed down pretty substantially. But what gets cut first?
“Wants” versus “Shoulds”
There are a lot of games that I feel like I should play. Disco Elysium has been recommended to me multiple times based upon the quality of its writing. Alan Wake 2 is being hailed as a survival horror masterpiece. Baldur’s Gate III is racking up the game of the year wins at the moment. One thing that they all have in common is the near-universal critical consensus that they are must-play, generation-defining games. The other is that I don’t really want to play any of them despite their inclusion on my spreadsheet. These are games that I feel like I should play because of their reception. However, these are not games that I actually want to play. That is a very important distinction.
It’s hard to read so much universal praise about a game and not think that I should try to give it a shot. “If everyone else is loving these games, I should really check them out to see what they’re all about,” I think to myself as I throw them on the list. This is an even harder to ignore feeling when friends are recommending these games to me personally. The problem is that, despite the praise, I’m just not interested in so many of the games on this list. It never registers to me that I’m adding these games to the list solely out of a sense of FOMO (that’s internet-speak for “fear of missing out”, for those more geriatrically-minded than even myself). But that’s in many ways the only reason many of these games are on this list.
I’ve tried playing Disco Elysium (four separate times, actually). I can tell that it’s extremely well written. I’m sure the story it tells is worth the time to play it. I just kinda found it to be a massive bummer and stressful in a very unpleasant way. As my to-do list in-game exploded and grew exponentially over the course of my first hour with the game, it felt like work. I’ve picked it up multiple times and put it down just as many. Maybe it’s time to just admit that it’s not for me and let it go. Will I miss out on the experience that many others hold so dearly? Yes, I absolutely will. But you know, I think that’s okay at the end of the day. I somehow think I’ll be just fine if I never get around to giving this game a fifth shot.
Similarly, I found myself bored to tears playing the original Alan Wake and Control. I loved the vibes and the stories those games were telling, but I just couldn’t bring myself to spend even more hours running through corridors shooting at the same enemies over and over and over again. I know Alan Wake 2 is beloved, but so were those other games developed by Remedy and I didn’t enjoy them. Do I really need to make myself feel obligated to play Alan Wake 2 even though I highly suspect I’ll feel the same way about it? Do I really need to fool myself into thinking that I should spend 300 hours of my life playing Baldur’s Gate III even though I hate Dungeons & Dragons?
No. No, I don’t. So many of the games on this list are “shoulds”. A much smaller number of them are “wants.” While there are times in life when the “shoulds” win out over the “wants” (turns out as much as my lactose-intolerant-self may want to eat a cheesesteak, I really shouldn’t eat that cheesesteak), something like my gaming backlog seems like the place where the “wants” should handedly win out. It’s no surprise that I find the list uninspiring and overwhelming when much of what’s on it is there only because I think it should be there, not because I want it to be there. Much of this list feels like an obligation, rather than something I’m looking forward to experiencing. And ironically, in my attempts at trying to avoid missing out on the games I feel like I should play, I’m finding myself missing out on the games that I actually want to play. No more. This is no longer a place for the “shoulds” anymore. This is solely a place for the “wants” from now on.
If Only it Were That Easy
One of the reasons why I write so many lists down on paper is that, by some act of strange mental magic, the act of physically writing something down helps my brain actually remember to do that thing. If I have a fleeting thought while I’m driving that I need to get my car e-checked, there’s not a snowball’s chance in hell that I’ll remember that by the time I get to wherever I was headed. If that thought comes to me when I’m sitting down at my desk and I can quickly write it down, then I will remember it. If that thought comes to me while I’m writing something and I integrate it into that article, then I’ll sure as hell remember to do it.
(Yes, this is a reminder to myself to go get my car e-checked.)
There’s something about crystallizing a thought by writing it down that gives it more space in my brain, which helps me remember to do that particular thing. And while that initially sounds like a positive, what if I actually don’t need to do that thing? By writing it down, by putting that thought into a list, I’ve given it more space in my head than it would otherwise occupy. If I’ve seared something into my brain by writing it down in a list, but I haven’t done that thing in, oh, let’s say, an entire year, did it ever need to take up that much space in my head in the first place? Did it really deserve to be seared into my brain over something I actually need to do, like get an e-check (last time, I swear)? Do I really need to have a list that reminds me for over a year that I want to play a shitty PS1-era survival horror game called Countdown Vampires? Is that productive? Is that pleasant?
(Let’s see how long it takes for someone to leave a nasty comment about me wanting to play Countdown Vampires and not Disco Elysium.)
Like, I do want to play that game. I really like that era of survival horror games and it sounds like the exact kind of dumb schlock that I love. But do I need that knowledge lingering over my head while I’m playing Majora’s Mask? Do I want to play that game more than I want to play Dark Souls for the first time (yeah, I don’t know how I missed it either)? Even by making sure that the games that are remaining on my list are ones that I want to play, I still have to question if they deserve to be on a list in the first place. Do I need to remember every single game that I want to play? If I want to play them, but they aren’t memorable enough to really stick in my head without being put onto a massive spreadsheet, how badly did I actually want to play them in the first place?
My weekly and daily to-do lists are great because I have to do those things to keep my house in order and remain gainfully employed. But do I have to play all these games? No. These are games that I want to play. These are not games that I have to play. By putting all these games onto a list, I’m elevating them from something I want to play, into something that I have to play in my mind. That creates just as much FOMO as including all those games that I felt like I should play.
But how do I solve this problem? Even if I were to edit this list down to ten games, the moment there is a list to be cleared and there is a game on that list, I’ve created an obligation. I’ve manufactured FOMO. It’s almost like the problem is not how I’m going about curating the list, but it’s actually the to-do list itself…
Oh…oh, no. I’ve been going about this totally wrong this entire time…
The Existential Epiphany
So there’s this quote that is attributed to Michelangelo about sculptors that really resonates with how I think about my writing. I honestly have no idea if he ever said anything remotely close to this and I’m sure like most popular quotes on the internet this is likely entirely bullshit, but I’m not gonna dig through the internet to figure that out, so let’s just roll with this because whether or not Michelangelo actually said this isn’t the point. That quote goes something like this:
Every block of stone has a statue inside it, and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it.
I like this quote because I feel very similar about my writing. As if this article hasn’t made it painfully clear, my brain is pretty scattershot and moves really fast at times. One of the things I like most about writing is that I can take a rough idea and through the acts of writing and editing I can hone that idea down to the truth that my brain can otherwise never reach without that purposeful effort. Much like that sculptor slowly chiseling away at a block of granite to reveal a goddess, I’m chiseling away at an idea to reveal the core truth that lurks within that rough idea. The slow acts of crystallizing an idea into the first clumsy words, identifying and throwing out the bits that don’t fit, and then finally refining what does fit often gives my brain a sense of clarity that I would never otherwise achieve.
I bring this up, because this is the point in this piece when I was previously going to talk about how I cut my backlog down to 20 individual games. How, much like Daryl did in his follow-up video on how he completed his backlog (which is absolutely worth watching if you have not), I was going to cast off some other games I’d still like to get to play at some point in the future and build out this secondary, extra backlog. From there, I’d rotate older games from that secondary backlog to the primary backlog when I had space. I planned on outlining some rules I’d follow to keep this manageable and to avoid the FOMO from creeping back in. I would then post the list of twenty games that I was adding on as my “official” backlog.
But I’m not going to do that*. Because as I was writing that last bit, I realized what the problem was this entire time. It’s me. I’m the problem. I’m approaching this from the worst possible way I could approach it. Backlogs do not exist to be cleared. They are not tasks to be checked-off. They are, much like bucket lists, something that we put together to make us feel better about the finite amount of time that we have here on earth. They are not tasks to be finished. They are not things that are actually meant to be completed. They are things that grow as you grow. They change as you change. Age as you age. They are entirely aspirational, reminders of the person that you want to grow towards becoming but will never fully be.
As long as I am approaching my backlog as something to be completed or cleared, there is no way to remove FOMO from the equation. The act of trying to finish my backlog is entirely born from the fear that one day, that list will be final. That fear that, as a mortal being, I’ll never experience everything I want to experience in life. I’ll never play every game that I want to play. I’ll never read every book that I want to read. I’ll never visit every city that I want to see or try every dish at every restaurant that I want to eat. I’ve already “failed” at one of my bucket list goals to eat something made by the late and great Iron Chef Chen Kenichi. But does that mean I’m a failure? Am I going to go to the grave ruing that I never got to eat something made by my favorite Iron Chef? No, it means that I’m human. I’m sometimes overly ambitious, but I mean well. I dream big, and while I’ll never accomplish everything that I aspire to, I have something that I’m working towards and that means I’ll have a lot of great experiences along the way. Life is the journey, not the destination. Knowing that, why am I so obsessed with “finishing” this backlog? Isn’t the point the games I play along the way?
Letting Go
I no longer meet the diagnostic criteria for having Generalized Anxiety Disorder (I am very aware of the whiplash in this transition, but trust me, I’m going somewhere with this). While that statement is true today, it would not have been true a year and a half ago. One of the final things that really helped me finally vanquish that demon was initially counter-intuitive to me. After integrating things like meditation into my daily routines, learning how to be more aware of when I was in heightened states and thereby more susceptible to anxious triggers, a fair amount of therapy, and getting medication to help when the panic attacks did come, I was very close to finally kicking this thing’s ass. But there was one thing that I couldn’t get past. There were some days where I just woke up anxious for no good reason.
I struggled with that. After all the therapy, all the exercises, the mindfulness, the meditation, there were still days when I just woke up with my heart and brain racing. I read article after article after forum post after article about this topic, trying to figure out why I was so close, but I couldn’t just get past this one final hump. And then I finally found the concept that I needed. I found the core truth that was lurking in the granite slab in my brain. That anxiety was largely coming from my obsession with beating my anxiety. It fed into itself. I was, once again, the problem. But what if I changed my thought process about this anxiety? What if instead of dwelling on it and spending hours reading about it and trying to fight that last little lingering bit of anxiety, I just accepted that some days I’d wake up feeling a little anxious and that it would be okay?
That did it. That was the final piece of the puzzle. Instead of waking up, feeling anxious and then feeling distraught and ruminating on that anxiety all day, I would wake up, acknowledge the anxiety, accept that I was feeling a bit anxious, and then get moving. On most days, it would pass by the time I was drinking my morning coffee and playing with my cat. Then it started happening less frequently. When it did happen, I’d just acknowledge it and get on with my day and would often feel better by the time I was leaving the shower, even sooner than before. And then, before I knew it, I had beaten it into remission.
There is no way to remove the FOMO that comes with treating a backlog like a to-do list. There is no way to successfully tackle a mountain like that. There will always be another game, another series, another something that I want to play, just like there will always be another restaurant I want to try, dish I want to eat, city I want to visit. By sitting down and trying to tame this list, by finally writing this article, by trying to “conquer” my backlog, I realized I was making the same mistake I was making with that last lingering bit of anxiety. I was ruminating on it, and fighting when I should have been accepting. I cannot conquer my backlog by completing it or making it “actionable”. The only thing I can do is accept that I will never finish it. Similarly, I’m never going to do everything that I want to do in life. But does that mean it’s not worth trying? No, quite the opposite. The only thing that matters is trying. Trying is all that we have.
I’ll never finish my backlog. Any attempts to reign it in or make it more actionable won’t change that fact. As long as I view it as something to be completed, it will be stressful and unhelpful. But I don’t need to view it that way. It doesn’t have to be finished. Finishing it is not the point. There are simply too many things to do in life and we just don’t have enough time to do it all. But that’s okay, I don’t have to do everything. I just have to enjoy the things that I get around to doing. After this whole well-intentioned but ultimately foolhardy exercise, I get that now. I see the statue in the granite slab more clearly, and that’s what it’s telling me. As long as I enjoy the journey, I’ll be happy and okay wherever I wind up at the end of the road.
Instead of stressing over trying to do everything, I just need to pick a game, pick a path, and see where it takes me. I don’t know where I’ll wind up, but the journey should be memorable. Is this thought pleasant?
Yeah. Yeah it is.
*I’m not so cruel to where I’d mention that I made a physical list like this and not actually post it. So here it stands, my backlog as of December 13th, 2023. May it only grow larger and more full of possibilities over time:
And yes, I did decide to leave Countdown Vampires off this one. Like I said, I don’t need to experience everything.
The Cult Classic 
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