Like many PC gamers, I have a problem. I have too many games, on too many platforms. I have bought so many discounted, bundled games that my games library has ballooned to truly silly proportions and I know I am not alone in this as around Christmas time this tweet was doing the rounds:
There’s a huge video game sale full of good games for free right now!
It’s your steam library. The stuff you bought like three years ago. You own those. Go play them. You’ll like them.
— Joe Sondow (@JoeSondow) December 22, 2019
This got me thinking, at this point I have a couple of thousand games I have been meaning to play someday, and obviously I will never have the time or inclination to get to all of them. But surely I could try a representative sample. So this year, since January the 3rd, I have been trying an average of one new title a day. A game I have never played, but either own or have access to via a subscription service.
The goal is simple. Play a game for generally around half an hour, long enough to form some kind of opinion on it. Ideally have sampled enough that I can have a short conversation about the game if someone were to ask me about it. Finally, decide if I would like to come back to it sometime, and then move on.
Oh, and to ensure I don’t get stuck on a series, each time I move on, I should move at least one letter down the alphabet. I wonder how many times I will get through before I have to skip a letter.
So far I have found this very rewarding. It turns out that, even bloated as it is, my library consists mostly of games that I at least like. This series provides the constant novelty that I crave. It feeds the same part of my brain that keeps me on Twitter and Reddit longer than is healthy.
I plan to give weekly highlights (and the occasional lowlights) on the blog here, but as always you can catch the videos on YouTube.