Of Backlogs, Game Collections and Playing Pressure

Hello, dear fellow gamers! I am Isleif from That Extra Level. It’s a great honour to be featured on LadiesGamers as a guest writer! Yvonne and I have been following each other for some seven years now, back when her blog was still called A Lady and Gaming and she was alone on deck. She came to me with the idea of a writing collaboration some time ago, and I was more than happy to accept.

A few words about me, but not too many. See, I decided right from the start to play it à la Tsugumi Oba of Death Note fame, in order to inject a bit of thrilling mystery into that blogging affair; and thus, I never revealed anything crucial about my identity. I let the writing do the talking, and readers picture me the way they wanted. Still, I mentioned some more trivial stuff over the years on my blog, and I’ll pass it on here.

I’m French-born and bred, yet lived a number of years in Iceland, a.k.a. the least collecting-friendly place in Europe, where I still miraculously managed to put together the bulk of my game collection. I love sipping tea when I play games and write about them, my genre of choice is RPG, and I enjoy listening to gaming Youtube videos when I level-grind. Last but not least, Isleif is a pen name, chosen in honour of my Nordic dwelling and Isleif the Open Handed in The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion; yet funnily enough, my real first name happens to be the name of an MC in one entry of a long-running RPG series.

For the interested, the full story of my gaming career can be read here and there; I’ll also gladly answer any question in the comments, while keeping the mystery alive.

An Ever Growing Mass of Games

So, after these introductions are done, I wanted to talk to you about a much discussed topic for gamers: the backlog. Before I started reading gaming blogs, I had simply never heard of the backlog. The concept of a milling, ever-growing mass of games a gamer set themselves to play was utterly foreign to me; and even more foreign was the self-imposed pressure and guilty conscience that seem to arise invariably from the very existence of a backlog.

Does this mean that I don’t actually have a backlog? Not quite, dear fellow gamers. I’m a game collector, and I’ve put together a pretty Back collection over the last ten years; so obviously, I do have games to play. Yet for some reason, I never viewed my ever-growing collection as a mountain that needed to be climbed, or razed. Each game I bought, am buying and will buy is first and foremost a quantum of entertainment, a potential pleasure provider in my eyes.

Gaming Instinct

I always say jokingly that I don’t have a backlog, I have a game collection; and my way of handling said collection reflects that view.

From my choice of games to play to the time I spend on them, everything is decided by what I call my Gaming Instinct. It’s my personal gaming compass, and it reigns supreme. If my GI wants to play ten Pokemon solo runs in a row, then I do just that; if it suddenly wants to play a game purchased ten years ago and shelved all that time, then I do just that too.

Now, it would be disingenuous to claim that the backlog hassle left me miraculously untouched. While I never felt — and still never feel — guilty of buying games, owning them occasionally generates mental pressure; and that pressure has only grown in intensity and frequency as my collection expanded over time. It’s a feeling of burden, of having chained myself to a task that’s simply too massive to be undertaken. We’re talking about several hundreds of games at that point, folks; games I want to play, not gaze amorously at from outside a display case.

That situation led to various coping behaviours, such as promising myself to play a number of games in a given period, trying to play several games at once, or cutting down the time I spend on each game. All these stunts were resounding failures, because they are completely at odds with the way my gaming instinct operates. But at long last, I found the perfect tactic to get rid of all backlog pressure, while having fun and humouring my GI. In a nutshell, I’m gonna indulge in a giant playing fest (and feast): I’ll play each game in my collection for two hours, and see if I like it. If I do, I’ll shelve the game and come back to it later; if I don’t, I’ll just pawn it. (For the interested, the full description of the deed can be read here.)

And this, dear fellow gamers, is how I deal with the backlog thing. Feel free to share your own backlog musing in the comments!

I thank you a lot for your attention, dear fellow gamers; and I thank you profusely, dear Yvonne, for inviting me on your lovely blog!