Sometime in late 2021, alongside many unknown others, I started to wake up from my “post”-COVID haze, took stock of my life, and thought to myself, “How did I end up with this many video games?” Hundreds of them, representing thousands of hours of playtime, which were apparently invisible to me until they reached a mass so critical, it became embarrassing. This is my humble backlog post.

The timeline of all this acquisition was quick. I intentionally did not own a TV for almost ten years. From 2011 until 2018, all I owned in the way of video games was my childhood Gameboy Color and Gameboy Advance, with a few old games I occasionally had to perform surgery on when their internal batteries gave out. In my early adulthood, if I wanted to play video games, I had to want it bad enough to play Pokemon Crystal or Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories for literally the 100th time.

Beginning in late 2018, my new collection started. My boyfriend at the time gave me his old Nintendo 3DS, then bought me a Switch, then gave me his old gaming PC. Part of it was likely well-intentioned—he knew they were things I would like that I would never buy for myself. Part of it was definitely pathological—he wanted more video game time, and he wouldn’t have to feel bad about how much he played (creeping up over a few years to regular 16+ hour days) if I had something to play next to him.

In my childhood, I played a lot of video games. Like, a lot. I pathologically sought fantasy experiences in video games and books in what I now understand was a form of dissociation from my home life. My parents didn’t really like me as a person, and my dad in particular let it show. When I moved out at 18, I wanted a more undistracted focus on the real world. No TV. Old Gameboys for occasional decompression only. It worked pretty closely to the way I intended. I completed my Bachelor’s and Master’s and made a lot of friends along the way. After school, I got several poems published while working full time.

But those old dopamine circuits were still there. When I received the new DS, they lit up. I researched all the games I missed and ordered a ton used from online—all the Pokemons, all the Professor Laytons, all the Ace Attorneys, anything critically acclaimed and remotely interesting to me. Of course, I finished only a small fraction before receiving the Switch, when I could start buying games on a platform where there were still new ones coming out. And with new games came new discourse: blogs and online journals and real-life friends with write-ups and recommendations. It was easy to buy a game if I came down with a cold and had to stay home from work. It was easy to pick one up while I was already at Target, just because.

Anyone who has visited Steam in the last several years will know what happened when I received the used PC. Sales happened every few months, and I missed a lot of classics in my functionally game-less years. Must plays for less than $5! And you absolutely must play them! Then came my most critical mistake. For my then boyfriend’s first birthday after he gave me the computer, I had the brilliant idea of buying us both a Humble Bundle subscription, so we could play the same games and talk about them, in a financially reasonable sense.

And the thing is, Humble Bundles are financially reasonable. Pay $15/month and get a dozen games! By golly! The argument that buying for discounts and sales is fallacious overall, because you spend more money buying things you otherwise wouldn’t buy, just didn’t apply to or dissuade from this kind of purchase. There was always more than $15 worth of games per month I would have actually bought. I kept my subscription until it bought me about 200 games.

Once this collection madness really started to accelerate, the worst possible thing to happen for this new bad habit happened: COVID lockdown. I was solidly not in the camp of people who used this time to reach a new level of physical fitness, maintain a sourdough starter, read a backlog of books, or write my take on the great American novel. I was not cut out for lockdown, and I compensated with the easiest dopamine rushes I could find—buying and playing video games.

The pace at which I played video games increased a ridiculous amount. I suddenly had hours a day to play. I also suddenly had way more disposable income (no longer commuting saved over $200/month in gas alone), so I still continued to buy games faster than I could complete them, especially as it became clear this was not going to be two weeks and back to normal.

At one point, I remembered a study from a college in the UK that predicted 18 months of lockdown. Early on, this seemed unfathomable. Two weeks? Maybe four weeks? My workplace was going to bring us back into the office every few weeks, then prolonging and prolonging. I brought up the study to my boss at one point, because after a few false deadlines for returning, the timeline made sense. That was about how long it was expected for a vaccine to be made, and easing restrictions before widespread vaccination would increase case rates, prompting more lockdowns. But eighteen months? Reader, that is almost exactly how long I spent in lockdown.

Isolated, I became fixated on the release of the PlayStation 5. Fixated in a way that reminded me clearly of adolescence, tunnel-visioned and unable to distract myself. I hadn’t had a PlayStation since my childhood 2, and this was an excuse to play my old favorites and any newer releases I missed. It was also, embarrassingly, a shining light. A literal anything in the future to look forward to. Something to talk about that was not the pandemic. Something I was going to be able to do.

I was so fixated, in fact, I nonsensically started to buy one PlayStation 4 game per paycheck several months before the 5 was released and I had anything to play them on. I knew it was foolish, but gave myself a wide berth for any behavior that was ultimately harmless. I wasn’t even going to pretend to understand what I was going through emotionally in that time.

And honestly, when I got the PS5, it did bolster my sanity. A lot of people were mad when Cyberpunk 2077 was released as a buggy mess, but I was thrilled. Thank God I could send videos of the bugs I was experiencing to people so we could laugh. In 2020, actually laugh! Was it good or bad that when I booted up Kingdom Hearts for the first time over 10 years and heard “Simple and Clean” come on that I wept a little? This was an emotionally raw time.

Well, with the PS5, I had to get the online service, which came with an additional 3 free games per month. Then, since I had so much time now, I could just buy and buy and play and play. I never played Dishonored? I never played Uncharted? This was the time.

As a child, when I had collected about 50 games over the course of many years, with their corresponding birthdays, Christmases, and positive report cards, I felt I had one of the top collections in the world. I bragged about it. Over a few short years in my adulthood, I accumulated hundreds almost by accident. Completely in spite of myself. It happened with the sense of watching someone else do it. And truthfully, I didn’t feel like myself. It didn’t feel aligned with me. So how did it occur?

The first shift I noticed basically as soon as I started gaming regularly again as an adult is that I simply could not focus on one video game the same way. Much of my early childhood was spent with a rationed hour or two on dial-up internet once a week. I didn’t have a smart phone until well into college. While in college, I watched Netflix on the same computer I did my schoolwork, so I had to do one at a time. TV time was TV time. Homework time was homework time. I didn’t have access to the mind-melting technology of today, vying for my attention in thousands of competing little ways, a smart phone in my hand, a laptop in my lap, and a TV in the background, all harmonizing.

In my childhood, it was not unusual for me to have only one new game every few months. I would play each game several times, and for any game that really spoke to me, I would fully engage—reading fanfiction about the game, writing fanfiction about the game, daydreaming about the game, and drawing its characters. I would really suck the juice out of it.

Now, I don’t have to. It’s unusual for me to play a game (even a short one) all the way through without switching to something else every once in a while. My attention span even for something as formulated to hold my attention as a video game doesn’t work the same in an era of short video media. Even as I try intentionally to repair that attention span, I am not special, and there’s only so much I can do.

Another factor is the digitization of all media forms. Twenty years ago, I did not own any digital video games. I did not own an ebook. If I bought (or pirated) digital music, I immediately copied it to a disk. My possessions were countable, and I was accountable to them. I could run out of space on a shelf or in a CD case. When I downsized, I had to touch everything I owned and assess: keep, toss, donate. And if I wanted to get something, typically I had to go to the store.

Now, I can buy a game on a whim. In a moment of weakness that is probably the same state in which I would never leave the house or go to the store, I can buy a game. I can do it in my pajamas, at 11 PM, awake too late and wallowing. I can do it in a few clicks when Steam notifies me a game I wished for is on sale. And I never really have to look at it. It will never embarrass me on a shelf. It’s easy to get to numbers your brain can’t really work with. Left unplayed, they sift themselves to the bottom of your console-based libraries, politely avoiding confrontation.

I’ve noticed this phenomenon for myself with other digital goods, that they feel unreal. For a long time, I did not even use a debit card. I withdrew cash from an ATM when needed and paid with that, so that I would know exactly how quickly I was going through $100 or $200. If I used the card, I could dig blindly until hitting the bottom and being declined. Left unchecked, I could now easily buy any video game that interests me, digitally, without running out of space to keep them.

Video game companies rely on and exploit this. It is not out of the goodness of Microsoft’s heart that an X Box Series S (with no disk drive) and a GamePass subscription are so inexpensive. It benefits corporations to make money on products that are not real in any specific sense, and to get consumers used to not owning anything. For younger gamers who have less disposable income and fewer memories of what it was like to own physical products, this is the only sensible entry point.

It’s easy for me to get on my high horse about owning physical media, but I have to acknowledge it’s a privileged position. I am just wired to dislike the thought of so much money being spent on things that come close to not being real, that only exist as 1’s and 0’s on hard drives, hosted in what you can call a cloud, but is really just a data center, a metropolis of humming servers and the barest minimum number of people to maintain them.

Another aspect has been the barrage of advertising, increasingly personalized. The cable ads and internet pop-ups of my youth were marketed towards me only broadly (e.g., toy commercials on children’s channels), and there could only be so many impressions when they took 15 seconds minimum during timed ad breaks. Now, it’s likely I see over 5,000 ads a day, probably a few dozen of them incidentally while scrolling on my phone in the morning, before I even see the sun. Each one tailored to me on the basis of a number of axises: sex, race, age, profession, political leanings, my GPS-decipherable motions, everything I have ever clicked, everything my close contacts have ever clicked. Since leaving my childhood home’s cable, I have not seen a single Life Alert or Head On ad, which were not intended for me, and which I would laugh at and never buy. Every day these days, I see multiple for video games.

It’s easy to take stock of one’s self and say, “I’m a millenial, the savvy generation. I’m immune to advertising! I don’t think it’s cute, and I know how evil it is! If your ad annoys me, I will hate you forever and specifically avoid your product! Neener neener.” But with at least 5,000 ad impressions per day, if you are successfully immunized against 99.99% of them, one would work on you every two days. You would make three to four purchases a week based on those ads.

It’s a product of our highly individualistic culture in the United States, and one that presents a deceitful front regarding supposed meritocracy, that we can think ourselves more powerful than the sheer infrastructure and machinery behind these ads. It’s not a coincidence that many of the richest men in the world are proprietors of targeted ads and the e-commerce they feed into. At this point, some of the algorithms choosing the advertisements you see are probably so overwhelming and sophisticated, it approaches being Eldritch. I’m not sure a single human mind could really hold the best one that exists today and understand it.

A humbling realization is that it truly doesn’t take much. If I fall for two advertisements for game bundles a year, that’s still easily 20 games I bought because of these advertisements. They are created and curated by teams of writers, graphic designers, marketers, salespeople, and engineers working with some of our most advanced technological achievements.

I am one person trying to guard myself against this at any moment: when I am tired and not thinking straight, when I am sad and want to self-soothe, when I am excited and wanting to continue the excitement, when I am medicated with soporific or mood-altering prescriptions, or when I am lonely and looking for something to connect with. Improving one’s baseline emotionality is hard. Developing and feeding healthy emotional modulating behaviors is hard. Emotionality is inevitable. And we carry a bouquet of advertisements for every occasion in our pocket.

Speaking of emotionality, another defining feature of video games is they really do easily slot into and support a life that is not functioning at a basic level. During COVID lockdown, they made time pass while I waited for the world to improve around me, helpless to do much of anything about it except stay inside. I notice I am primarily interested in them when I am in a slump. They demand very little from me in a life full of demands.

The price of entry is low. When inflation is accounted for, video games and their consoles are incredibly cheap, overall going down in price over time. There are a lot of accessible options, with basically no requirements in terms of physical or social fitness. This is a double-edged sword: they are always available to you; they are always available to you.

The above was how I reverse engineered my path from purchasing no video games in several years to over a hundred every year for a few years. Once I saw it, I wanted to do something about it.

I started with a few sessions of searching out and reading others’ personal accounts of their backlogs. The philosophies seems to fall into two distinct camps: the Freedom-Seekers and the Disciplinarians.

The Freedom-Seekers acknowledge they can’t continue on the way they have been. They commit to a new way of doing things in the future: prioritizing buying games they are excited about over games that are on sale, not buying a new game until they finish an existing one, and/or intentionally restricting their diet of conventional games journalism (which tends to focus on and glorify new releases, sometimes specifically designed to sell them).

Everything that you purchased before? That’s a big shrug. A shirt tossed in the wind. Break up, forget about it, move on. Have you heard of the sunk cost fallacy? Are you really upset about having too many video games? Are you really going to stress about one of the silliest hobbies that exists because you can’t choose what to play? Consider it your library, consider it your retirement, consider it an inheritance for your children, consider it insurance against boredom if you get laid off. Literally just get rid of things or put them somewhere else if you can’t take looking at it.

Honestly, none of this feels wrong. But also, I don’t have that kind of chill.

I am a Disciplinarian. A Disciplinarian makes a comprehensive list of all their unfinished games, usually with how long it’s expected to beat each of them, and devises a strategy to finish them. I’ve seen ones like using a random number generator to tell you what to play next, or alternating between one long game followed by one short game. Some Disciplinarians give themselves a minimum period of time they can play a game before they are allowed to say they don’t like it and scratch it off the list (I don’t).

It’s definitely a cultural neurosis (and one I participate in) to approach a very casual hobby with no stakes in this fashion. Nobody will notice or care what I do with my backlog problem. Mostly the only thing people notice about my gaming happens when they come to my apartment for the first time. They notice I have a lot of damn games, and I’m vaguely embarrassed.

Since starting by making a sheet listing all my unfinished games (I could practically hear someone yelling “Shame!” and ringing a bell the whole time), I have tried a few strategies over the past few years to tackle it, loosely connected to the calendar year.

Strategy 1: A full moratorium on buying new games except for Pokemon Legends: Arceus (which I had been excited about for a while) and anything I play socially (I don’t play multiplayer with strangers, only with existing friends, so it’s not too much of a loophole). Then it became also except for when I end up with a gift card for a retailer that sells games. Then also except for when someone asks what they should buy me for a holiday.

Success level? I didn’t execute it perfectly, but did scratch way many more things off the list than I put on. Sort of successful.

Strategy 2: I’m all better after a year with Strategy 1! I hardly bought anything! I can totally trust myself to just try to buy less with no clear rules and give my purchases more thinkies this year. I am super detoxed from buying games on a whim, and it will definitely work. Except for when there’s a specific bundle I really like (bundles again?!). Or like, a really good sale on a game I’ve wanted for a while (which will go on sale four times a year for the rest of my life). Or like, I’m super phobic about flying on airplanes, and I need something to distract myself, so let me buy games until I find the one that makes me magically not phobic of flying anymore (I’m still incredibly phobic). Also I developed a semi-disabling condition and having an X Box would make me feel a bit better (okay, it sort of did). So I need a few games for that.

Success level? Almost none. This didn’t quite put me back to square 1, but I definitely bought more games in year 2 than I played.

Strategy 3: I can buy 1 game for every 10 I finish or intentionally abandon. So far, so good. I haven’t even spent every new game I’ve earned, because this strategy taps into my natural urge to plan for the future. I’m a good little marshmallow-hoarding 5-year-old in an adult body. I want to make sure I’m ready just in case something truly really cool and impossible to delay or avoid happens with video games (it won’t, but I’m happy to lie to myself on this point).

Success? So far, so good. Even if I had to intentionally find and exploit my inherent flaws to make it happen. But if advertisers are doing it to me for their self-serving purposes, I can do it to myself for something good.

Ultimately, though, why bother finish the backlog? At this point, a lot of what is left is left for a reason. There are some more shallow reasons that speak to me. I am vulnerable to the sunk cost fallacy, and this instance, not letting go of the cost seems harmless, so I’m happy to sink for a while. In my backlog journey, I also have found a few games I don’t think I would have otherwise played or chosen that I ended up liking. Buying bundles and then actually playing through them means getting the occasional pleasant surprise.

Mostly, though, I think the one core reason this journey has become so important to me is it feels like my best chance to recalibrate to a world that is simultaneously digitizing and wielding an unfathomable level of resources geared on taking my attention and taking my money.

It feels like the only way to truly understand what I purchased in these past few years is to look at each individual purchase I made and try it on. Do I immediately know I won’t like it, and donate the key? If I do play it, do I like it enough to finish it, or do I put it down part way and uninstall? Keep, toss, donate.

I can’t conceptualize thousands of hours, especially not thousands of hours I carve voluntarily out of my free time. If I want not to repeat this mistake, I have to intentionally experience thousands of hours. It is much easier, now, to buy something than to make it of use. It’s incredible, and horrifying, how much we can purchase to immediately forget or discard, the purchase of the thing more real than the thing itself.

It’s disturbing, that I need a strategy at all to make sense of what an algorithm guided my hand to. That I am anxious about the way my participation in hobbies feels like something an abstract force chose.

Will I feel the weight of thousands of hours when I reach the bottom of the list? Will I understand fully why I did what I did? If I do, will I learn to better resist it?