I’m trying to go through my unplayed games. It seems a bit of a waste of the time and effort of the people who made the games, then of the time and effort of the people who gave them to me. However, what does it mean to mark a game as done?
There are a few games I picked up or wishlisted because they were cheap. Some, I played a little bit, then decided maybe I’d try them another time, and it wasn’t until months later I deleted them to save space on my hard drive.
It’s not a problem. Not really.
Now I have a simple thing; if I’m done playing a game and feel no desire to come back to play it, it’s done. It’s completed. This may mean some games aren’t great returns on investment, but that’s okay, too. Some games I may play only long enough to learn I don’t want them
But at the same time, it is introducing me to a host of reasons to discard games. For example, I have Bioshock and Bioshock Remastered. I don’t have any interest in revisiting it, so that’s a matter of shuffling the game out of the main library. Some games I played for twenty-five minutes, and didn’t feel compelled to come back. That’s okay. Part of what a game wants to do is get you to play it – and if it doesn’t do that job, then it doesn’t do that job.
We need to be okay with not playing games. We need to be okay with having made small mistakes – I bought this thing I wound up not wanting. I’m not saying it’s not a mistake to occasionally buy things you don’t really want, because of sales or opportunity. But I am saying that it’s worth our while, generally, to be okay with once a mistake is made, that mistake being made.
There’s this line from the original Robinson Crusoe: To be in trouble troubled, is to have your trouble doubled. I think about it a lot: The idea that we can make our problems worse by chasing ourselves around in mental circles. That part of solving our problems is to stop punishing ourselves for having made them in the first place.